Yellow Blossoms Tutorial

One of the members of our Air-Dry-Clay Yahoo Group, Rubina, has written a tutorial for you to create these lovely yellow "filler" flowers with cold porcelain.   She specializes in cold porcelain flowers and is a wonderful teacher, so you should enjoy this tutorial.   Lots of good, step-by-step photos!   Perfect for a beginner!   Go to Rubina's website Gemini Arts and Crafts for step-by-step tutorial or view this video slideshow to make the yellow blossoms.

Modeling a bunny with Paperclay

Watch masao fujikawa as he models this rabbit in about 10 minutes. I'm guessing he's using a Japanese air-dry clay product very similar to Creative Paperclay.

How to Make Mini Hair Rollers for Mini Dolls

Marsha, from Marsha's Musings and Sassy Mini Dolls, has shared her technique in this video for creating hair rollers (pink of course) for your mini dolls. I think this is cute and clever!   I wish I had  thought of this when I made my Auntie Marion doll (cloth doll shown here).  Some pink rollers in that red hair would have been a good thing!

Blogger tips - animated images

I had a bit of trouble getting my dancing Valentine to animate when uploaded to Blogger! Apparently, to make an animated GIF work in Blogger, it must be uploaded to an outside image host and hot-linked.   The problem seems to be the auto-resizing of images done by Blogger.  

In doing research to figure out why my guy wouldn't dance, I came across a blog full of tips for handling images in Blogger.   Because so many of you also have a blog on Blogger, I thought you might like to take a look at 'Image Test' , a blog created solely to test various images.   In addition to explaining animations in Blogger, it also contains info about positioning images, adding captions, etc.

According to 'Image Test', if the image is larger than the selected size (sm, med, lg), Blogger stores the large copy and creates a scaled image in the selected size. When that happens the scaled image will not animate.  My image was smaller, not larger, but it still wouldn't animate.    I didn't find my solution at 'Image Test'....but you may find yours!

Now....if I can just figure out how to get rid of the border around my animation. Coding 'border=0' into the HTML doesn't seem to work!

How to Decoupage a Bangle Bracelet

This tutorial for creating a decoupage bracelet from papier mache pulp and a recycled masking tape cardboard core is taken from the book Contemporary Papier Mache: Colorful Sculpture, Jewelry, and Home Accessories

You could create this with your own homemade papier mache or with an "instant" product like Celluclay.    Just add water to Celluclay to create a papier mache pulp.  You could also use an air-dry clay such as Creative Paperclay or some homemade cold porcelain.  Just about any no-bake clay product should work well and may give you a smoother texture than papier mache (if that was desired).

I see all sorts of possibilities with this idea and I hope you do too!

Part 1. Materials list
Part 2. Making the bangle
Part 3.  Decoupage instructions