Klay Karma

I had a lovely weekend at the Klay Karma polymer clay retreat in Nashua, New Hampshire.  My guild, the Southern Connecticut Polymer Clay Guild, hosts a weekend retreat every other year.  Klay Karma is a polymer clay retreat run by a group of Massachusetts and New Hampshire polymer clay artists scheduled for the off years of Clay ConneCTion.  It’s great to have a polymer retreat to look forward to every summer.

It was a great weekend, very mellow.  The whole thing was incredibly well organized and a delight to attend.  There’s a special kind of buzz in the air when you fill a big room with more than 50 polymer clay artists at work.  It was great to see old friends and meet some new ones.  Watch some great demos, eat delicious food, shop and play with clay.  Surprisingly I even finished a fair number of things.  I made a few ikat canes and used them to cover the nifty silver bead cores from Metal Clay Findings.  This was the first time I covered the smaller 1/8 inch cores.  I’d only used the 1/4 inch cores previously. I really like the skinny little spacers interspersed with the larger beads.

Diane Villano spent the weekend working with the silver bead cores too.  She sat across from me and we both fielded a lot of questions about covering them with clay.  Diane’s beads have wonderful flowers on them.  We traded and I got this lovely bead:

I turned one ikat cane into a set of earrings and a pendant.    Then I gave them to a friend who had generously opened her home to me when I was in her area taking a polymer clay workshop last year.  She injured her shoulder this year and hasn’t been able to do anything creative for quite a while.  She showed up in a light blue t-shirt which matched the set I had just finished and I decided they needed to go home with her.

It was a really happy weekend all around.

Tagged as: jewelry, polymer clay, retreat