Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

A week ago I posted in Face Book that I had finished several pair of earrings made from Hadar’s clay.  I was experimenting with techniques from her book, The Handbook of Metal Clay Textures and Form, and I promised to share my experience with you.  The larger oval pair of earrings (lower left in photo) combines Brilliant Bronze and Copper.  I carved curvy stripes in the copper oval and laid in snakes of bronze, sanded flat and fired.  I know I could polish and make them smoother and shinier but I like the more rustic look.  I used Baldwin’s Patina to bring out the color contrast. The upper right pair of earrings also combines the bronze and copper.  The back textured layer is bronze and the smaller rectangle is copper.  I was concerned that the copper might be too thick and not bond well but as you can see – no problem! The earring on the lower right also has a backing of bronze.  I carved horizontal strips and laid the copper snakes in.  Then a textured the snakes cut

Taking a walk through a forest, on a mountain trail or through a meadow, always inspires me.   One of my favorite flowers on these walks is the thistle.   The details of that flower make me smile.   When I found this thistle stamp in a store, of course, I just had to have it.   I put it on my work table waiting for the right time to use it.   One day I decided to make the thistle in fine silver clay and put a wire staple on the back.   That staple would allow me to make a backing of polymer clay and attach it securely to the silver.   I also made a silver flat bail with a hole toward the bottom so I could put it between two layers of polymer.   Both the staple and the hole would force polymer clay into those openings locking the silver in place.   These are the 3 slabs of polymer for the Illuminance & Clarice beads The back of the medallion is made from the sunburst slab in the front of the picture. Combining metal clay with polymer clay fascinates me.   I love blen

Several years ago I went to an estate sale wanting to find something to buy to remind me of family friends who lived in that house.   They were such interesting people who were creative, talented and so much fun.   I looked through everything upstairs and eventually found my way to the basement.   There it was! An old ornate brass doorknob.   It went in my box of treasures.   Recently I rearranged my art studio and found it.     My 2 part mold mix came from Cool Tools and just for fun I made a mold of the top of the doorknob.   Then I made a silver medallion using the mold and drilled a tiny hole in it because I wanted to incorporate polymer clay some way.   I know I’m supposed to figure out the entire piece of jewelry before I start anything so it comes out the way I want.   But this time the piece just grew!   I also made a bail that I thought might look good with it…or not.   I fired the pieces and tumbled them and patina’d them.   They sat on my desk for two weeks – until

One of the benefits of taking online classes is building an arsenal of techniques that can be drawn on to produce the design that is in the mind’s eye.     After practicing making transfers to polymer in Heather Campbell’s class, a design idea popped into my head that could incorporate some of my own photographs into my polymer jewelry.   Looking through my photographs (I have hundreds..really) and deciding which images to use took a little time!   I made digital copies and turned them into black and white photographs, reduced them to contact sheet size and printed them using the toner printer.    Then I rolled out the creamy blend of white and Sahara Fimo polymer clay to #3, placed it on a tile and put a thin coating of clay softener over the clay.   The cut out images were placed upside down on the clay.   As you can see from the photo to the finished piece, the image is reversed.  If there is writing that is very important!  Learning to burnish the images with my fing

A couple of months ago my friend, Helen, asked me to make her a ring for her thumb out of copper.   She’s been having joint pain and thought maybe the copper against her skin would help relieve it.   Of course, I said ‘Sure’!   I came home and thought about how to make a ring that would fit or could be adjusted to fit.   And the copper really needed to touch the joint.   And Helen lives 200 miles away so there would be no ‘fitting’. I cut paper and played with a design that would wrap around the thumb and not get in the way of daily chores.   I came up with this design.   During one of my practice sessions with my jeweler’s saw, I decided how to cut it and how to decorate it.   I practiced. The copper sheet I chose for the final ring came from my junk yard treasures.   It has striations on it and the plastic protection coating was still on one side.   I carefully sawed on my scribe lines and filed and sanded all the edges.   Then I used my disc cutter to make the random cir

As most of you know, my Tuesday blogs for a few weeks will be about my trip to several Utah monuments and parks.   Friday blogs usually have something to do with jewelry and creativity.   I always take a sketch pad and camera with me on trips.   So many things I see spark an idea for a piece of jewelry I want to make.   This trip was no different and one of the ideas I had after seeing the magnificent rock formations was to combine the vertical slabs of rock with the angled layers.   Since I’ve been taking several polymer clay classes, I decided that would be the medium.   Rock colors (copper, black, white, gold) mixed with some metallic mica powder and pepper represents the minerals.   I made some canes that combined the colors and that I could flatten for the long vertical rock formations.   For those of you who don’t know what a polymer clay cane is, picture a long cylinder of clay that has a design running through it.   You slice off a thin slab and apply it to a base of c

Viking knit is the oldest method of chain making and I've become fascinated by it.  Once I conquered the single knit, I decided to add beads.  I could have googled or asked how it was done but it seemed like something I could just figure out.  And I've learned a lot as I proceeded first with tumbled turquoise beads and then with pearls.  I thought I'd share a few of the things I've learned.   Iif you want a great tutorial on viking knit technique, Trina Ann at http://blog.trinaann.com/  has written a clear concise easy to understand tutorial.  I highly recommend it.    Tumbled tuquoise beads in viking knit  I used tumbled turquoise beads in the first viking knit chain and I did not really know what I was doing.  But I went right ahead and as it turned out, I liked the end result.  Since the beads were irregular in shape there was a random quality to the finished product. During that process, I began to really understand the technique of viking knit.  Loo

When you look at my etsy stores you see Mojave Stone jewelry .  In the 1970's, my father and two brothers mined a stone in the Mojave Desert in the middle of nowhere California!  Actually, the mine was somewhat but not very close to Desert Center.  It had been a gold/silver mine before they staked their claim and began mining stone.  My family lived in Missouri and the stone had to be trucked from the desert after strip mining it.  I was married and away from home so I got to hear the stories of making a road, fighting off bees, surviving the heat, being careful of the critters and all the other 'Wild West' excitement.  And I did not have to rough it! Dad was going to retire (some day) and make and sell the polished cabochons (a stone cut and polished usually with a flat back and a convex top) for jewelry.  In the meantime, he had some distributors sell it, some metal smiths create pieces, and he trademarked it as 'Mojave Royal Blue' and 'Mojave Stone'.  He

I love going to the market and seeing all the colors and shapes of vegetables and flowers and people.  Usually I take my camera and capture whatever catches my eye.  But today I decided to just enjoy everything with my friend and buy some tomatoes and and flowers.  Of course I took a large bag and before my trip was over I had 3 bags full.  I knew that would happen didn't you?  As I turned a corner and went up another aisle, I was stopped by a cabbage with the largest ruffliest leaves I have ever seen.  I said, 'I want that!  I want to take a picture of it.'  Remember, I had no camera!  The lady in the stall offered to take off the big outer leaves so I would have a normal size cabbage.  I almost grabbed it out of her hands!  'No!! Those leaves are why I want it!"  So she carefully handed my the cabbage and I got it into a plastic bag.   We left soon after that with my bag full of tomatoes, squash, 6 large sunflowers and my ruffled cabbage!  On the way home I ima