Eraser (Rubber) Carving

Did I say I was going to try to combine wire with polymer clay pendants this weekend? Yeah, right! Of course I didn't. We were shopping on Friday, Nina needed few things for school and in the stationer's shop I saw quite big erasers. And they were on sale. Just perfect, for quite some time I wanted to make my own eraser stamps. I bought 7 or so and it seemed a lot. I started with carving as soon as we got home and it's really an easy way to make stamps! Nina was watching for some time and then she wanted to try, too. We run out of erasers yesterday although we carved them on both sides as they are thick enough. So tomorrow I am going back to that shop to buy all the erasers they have left! :)

These are Nina's carvings (I made her name and draw a cat, she did all the carving herself and designs for the other ones):












And these are mine and one with a piece of paper where I tried how eraser stamp works:












Have a wonderful week!

Wire Pendants and Rings

Bought some more wire, different types and now my fingers really hurt!!! The next step is to figure out how to combine wire with polymer clay. I'm looking forward to the weekend...

Box, Pendant, Picture and More Pendants

Yesterday I was in Velenje meeting with the girls from our creativity group. It was great to see them again and we had a wonderful time together. We had a "How to make a book" workshop and then watched photos from Rusia. In the meantime we ate a lot of delicious home made food and I learned how to make a wire pendants. I had to try that today and of course I didn't have just the right wire, but with some things from my stash they turned out quite ok. Oh, and we had two great swaps yesterday as well - scrapbook pages for memory books and 8th March swap. I got this cute picture, made of air dry clay (thanks Marta!):

And this is what I've made for our swap (cardboard box decorated with decorative paper K&Company and some ribbon with polymer clay pendant in it):















These are the two pendants I managed to made today (Natka, thanks for the instructions!). Yesterday I am going to the city to buy some more apropriate wire.
























Thanks for the lovely day, girls!

Baking Clay

Look what I got! A brand new cute little oven which I am going to use for baking clay! I used my regular kitchen oven until now but for quite some time I was thinking about buying a smaller one just for clay. Last week they had them on sale in one of the stores near here. Dajana went there in the morning while I was at work and now I finally have it. Hooray!

I am going to turn it on now and bake the pendants I made earlier. Hope it works well and doesn't burn them :) - keep your fingers crossed, please!

What My Mom Got

One of my toughest yearly "obligations" is picking up a present for my mom's birthday. It's so hard to give something to a person that actually has everything already. Their house is full of potted flowers, so that's out of the question. Clothes are out of the question, too. Accessories... well, maybe, but used too often. Home decorations... nah, they have too many. Last year my brother and I gave her a painting she wanted for some time. A year before coupons for beauty treatments in a saloon. This year I was not running around the stores like I usually do every year. I bought tickets for opera (which were later sold out, so it turned out to be a really good gift) and we went to see Carmen together. Nina, mom and me. She loved it and she loved the fact that we went together. I also made a small scrapbook album with Nina's pics and I am not sure what she was more happy to get, the ticket or the booklet. Since taking pictures in the opera house is not allowed, I can't show you pics from there. So here are few pics of my little album. The tittle is: My Nina.

Message in a bottle

Lunes tagged me for the Mimi's Message In a Bottle Meme. Since I don't want to end up in a virtual dungeon I better pass this on.

But first a short story about messages in the bottle. When I was younger, about 14 or 15 (Omg!! That was almost 25 years ago!!!) I thought it would be a great thing to throw few bottles to the ocean. Before we went to our summer vacation to Croatia I prepared 3 bottles and 3 messages in few different languages. Message contained explanation why I am doing this and my address and date so that the finder could let me know when and where the bottle was found. My dad was quite enthusiastic about this idea so we went to the open sea with our little boat and I threw the bottles to the water, but not all in the same place. I was hoping bottles would travel a long way and end up on the other side of the world or something like that :). When we got home after 3 weeks, there was already a postcard waiting for me from Slovenian couple who found my bottle near the place where we were staying. They said it was amazing to found a bottle and that it was the greatest thing for them that summer. Cool. One was saved. About a year later I got another note, from Venice, Italy. That means that bottle traveled about 200 km. Even better. The second one was saved, too. The third one... well, I don't know if it was ever found. I like to think it is still floating somewhere in the oceans, traveling around the world, or waiting on some nice sandy beach on some exotic island for someone to pick it up :).

