Cool Clay things in the Mail

Remember I told you I was in a bead swap with fellow pcagoe members? Well my last set arrived in the mail on Thursday from David Revonav. They were late ( by a couple weeks :) ) but were certainly worth the wait. I was wondering who else had drawn my name and now that mystery is solved! He couldn't have picked a nicer palette of colors for me. I love the chartreuse and the purple veined turquoise beads. I didn't know quite what to expect as I have only seen much of his work involving silver with PC accents, done in the very uniquely Revonav way.

You may remember about a month ago me making a post featuring a new earring design of his. Now that I think of it, those colors were in those earrings, perhaps that is why David choose these for me, since I raved over them so much! :)

I am still thinking of ways to use them effectively and have not decided yet wither to make a necklace with them or a bracelet and matching earrings. But when I do I will be sure to share with you. I must mention that he was so generous to send me a wonderful gift of his silver earring blanks. I have been wanting to try something like this for awhile and been pondering taking up silver smithing but I think my husband would kill me if I got into one more medium! This gives me the chance to experiment and have some of Davids silver work at the same time! Thank you so much David for such beautiful pieces!

Friday, brought the mailman to my door with a box of something I have been waiting literally months for! I ordered this back in the deep freeze of winter (February) and have just received it now in Summer. I am a little disappointed that the promise that was made to me to email me with a heads up (this was back in April when I feared it was getting late in the year for sending polymer clay because of the heat factor) when it would be mailed so I could look out for it and not let it partially bake in the metal mailbox which stands in the sunshine all day, this request was not honored.
Oh well , live and learn, and I guess I shall buy my clay only directly where I can see it and get it when I want it. If some of you don't know, Polymer Clay starts to cure in only 90 degrees according to Donna Kato who has intimate knowledge of the properties since developing her own brand so I think she should know! :) This can make it very difficult to work with and make conditioning near impossible. Being that this is a new clay I wanted to try it under the best circumstances possible. I am really half afraid to open it because last I heard (about two months ago? I can't remember it's been sooo long) it was laid up in customs, and who knows how hot those places get or the containers coming over from Germany? Well, I think I'll open it now and see.

Ok, I've opened the box, and I won't ramble on and on but I must say I am pretty disappointed. I think I waited more than long enough, it even ran past the time limit PayPal gives you to get a refund (3 months) I waited 4 months for this to arrive. Again I got no email to tell me it was on the way (well I did find a USPS auto email but that was not from the seller who told me she would inform me and keep me updated and did not). I opened the box, the packing slip was just a regular packing slip with pre-printed , 'Thanks for your order', no hand written note, 'Sorry it took so long', nothing! To me this is inexcusable. I did find two little packs of the clay in there, I suppose it's supposed to be a bonus? but not a word about that either, and the colors (neon orange!) are not something I can think of a use for unless I tone it down with another color.

Then came the 'jars', which I had been looking forward to as I love to recycle and thought these would be good for storing and sorting out baked PCbeads that are too large for my other bead holder boxes.

I have to say, I am glad I don't have pet allergies, because everyone of these jars were covered in some kind of pet hairs. Some crinkly, some short and curly, some white, some orangey looking and some rather dark. On every single jar! Along with other 'debris'. It took me two hand wipes to get it all off! (I took pictures if someone wants to see and doesn't believe me, but I'd rather not post them). The one jar of Ivory (seen in the picture) the top was filled with the hair and debris and I wiped it off, looked and wiped again, dried and then noticed that even after the hair and debris were cleaned off this top was so badly scratched it had lost all aesthetic value.

At least the colors I ordered were correct. I did not have colors to go by when ordering (but I don't remember right now because is was so long ago) , so I went by the names. It seems though that the Turquoise and Jade are in the same family, the Jade just being a lighter version of the Turquoise. Not what I would call Jade, but pretty nonetheless. The other colors look ok, and when I get over this whole thing, I may open a jar and try it out. Frankly I am hoping one of two things, that I really don't like it that much and won't be wanting to buy it again or if I do there will be more than one place in the whole US to get it from!

If you'd like to know more, just drop me a note and I'll answer you privately.

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