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Stamps and Textures Workshop - November 2011

On the 13th November Guild members met at Curborough Farm Craft Centre, Lichfield for a class on 'Stamps & Textures'.

Our Chair person, Rachel Warren was our teacher and with two ladies fairly new to polymer clay we got off to a good start with stamping an impression into the clay and stamping a pattern with ink onto another piece. These were soon put into the oven so that further embellishments could be added later.

Next came ink stamping into very thin transparent clay - not easy as we found out - followed by stamping a texture onto various shaped beads, and shaping the bead as we stamped. Skinner blends were used along with acrylic paints and inks for a number of effects along with rock salt for lava beads and extruded clay for coiling around bead cores.

Fortunately for me Rachel had provided us with a very detailed handout at the beginning, which kept me on track, as each of the demonstrations through out the day were so packed full of information my head was spinning. My photos of our results from this class don't do it justice - I think we all went home bursting with ideas and desperate to try more.

An added bonus was Penny Vingoe from 'clayaround.com' who very kindly brought lots of tools, clay and all the other lovely things from her web site to tempt us, its a good job I had raided my husbands wallet before leaving home. It is very nice to be able to see the colours of the clay or the mica powders in your hand when choosing one you haven't used before, and she had all the new pastel colours with her too, very tempting.

A very enjoyable day thank you Rachel.

Sheila Smith