Stack O' Canes

Oh boy, I've been sadly neglecting my blogging lately. In my last post I said I expected to be back to my healthy self, but that didn't happen. Instead I had a darn relapse! But now, for sure, I am back to my healthy self and back to claying, as well.

Here is a photo of my latest doings... my "Stack O' Canes"! As usual I had a lot of fun making these. The orange set was made to mimic the school colors of orange and grey for the Atascadero High School, the school where my niece and nephew attend. The other two sets were my experiments with putting some of the color yellow into my work - it's a color that I rarely use. I think it worked out well!

Please click on the photo to enlarge it. Thanks for looking.

Purple and Gold, Blue and Lime....

That title sounds like school colors or something, doesn't it? Nope. Instead those are the colors of two new sets of polymer clay kaleidoscope canes that I made. I've been sick for about 2 weeks - one of the longest illnesses I've ever had, and so I haven't done any claying for that whole time. Finally I felt good enough to get back into my Claypen, and these canes are the result of that.

I just know I'm going to be my regular healthy self any day now, I'm feeling much better at last. And I'm rarin' to get back to the clay table and make more canes. A lot of ideas are jumbled up in my head so I better let them out while I can!

Here are two of the most recent canes:





Thanks for looking! There are lots more canes that I've recently made on my Flickr site, I'd love it if you'll take a peek. Here's the link:

Jae Jewelry & The Pleasant Pheasant Flickr Album

Canes for Corey

In honor of the memory of my friend Seana's son, Corey, whose 21st birthday would have been this week, I have created a set of orange canes. Corey loved the color orange, and all Seana's friends wore orange clothes as a remembrance of him on Friday.

While it's incredibly sad that Corey is not with his family now, we do know that they will see him again in Heaven. So to help ward off the sadness, we can use these small ways to remember him and the joy that he was while we are still held here in this realm.

Seana, my pain meets yours in the loss of your son. I can never express the depth of my sorrow to you in your loss, but what I can do is make a set of canes that I've named "Corey's Canes" to help keep his memory alive. (((((Seana))))) You're a dear friend and one of the best polymer clay cane-makers I know!!

Grandson Max's Visit

I wanted to share grandson Max with you all today. He stayed with us for a week and we had a great time! He's a cute little guy and loves Nana and Papa a lot. And we love him, too.

Here's Max!

And here is Max again, after his bath, hiding from Papa! Since Papa was in the other room just then, Max said it was okay for me to take his picture. After a while, Papa was looking everywhere for Max and couldn't figure out where he'd gone. Max is a GREAT hider - he can be completely quiet for a long time (when he wants to be).

Sharing the Baby Love

I wanted to share little Lucie with my blogging buddies. She has a problem... her hands are always busy holding up her front half. So she can't carry the stuff she needs! She's a smart one, though, so she has figured out what to do.....



Nana and Papa are having the BEST week! We'll babysit anytime. Hint hint. Luckily there are enough grandchildren to go around - Lucie's brother Max will be here with us next week, and their oldest brother in April for Easter break.

Winter snow caused us to have to decline two chances to babysit for our son's kids - we were bummed! But hopefully he and his wifey will go away again soon, LOL. If not, we'll go visit more often now that we are getting less snow.

The Miracle Baby and Some New Canes

Many of you may know that my child-bearing days are well over. So why do I have a 7-month old baby girl in my care this week? Ah, the miracle of grandchildren. We (husband and I) are having so much fun with this little baby, she's so cute and so busy, crawling all around the place and talking to us in big paragraphs that we don't understand a word of! After the first day, when she was a little worried about what happened to her old life (poor thing), she is now acclimated to us and just beams with happy smiles every time we look at her or talk to her. Of course - MY old life has taken a drastic change, too! Diapers and feedings are the new norm for me.

Since I finished some new kaleidoscope canes the day before Lucie arrived, I thought I should share them with you now. These are my "Magenta" and "Easter Sunset" series of canes. I won't be making any new ones for a while, since after this week with Lucie, her 3-year old brother Max will be here for a week. Crazy! But fun.

Day 27 - only one more day after this one!

Boy, today was a busy one for me. We got a lot of snow overnight, here's a photo that I took early this morning looking out the back door. That's the hot tub under that layer of snow! And below that is a photo of our son Tim's truck in the driveway after we had gotten the driveway cleared of snow, a couple of hours later.


Snow being the first thing we had to deal with today, I am sharing an "already-made" polymer clay creation, a needle case that I made using a texture sheet made by our own Ponsawan Sila. I absolutely LOVE that texture sheet and use bits and pieces of it all the time. Thanks, Ponsawan! Ponsawan is a fantastic artist and always wonderful about sharing her knowledge. You can find her tutorial blog here: Polymer Clay Beads Tutorials by Ponsawan; and her fabulous creative personal blog here: Polymer Clay by Silastones.


We have more snow since yesterday's storm... but not so much that it should keep me from Thing-A-Day's final day tomorrow.