You hear all the time about things 'going viral' on the web--and few places demonstrate this better than the polymer clay community. Case in point? Polymer Clay Daily--THE weblog of the polymer clay world, recently featured a link to the website of well-known polymer artist Alice Stroppel.
Alice has been doing face canes for years--almost everyone who works in PC is familiar with her work--but she also came up with a simple technique for using leftover canes--ends, failed pieces in a unique and innovative way; she demonstrated this at a recent retreat to her table mate--seemingly as a casual afterthought--and once the genie was out of the bottle, it travelled over the world with the speed of light.
In and of itself, the technique is so simple that most artists (like myself) are scratching their heads and saying, "why didn't I think of that?!",
whilst busily working away making the beautiful canes that she invented. Most polymer clay is fun--it's why we love it, and stay with it--but this technique is PC fun on steroids.
It has all the elements we love--Frugality (we hate to throw those old canes away, if there were only some good way to reuse them..) Beauty (just take a look) Ease of construction (The canes are ridiculously easy and fast to make) And above all, the sheer Serendipity of it--you never know what you're going to get, but odds are seriously in your favor it'll be great.
Alice, of course, could have reserved this knowledge and sold it in the form of tutorials, which most of us would gladly pay for; but instead, she chose to generously share it with the rest of the PC world for free. And this is one of the things that makes the PC world such a great place to be--a generous, sharing, supportive community of artists all encouraging and inspiring each other.
How cool is that.
I'll be teaching the Stroppel Cane technique at the November meeting of the Austin Polymer Clay Guild on Saturday, November 5th at 2pm at the Ralph Yarborough Library, 2200 E Hancock Drive. Please check our yahoo group and facebook page for details and supply lists.
Namaste,
Randee
