Anna's worktable

Today, Anna from LilaRubyKing is treating us with some work in progress. I don't know anything about working with silver and metalsmithing is such a mystery to me.
It seems all so complicated: sawing, soldering, dapping, doming, using a mandral,... All these tools are unneccesary in ceramics as we can form the clay anyway we like - easy!
For some reason, metal and glass are materials I'm not attracted too to work with since they seem so much more difficult to give shape. I would be really frustrated trying to manipulate a material that is so laborious & stubborn. So glad that Anna is working her magic with the metal.
The little bear head is porcelain which I slipcasted from a handmade mould.
The result of the work above can be found in her shop... :)

Flickr Favorites

1. Nina Ma'am, 2. sheer laughter, 3. The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. -e.e. cummings, 4. I wanna be laughed at, laughed with, just because

I love to laugh & I love seeing people laugh too. I usually can't help myself and start smiling and most probably laughing along too. I love how when you try to take a picture from people laughing , the image usually is a bit out of focus. It nails perfectly the feeling of having a roaring laugh and being a bit 'off ' this world. Laughing is like a drug to me: it's a neccesity & I get the most energy out of lots and lots and lots of it.

Preparing

Yesterday, I prepped things to take to the Fashion museum at the end of this week. All of these things will be sold in the museum shop and the happy girls are a big time favorite there so I made loads of 'em.
Thank you for voting on the tags. I love the lime a lot but since these will be put up for sale, I thought a more neutral one would fit better so I went with what most people said: hemp twine.
And then I had to come up with packaging for the buttons. I glazed 'em all transparant and thought that a kraftpaper packaging would look nice.
I cut out A4 sized kraftpaper and printed a tekst on them & drew a frame around it. The tekst says 'LACE' (porcelain) as the buttons do look a bit like lace but they are pretty porcelain...And now I'll have to glaze a whole batch of colorful buttons so that I can fire the kiln & deliver the goodies soon.

Handmade tags

You can click on the pictures to see 'em bigger. Thanks for your vote! :)

Time wasting experiment

Sometimes I bump into a shop on Etsy where I just have to see every listing...
Provax is one of those shops:
And when looking into her profile I see there was an interesting feature about her work in Etsy's blog which I completely missed at the time but glad I found it now.


Great stuff hey?

Happy weekend, everyone!
X
Mitsy

PS: The porcelain rings came out of the kiln well - some of them are slightly deformed but not in a disturbing kind of way. Will show a picture soon although it won't be the end product yet...

Sizing

Testing the sizing of the rings. It's hard to determine the size as the porcelain will schrink quite a bit during firing. I'll be opening the porcelain kiln later tonight & I can't wait to see the results of these.

Flickr Favorites

1. 105/365, 2. Untitled, 3. today, 4. bottled.

I'm not an obsessive kind of collector but I love to keep bits and bobs that I pick up here and there. Mainly these are things from nature: shells, leaves, pebbles, sticks,...
Apart from that, I keep things in jars. I have a hard time to throw away glass jars, they get a second life in our house. I keep stuff in them. Wooden balls, buttons, yarn, matchboxes, beads, lace,... It helps me organise all the things I just can't throw away as I'm convinced that all of it will come in handy one day.
Are you a collector? What do you collect? Do you use jars? And what do you put in them? Ohh, I'm so curious! :)