From Sketch to Design

I thought you might enjoy seeing how my latest creations came into being.

First my inspirations:

Illustrations from my childhood

From artist's like Gyo Fujikawa and Tasha Tudor.

Mary Harding's clasps:

 and Melanie's (Earthenwood Studios) toggle/resin experiments:

So with those inspirations rattling around in my brain and the need to create a line of clasps scratching it's way to the surface I sat down with my sketchbook.

I pulled out the clay, my lino block carving tool and my favorite sculpting tools and made the molds.  It took me a few experiments as I've never made a mold or stamp for the clay.  Fun, but I wasted quite bit of polymer clay and mold making stuff in the process, oh well it's part of the journey.

After I had a few molds that I was happy with I threw them in the oven and waited.  From the molds I pressed my toggles. After those baked; I painted them and did some surface treatments to create a 'watercolor' effect. 

Now in a perfect world at this point I would have whipped out my precious metal clay and created bronze or silver branch toggles.  But being kiln deficient, , that didn't happen.  So after some brain storming I created a 'branch' from copper that is hammered for texture and antiqued.  Here are some of the results:

And a necklace designed with the Spring Willow toggle pendant:

Clasps will arrive attached with a small piece of copper chain that can be removed before adding it to your design:

Visit my Etsy shop to view all the new clasps.

Next up is to try the clasps in different colors for the different seasons.