Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Canes Have Now Become a Bracelet

My canes have tantalized me for a week now as I have gone through the creation process and I was more than ready to create some beads from them. However, I had another project that I wanted to participate in first.

Jacki Christie of Christie’s Cottage does a Wednesday give away on her blog. She does tireless promotion for many of the artists on both Artfire and Etsy and I have been honored by her featuring one of my pieces of jewelry as a give away. I offered up one of my polymer clay bracelets and she also gave away one of my polymer clay penguin Christmas ornaments. This time I told her I wanted to create something specifically for her give away.

Since I have bunny earrings and bracelets running all over my workbench, I was really leaning towards creating a Easter Bunny charm bracelet. The give away is slated for March 7th and I felt this gave me enough time to do something specifically “bunniesh” and the recipient enough to time receive it before Easter, especially if I went with something for the younger crowd. It could be a great basket stuffer.

Well, as inspiration would have it, I kept thinking about my new canes and I kept thinking about this stash of a dozen brass bangle bracelets that I had staring at me. Then a Victorian thought came to mind. I have been surrounded lately by some beautiful Victorian lace valentines and the background of Jacki’s blog is Victorian. The Ashes of Roses of these canes kept whispering lace and fineness and the pinks and peaches of the excess clay staring at me simply demanded that I create that bracelet.

So, I looked at a million lace patterns and  intended to create my translucent and white accent cane by using a lace pattern, and not the normal bullseye lace pattern. I was looking for real lace. But, as my impatience to create overwhelmed my nitpicking, I went with a crosshatch pattern.

The bracelet quickly came into shape and the colors were sweetly romantic, feminine and oh, so, Victorian. I fell in love with the bracelet and it did not take long to determine that this was the give away for Christie Cottage.

Here is my most favorite bracelet EVER! Well, for this week anyway.

AshesOfRoses-10 AshesOfRoses-11 AshesOfRoses-12 AshesOfRoses-02 AshesOfRoses-03 AshesOfRoses-07 AshesOfRoses-08

This bracelet is set on a brass bangle and it has been hand wet sanded through three grits before a light varnish to give it shine.

If you want to be part of the give away, here is the link to Christie Cottage. It will not be posted until the first of March, but she has other shopping sprees, twitter trees and other promotional events that she routinely schedules.

Enjoy the canes, these are the actual canes that I have for sale on my website.

These canes are limited and they will not be repeated, so if you are inspired to create your own Victorian bangle bracelet, then now would be the time to get the canes.

Enjoy

Julie and Blu

2 comments:

Sarah Harkins said...

This is a great idea! I have wanted to make a bangle out of my clay, but haven't gotten it to work yet. I tried forming it on a pop can, but it came out too chunky.

Julie L. Cleveland said...

Hi! You know, I have heard about some folks forming them around a pop can, but I also heard of one that uses the polyform clay rollers to do a half circle like you do for the beads. Peel the tube of clay out and then form it around a pop can or something similar. I have not tried this, but it is on my list of things to try. I think IrisMishly has a few tutorials on bangle bracelet. Here is one of them. http://www.etsy.com/listing/80969092/polymer-clay-tutorial-polypedia-e-book

I also have metal cuff blanks that I use to create cuff bracelets. I have none for sale the moment, but those are fun bracelets to make too.