So, here is my today's message in the bottle:

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Here are the rules:

You are about to send a virtual Message In a Bottle across the Blog Ocean. Leave a message in the sand or on the bottle. Write anything you wish. Be a pirate or a poet. Serious or silly. Anonymous or not.

What message would you like to send out to the universe?

Message In A Bottle Meme

1. Compose a message to place in your virtual bottle.
2. Right click and SAVE the blank graphic below.

3. Use a graphics program of your choice to place the message on the picture.
4. Post the Message In a Bottle meme and your creation on your blog along with these rules.
5. Tag a minimum of 5 bloggers - or your entire blogroll - to do the same. Notify them of the tag.

Your virtual bottle will remain afloat in the blogosphere ocean for all blogernity (That’s a Mimism for blog + eternity.)

So, if you are tagged by me, go over to Mimi’s and ADD your site to her Mr. Linky list and place your blog’s name and url in a comment HERE TO LET MIMI KNOW YOU’VE COMPLETED THE MEME. Mimi will add it to the master list of message bottles. Email mimiwrites2005 at yahoo.com if you have questions. Participation is optional. Just remember she has a dungeon….and some of you are STILL there from the Band Meme. Have fun!

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Since I am not really sure I know someone that would play this and pass it on, I am tagging all of you readers. If you like it, make your message and pass it on. Thanks, it was fun!

It's funny...

... how some things are synchronized. Let me explain. For the past few months I have not been in the mood to do anything. I haven't made one single thing since the end of last year. My computer was (and still is) turning off all the time because one of the fans stopped working. That didn't bother me, I thought it was actually good to spend less time in front of the computer and have more time for creating and doing other things. Now I keep asking myself how it is possible that two months passed by and I didn't even notice that... with nothing to show, nothing to boast off with, and not much to write about.

Anyway, Nina went to skiing vacation with her father on Friday. I did some cleaning and some repairing that needed to be done. Then I got together all the things for claying and started to play. I'm still warming up and still waiting for the ideas to fill my mind again and force my fingers to crave for forming clay or cutting and gluing paper. I checked my neglected blog and noticed that it had hundreds of visits in last two days. Strange. No posts in last two months and so many visits? I thought that must have been some kind of mistake in my counter. I clicked the first link in my link bar, Polymerclaydaily, which I just love as there are always pics and links of the most amazing polymer clay works. And there it is, my bead and my hand making a bead! Woo hoo! I'm honored. And thrilled, in a really good way. Thanks Cynthia! That will keep me going.

It's time for me to wake up from my winter sleep. Sometimes it's hard to do so, but in my case few of the events that happened at almost the same time are making it much easier. Thanks to all of you who were visiting my blog during the time of my absence and special thanks to all of you who keep reminding me that crafting is what I just have to do.

Best regards to you all and keep checking in here, I'll be around more often! :)

First International Bead Swap Finished

These are my beads for the First International Bead Swap on European Polymerclay People Forum. We had to make 2 sets of 10 beads and send them to 2 participants. My two sets found their new home in Isreal and USA. In return, I got two different sets of beads and I am going to post pics of them tomorrow. I hope that was just one of many swaps there as it is always fun (and a bit of pressure, too) making things for someone else.

I made one focal bead for each set and 10 beads in 5 different patterns and sizes (so that's 11 beads, but I guess that's ok as well - if there is a focal bead it's good that you have even number of beads for each side, right?). I was working with translucent clay which I haven't figured out completely yet... but I was quite pleased with the final result. All beads are sanded and polished.

