Crafty Weekend

It’s very rare for me to schedule 2 personal events in one weekend. I signed up for a resin jewelry class at Little Bird Creations months ago and was really looking forward to that. Then when I found out Dyan Reaveley was teaching at a LSS on Long Island, I had to go to one of her classes! I decided on the collage workshop since I find that to be my biggest weakness and that was on a Friday afternoon. My hubby reluctantly agreed to take the day off work so he can pick Sienna up from school. Well, poor Sienna picked up a stomach virus from school and threw up Thursday night after she had gone to bed (at 7:30! should have known something was up!) She proceeded to wake up numerous times throughout the night to throw up or almost throw up. Needless to say, sleep was not on my side. I considered canceling on the class but it’s not cheap and thankfully, Yves was going to be home. Really no point in canceling, he can handle it. Off I went in the morning trying not to worry about my family!
DyanReaveley1
Well, Dyan is a hoot!! We got a brand new Dylusions journal as part of the class. Knowing that most people are afraid of messing up their brand new journal, she had us rip out a page at the seam. EEK! Then rip out another page at the seam! YIKES! Then rip out half of a page! Then pick a spray ink and spritz it on a random page! Then spritz a random page on our neighbor’s journal! Well, now the journal wasn’t brand new anymore! We started doing some backgrounds, techniques I’ve done at Little Bird but still neat to do with it’s creator!
JournalBack1

JournalBack2
We started looking for some images in a magazine and once we picked something out, we had to give it to the person across from us! Aack! LOL! Basically, she was reiterating that it wasn’t about the end result but the process of doing the journaling. Here’s what I came up with:
JournalPage
This page isn’t complete and I added a few more details to it since then but Dyan didn’t want us to finish the page as she wanted to teach us other techniques. We did some doodling on images from magazines and also some more collage work using color copies of cut up collages she had done. Did not take any photos of these pages but perhaps I will show some in a future post.

On Sunday, I head up to the Upper West Side for an all day resin jewelry class with Isolina Perez at Little Bird Creations. I was really excited for this! I’ve done some resin before but not much. I was also excited to try Crystal Clay and Resin Klay.
We did the resin first since it would take the longest to cure (3 days!) Picking out images to use was the longest process! Next was Crystal Clay, I think that takes 24 hours to cure and we stamped into it embedded swarovski crystals into it. The last thing was transfering an image into Resin Klay and we had to work fast for that one, since it only took 7 minutes to cure! We got to do some metal stamping and banging texture into copper to add to the resin klay. That was a lot of fun!
Here are how my pieces looked after class:
ResinToCarry
Here’s what I did with some afterwards (thanks to fellow classmate, Eileen, for posting her finished pieces and motivating me to finish mine! I tend to procrastinate!)
BelgiumEarrings
These images are postage stamps from Belgium! I’m not sure who the guy is but I liked the pink! The hearts were earrings from Isolina’s stash. I added some crystal dangles and made ear wires with crystal to match. This could probably use another layer of resin. Maybe I’ll add some one day!
ResinPendants
I tried to do a bit of layering with these. I think the star was also an earring. For the owl, I tried to keep the glitter contained to the edges but it spread. I’m ok with it, tho!
ResinPieces2
The last of my resin pieces. The purple piece is a bead and maybe one day I will turn it into a charm and make a matching necklace for the earrings. This definitely needs more resin! The square piece was just some glass glitter and red glitter and I popped a crystal in the middle. Not sure what I will do with this!
SkullClay
This is using the Crystal Clay. I have to be honest, when I first saw Crystal Clay on the market, I wasn’t really impressed. It’s not my thing and after working with it, I did not change my mind. Maybe the problem is, it needs more crystals! Here are 2 more. The one on the right is stamped. Again, I think it needs more crystals!
MoreClay2
And finally, here is the piece with the Resin Klay. This was my favorite after the resin. I hadn’t done image transfers in awhile and this reminded me of how much I enjoy it. I also had a lot of fun adding texture to the copper! At home, I had to file the edges of the clay and I added some vintage photo distress ink on the edges. I wish I added more. You can hardly tell! Anyway, I then glued it to the copper and added a bead dangle. I plan on doing more of these!!
ButterflyPendant
All in all, a very fun and creative weekend even if my mind wasn’t always fully there in the classes. I felt bad that Yves picked up what Sienna had and stayed home from work on Monday and Tuesday! Sienna went back to school on Tuesday. I’m happy to report that everyone is back to their happy selves again! Yay!