Forgive me!

One more just finished. This is a screwdriver keychain. The bits are hidden inside, sweet eh? I made the surface heavily textured to give more grip.

Little bits of this and that...

http://feeds.feedburner.com/LittleBitsOfArt (feed for this blog)

People have asked. I will tell you.
I loved Across the Universe. I have a short attention span and frequently wish things would just FINISH already. I never wanted this to end, ever ever.

So scraping together my last pennies I placed an order for some blanks and an order for some silver wire...
I think the new products are pretty awesome. Above, pretty easy to tell, is a brass letter opener, below a perfume pen (it's got a wick inside to absorb and hold your perfume so you can carry it around with you)
Yes, I will be doing some more masculin patterns for some of the items :)
anyway, that's it, oh hey, and a shiny bead with my canes on it...

New photos and auction stuff...

My new flickr pro account!
From my very first pieces to the most recent, gonna try and keep this up to date :)

With craft shows coming up I've decided to hold my breath and put some canes back up for auction. We'll see how this week goes!

Foiled again!

I had big plans, big plans indeed.

It's been a good while since I've made a butterfly cane and I was figuring it was about time. I've got a fair amount of monarch (blue, orange and green) and a good hunk of morpho left so I figured I'd work on a Swallowtail sometime today....
very exciting right?

So last night as I'm preparing dinner (see below) I somehow, carelessly, drag my finger along the open can of pineapple, I feel searing pain and a grinding of (bone? nail?) along the can. Gross gross! so i'm bleeding all over and wow, the pain is just incredible, I'm used to hurting myself and never had a cut like this! Sat down trying not to cry like a little girl and held my dripping finger in papertowel 'till it settled down. It hurt all night and woke me up everytime it touched anything. Lame.

So whats this mean? no caning for Adria, not with a big old bandage and a whole finger too sore to even type with. *sighs*
but hey, dinner was delicious!


Adria's Polynesian-ish Chicken Brochettes

4 chicken breast halves, cubed for brochettes
mushrooms,peppers, onions (whatever you'd like for brochettes, chopped large enough so they wont burn)
1 can of pineapple *chunks* with juice reverved
Marinade:
3 T apricot jam
2 T soy sauce
2 T your favorite sweet bbq sauce
2 tsp grated ginger (or 1 t dry)
2 large cloves minced garlic

At least 3 hours before cooking combine all marinade ingredients (you can add oil but I don't feel it's necessary, I'd rather spray my grill if needed) and drop in your mushrooms and chicken, stir to coat, cover and set in fridge.

20 minutes before cooking stir in about half your reserved pineapple juice.

Assemble brochettes combining marinate chicken and mushroom pieces with pineapple and veggies, brush with leftover marinade.

Grill skewers 10-15 minutes or until juices run clear.

Optional and more delicious:
1 pound of bacon,slice bacon in half (width not length) and boil for a few minutes, let cool. Wrap each chicken cube in a piece of bacon before adding to your skewer, brush with marinade and grill as usual.

Assembling a cane

I put this tutorial of sorts together a few years ago to explain some basics of cane building, I believe it's since been lost so I'll post it here :) You're going to need to know some polymer clay basics to get this.


By this point the clay has been conditioned...I take a triangle of white and a triangle of blue, I begin to roll these through my machine folding and pulling it through again creating a gradient blend.


When I have a nice blend I turn it sideways and roll it out thinner and thinner...then I roll it all up (starting from the white creates a highlight effect)


I continue doing this for my other colours.


Here I've cut the yellow cane (the cane is the rod of clay) and inserted black sheets of clay for veining


I wrap all my canes in a thin sheet of black for contrast... here I have reduced and cut up the red cane (by squeezing and pulling, rolling just a bit to make it longer and thinner) and form the body of the dragonfly..

I reduce my other canes and start inserting them around the body, cutting them to fit, I want a nice round result (easiest to reduce later)


Now I pull and squeeze like I said, if done properly the pattern distorts very little...but a little distortion is normal and I think it's charming...


reduced cane, ready to slice...i can bring these down to a 3 mm diameter and lose no detail.


some slices taken too early so they're a bit distorted (the clay was warm) but you get the idea...if you cut thick slices you get cane slice beads, or you can slice extremely thin slices and layer these over a clay ball to get other shapes...which is what you see in the rest of my work...

hope this gives you all an idea, see, no paint :)

trips and falling behind

Well the family and I just got back from New Brunswick. It was a short trip but needed. We visited the cemetary in Bristol to lay flowers, did some 4-wheeling and family bonding, brought home a ton of veggies from the farm and I've been enjoying cooking em up. Tomorrow will be my gran's fantastic borscht with beets, beets I dug myself from the place she grew up, lovely isn't it?

What does all this have to do with polymer clay? not so much, except I'm a little behind on updating the store! I DO promise to have a bunch of new and delicious items up in the next couple days. And oh hey lookie, a new blog!

Site Update

Remember, the Claycave Shops are under Construction at the moment...

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Update August 26th 2007

Thanks to all the folks who came out to Rendez-Vous 2007 at the Dorval Civic Center! It was great to see some new faces and meet some of our fellow artisans! Remember, we will be at the Dollard-des-Ormeaux Craft Fair in November. Just in time for the holidays!

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