Still Making Christmas Cards

Hello again. I'm so busy lately and so not in the mood for posting. Not much is going on but it is obvious that the end of the year is approching as days are getting even shorter as they were. Not really shorter, they are just passing by with the speed of light. Mostly what I do is go to work in the morning after having serious troubles with getting up; I don't sleep well and I don't sleep enough so I wake up really tired day after day. Luckily I have fantastic co-workers and those 8+ hours I spend at work are not that hard, although a bit stressful time is starting in our accounting department which will last until mid January when we must have our balance and all the reports prepared. When I get home it's almost night (it gets dark at about 5 pm at this time). Then we usually do few things for school - I still have to help Nina to study, she makes most of her homework as soon as she gets from school so fortunately I don't have to worry about that. We have something to eat, go shopping or visit friends or have someone coming over,... and the day is over. The only thing I had time and will to do in the past two weeks or so was making cards. I never liked making them but since I bought some papers and other stuff it's much more fun. Now I actually love it! Here are some of them (if the slide is not working on your computer, you can see them here as well):

Thanks for stopping by. Sign my guestbook at the top of the page if you have time. Thanks! :)

My First Handmade Book

I am so proud of myself!!! I made my first book today! It's not really big, covers measure 10 x 12 cm and inside pages 10 x 9 cm and it has 24 pages in 4 different colors.

While surfing the web I came accross pics of handmade books and booklest and I just loved them. Today I watched the video on Craft TV Weekly where the demonstrator shows how to prepare back and front cover and put them together, how to stitch pages,... Since I had time I thought I would give it a try. Measuring and cutting paper was quite time consuming as I don't have any special cutters except blade, ruler and measuring plate. The hardest part was cutting the hard cardboard I used for covers, my hands still hurt! Making holes was much easier as I imagined and so was stitching. I wanted to make a coptic stitches at first, but then I figured out it would probably be safer to start with a stitch from that video. I didn't stitch too tightly, I am going to put different pictures and embelishments on the pages later so they will fill the inside of the covers, I guess. Oh, and the center inside part where pages are attached to the cover - that's my idea! I didn't want just glue the last page of the inside papers to the cover, I think this solution is much better. Almost like a real book! :)

It was so good to see how well things are fitting together and that in a few hours of work few ordinary pieces of paper turned into a book! Hmmm, maybe I should quit work and start making books! :))

And of course, here are few pics of you my masterpiece :)!

Cardmaking continues

It seems I got into cardmaking lately. It's probably because I should make beads for a swap and I just can't make the right combination. I guess it's about time I make them... maybe I'll just make another card before I start. :)
Since it is time for Christmas cards I am trying to make something more in that spirit. I have quite some stamps, but of course no stamps with Christmas themes. I just have this Santa, which is rather cute and it will have to do, and a swirly tree which I've used just for stamping on clay so far. My brother just came from New York, I was hoping he is going to get me stamps and punches and some other stuff I wanted... but he couldn't find any craft store there. Oh well, by next year I will have more Christmas stamps and papers, I am sure.

Santa Claus Fest

Sounds interesting!
I hope I have time to do something for this contest, I really like the idea. I should be working on cards and gifts and decorations, but days are passing by so quickly that I don't have much time for such things. Unfortunatelly. It's time to organise my life a bit better. It's weird. I mean, days still have 24 hours - that's the same as years ago. And few years ago I was much more effective as I am now. I had another job and my working time was 2 hours shorter as it is now. And Nina was going to sleep at 7pm while now she is up until 9.30pm usually. Yep, that could be the reason...

Cardmaking

I got few 6x6 BasicGrey paper pads today and I couldn't resist - I just had to try them!

Latest Pendants

This is fun! No more nervous breakdowns because of the pics here on blogger. I don't know for others but I always had problems with loading and then arranging more pics at once. They were all around the site and every time it took me quite some time and patience to put them in order. And then I look at my site on my work computer and pics are not lined up! Now that's over, I'll use Slide more often. Anyway, here are some of my latest pendants... as usually, I gave some away before I could even took pics.