Ok, so I know I am two months late, but I wanted to share a bit about this last year’s Polymer Claycation. I rolled in on Sunday and was one of the first to set up at good old Table 4. I had a nice, generous workspace (more space than I tend to have at home!) and some room on the end of the table for a pop-up Polka Dot Cottage shop.
Most times when I have several dedicated days of claymaking ahead of me, I have a bit of a theme in mind to guide my work. This year was The Year of the Tiny Flowers. In other words, I had decided that I was going to make my Calico Cane design in as many color schemes as possible.
For the last few years, I’ve been leaning heavily on bold kaleidoscopic designs, as in the Jubilee Cane. I love that look, but I noticed at the craft shows I was doing, people spent a lot of time admiring the pieces that featured more dainty designs. So I set out to make a bunch of Calico canes this time.
While I was at it, I made some Strata Canes (which are very quick and easy to make), and a few Jubilee Canes, too. In all, I finished eighteen canes, nine of which were brand new. The other nine were replacements for designs I had run out of.
It’s unusual for me to use this time to build my cane library, because I am typically focused on finished pieces. But this time I was all about the canes, and honestly I would have been perfectly happy if caning was all I had time for.
As luck would have it, I did manage to make some crochet hooks. And a small pile of hair clips, rings, bangles, earrings, and stud earrings that mostly went straight into my own jewelry box, if I’m being honest 😁
This is the second year in a row that I have done the polymer clay retreat thing in mid-November, and both times, it kicked off literally weeks of obsessive behavior, LOL! When I wasn’t sitting at my clay desk making more canes, I was turning those canes into jewelry and crochet hooks and seam rippers. Or I was sanding the daylights out of everything to make them shine. Or I was standing behind my table at a craft show hoping that some people would like what they saw (happily, some people did). Or I was updating my website with all of the new pieces and removing those that had sold. Phew! (I touched upon some of this in my December check-in.)
Eventually I looked up and realized it was December 20th, and I should probably get ready for Christmas. That is the only thing that stopped the madness 🤣
And I will admit, that I did spend a few days after Christmas back at the clay table, working on a couple of new color schemes, which I hope to be telling you all about soon. And I’ve done a bit of claying this morning, too. I can’t seem to stay away.
If you’d like to see what’s new in the shop, take a look here!
I still have more things that I want to tell you about: nibling hats, concerts, those new color schemes I mentioned… If I can manage to keep these topics relatively simple, maybe I will post more frequently. Wish me luck!
