art buttons

Welcome to Inside the Studio!

House Heart Charms

My recent project was making the charms shown above for the Bead Cruise.
I have been a sponsor for the cruise every year except two. Job got in the way.
70 items were needed for the Goody Bag that go to each Cruise participant. The theme for the cruise is Hearts or Alice in Wonderland. You don’t have to make something to go with the theme, it is optional, this year I chose to go with the theme. As you can see I went with hearts.
I’m going to show you how the charms came to life!

I extrude a clay coil from my clay gun. Pretty cool toy! I cropped out the huge mess that was in the photo…a little is still there but I was unwilling to Photoshop it out.

I straighten the coil out and measure it putting tick marks where they will be sliced. This makes it so they are close to the same size. Not that my slicing is perfect.

I take one of the clay slices and hand form to look like a house. Smoothing edges and flattening as I go. Put the loop in the top of the house and clean up the insertion point with a wet paintbrush.

I stamped the Heart into the clay. The heart shape was made by carving the end of a dowel. The dots were made using a stylis. They are set aside to dry as I continuing making lots more. Ignore the dry clay hands.

Underglaze colors on and getting ready to go in the kiln for the first firing.

All the glaze colors are on and ready to be dipped with the clear glaze and fired once again.

Out of the kiln! It’s a party of color. I love color!

Carded and ready to be shipped to go on a Cruise.

As you can see there are many steps to get to a final product.

*Remember any button can be a pendant or jewelry component.*