Thursday, July 29, 2010

...And to think it all started with one pair of earrings...

Imagine, Partners in Charms would never have come into existence had it not been for one very special pair of earrings!  Here they are...drumroll please.....





When we saw these earrings in a project book, we knew we had to try them.  They use a technique with polymer clay called the "Skinner Blend."  The clay is run through a pasta machine over and over and over and...over!  Whew...it's quite a process!  When it's all said and done, you are left with a beautifully blended sheet of clay that, in the case, blends from red, to gold, to green, to blue, to purple.  We LOVED the Skinner blend, and of course, couldn't stop at just one pair of earrings!  We made more Skinner blend earrings with this really cool lily shape.  Like these:





These are a little more neutral.  They blend from a rich rusty-copper, to silver, and finally to black.  Then, for those people who may not want such a long earring, we made these:





We call this blend of colors "Seaside Oasis."  We even added some translucent clay to the blue and green to give it a bit of a water-like effect. 

So we made a bunch of lily earrings, but once we took the lily shape from the sheet of clay, we had beautiful, blended clay leftover.  We couldn't waste it!  So we came up with these:





We cut out little teardrop shapes from the Skinner blended polymer clay, and created these cute loop earrings.  Here they are in the copper-silver-black color scheme:






And to top it all off, my "partner in charms" (and amazing mother-in-law), Kathy came up with this:





She calls it a "rah-rah" bracelet.  She took the rainbow lilies AND the rainbow teardrops, added some glass beads, and came up with this amazing bracelet!!  I LOVE it!!

Look for more pieces using the Skinner blend coming soon!  (Of course we couldn't stop at this!!)

PS - Check out our "Shop" page for a great package deal!