havig it all

Copy And Share Everything

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If you have been on the Splitcoaststampers site, you have likely seen the term CASE on several posts. In case you were wondering what that means, it stands for Copy And Share/Steal Everything. Basically, Splitcoaststampers is a huge community of people stealing like artists. 🙂

This is one of the many reasons I love this site. It is a great place for inspiration and everyone wants to inspire everyone else. You can practically feel the love when you look through the posts. (Ok, that might be overstating it, but it is nice looking through the beautiful work people want to share.)

A few months ago, I found a card posted on Splitcoaststampers by sistersandie in the gallery for the Gorgeous Grunge set (one of my favorite sets). I liked how she used the stamps to make a stripe of splats. It seemed like a perfect Father’s Day card, so I decided to CASE it. Continue reading →

Bites of Creativity

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We recently had a cookout at work and everyone needed to sign up to bring something. I don’t enjoy cooking, so I’m usually the one to bring the paper goods or drinks. But by the time I went to sign up, those were all taken.

Crap. I was going to need to make something.

Figuring I could at least make a simple dessert, I headed over to my Pinterest board where I have been electronically hoarding dessert ideas and recipes that look easy to make. I found one for S’Mores Pops, which looked simple enough.

“But, Rhonda, this is a blog about creativity and not about your attempts to make recipes from Pinterest. What’s up?”IMG_2030

Agreed. The same thought crossed my mind.

There is a tie to creativity here, so please bear with me.

The S’Mores Pops looked nice and had lovely proper pop sticks on them. I didn’t want to spend that kind of money on something to take to a lunch where I knew there would be a ton of other desserts to choose from (and there were tons including a fabulous carrot cake) and I didn’t want to feel obligated to make them look pretty (my available time to make these was short and I didn’t want to stress out over it).

So I went with toothpicks and found a way to make them work. They weren’t perfect and pretty, but they still looked appetizing. Then it didn’t seem right to call them “S’Mores Pops” so I went with “S’Mores Bites” instead.

As I was making these adjustments (toothpicks, less pretty, different name), it occurred to me that these adjustments were actually a little bit of creativity. Continue reading →

Rings and Things

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In my last metal clay class, we focused on kinetic rings. In the past we have only worked with Art Clay, but this time we also used FYI Silver Metal Clay by Val Lewis.

FYI Silver Metal Clay BitsWe started with the FYI clay because it needs to be fired in a kiln and we needed the pieces to be ready for the next steps for making the rings. I hadn’t worked with this clay before, but it was quite nice.  We used 10 grams of the FYI clay, and I was able to make the 4 pieces you see here. For reference, the round pieces ended up about the size of a penny. (Note that it is tough to take nice pictures during class with your phone with silver all over your hands. :))

One thing to note about the FYI clay is it has a higher shrinkage rate than the Art Clay. The picture on the right shows pencil lines that were drawn before firing. You can see the pieces shrank about a 20-25%. The advantage to this is you could create very small designs more easily because you’d have more clay to work with before it shrinks.

I had some extra clay after making the 2 pieces for the spinner ring. I used it to make a small butterfly pendant for 1 of my nieces and another squiggle piece that I plan to use as part of a necklace. Of these 4 pieces, the squiggle is my favorite. I want to make more pieces like this simply because they are more my style. Continue reading →