Linda's Magic Workshop - Linda Britt Design

Leaves turning colors - Velvet covering on the young buck's antlers - Searching for that light weight jacket for walks - Enjoying cool night and early morning breezes - Visiting Flicker in the pine trees - he knows - It must be fall! And where did summer go? In keeping with that theme, this is my new seed pod I'm adding to my collection. The outer shell is made of copper metal clay and the pod is made of polymer clay.  It's fun to combine the two mediums.  Interested in the process?  Keep reading! If anyone has been following my FaceBook posts, you know I've been learning about and testing the temperatures of my new Paragon E12A kiln.  The interior temperature is not the same as the digital readout so I've been making my own chart.  While doing this testing I decided to make something from my clay instead of just strips and circles (I'm doing that too).  What better that a seedpod? The copper clay is Hadar's Friendly copper clay and it is...

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 sna...

Sharing my work from Hadar’s class with you is making me remember and document what I learned.   It’s a really good thing!   Details can be so easily forgotten.   In between assigned projects, I made a pair of earrings from a slab of copper and a slab of brilliant bronze.   When you really look the top layer of one earring is plain copper and the back layer of the other is textured bronze.   The pieces on the top layer started out as a single shape and I cut them to look like cracked mud.   (At least that is what dried cracked mud looks like here in the Southwest).   Since the two materials have a slightly different shrinkage rate the cracks became a little wider.   After I sanded and fired them, I polished them and made them into earrings.   These were fun and I’ll make other earrings in a similar style.   I also tried my square pliers and love what I can do with them. This pair of earrings sold before I could ...