…easy polymer clay jewellery bowl…

The downside of having been away from this space is that I have quite a back-log of projects that I haven’t shared, and a challenge I am really behind on, and it feels a bit like that’s all I’m blogging about at the minute. I do try and remember that random craft projects and jumping around is kind of what I do, and what I blog about. Would I think about it so much if all these projects weren’t part of the challenge, and just things I had made and was sharing? Probably not.

I’ve been doing some planning for Blogtober, as I am crazy enough to be attempting it on both blogs (two blog posts a day for a month when I haven’t shared much for 6 months? Why not!), and I’m looking forward to getting back into the kind of stuff I used to post about. WIP progress. Weekly round ups of general life happenings. Book reports. Some flash fiction snippets (remember when that was a thing I did?). I’ve been poking back through my archives to when I did blog almost-daily to see what it is that kept the words flowing, as well as through the archives of some of my fave blogs that I would check over coffee each and every morning. Hopefully, what I’ve come up with is some semblence of something you might be interested in reading!

Today’s cute project I wanted to share with you is another from my 100 days of Use It Or Lose It – I had this box of polymer clay from various projects that had been floating for AGES, and a lot of it was simply getting too old to be useful. We tried to make some beads and things, and it all just crumbled, so I salvaged what I could, and decided to make myself a little bowl to hold my diffuser bracelets. For a while I’d wanted to do something to get them more organised, as everytime I looked around they were all over the bathroom sink, or on my bedside table, or randomly floating around our walk-in wardrobe, and with what appeared to be just about enough clay, I decided there was no time like the present!

Once I’d warmed up the clay and made it plyable and workable, I rolled it out evenly, and then laid a cute little stencil over it and rolled over that, to create and impression, before draping it over a small glass bowl and gently working out the wrinkles. Once baked, a little wriggle of the glass bowl was enough to pop  them apart, and ta-da, one little bracelet bowl was done!

I was a bit disappointed that the pattern wasn’t more visible, but I think I lost a lot of the depth of the embossing as I worked it onto the glass bowl, with the pressure of trying to get it smooth pushing it too far flat. Overall though, for my first try at this technique, I think it is ok, and the bowl does the job it was designed for and does a fabulous job of holding my bracelets and keeping my bedside table tidy, so I guess I can’t complain too much!

Today is a cold and rainy kind of day – pretty much the best kind of day we can ask for, with drought raging across the state. We’re supposed to get between 10 & 20mm, so the kids and I have done a quick whip around the house this morning to pull it in to shape ready for the weekend, and it’s fun all the way to bedtime. I’m supposed to be heading away this afternoon with some friends for our church women’s conference, but I’m still not feeling great after last weekend’s bugs, so I’ll make a final decision on that around lunch time. I’m half way through a good book, which I’m swapping for hand quilting every now and then. Master 11 is starting a knitted square blanket. Master 9 is starting a ripple blanket. I really should be planning for school next week, but maybe that can be Sunday’s problem. Right now, it’s far too tempting to snuggle up with my babies and nom on some leftover birthday cake (how is my baby FIVE??) and get our craft on. Just the way Friday’s should be. Have a great one, friends!

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This is project six of 26 for the Make All The ThingsChallenge I am doing with Carrose Creative. You can see my other finished projects here. Please feel free to play along if you would like and drop us a link in the comments to your project!