Weekend with Auntie

Since this is my first blog, I should probably start by telling you that my name is Linda and I can remember wanting to be an artist as far back as my kindergarten days. 

Speaking of kindergarten, last weekend my 6-year-old grandniece, Paityn, came to visit.  Her sixth birthday present was to spend a weekend with me, painting and making beads from polymer clay in my studio. We had a wonderful time.  She painted some chipboard boxes with lots of color.  Then she made some interesting beads, which you can see here.

Paityn is very visually perceptive and she thinks like an artist, even at her young age.  Most of these beads are made from colors that she chose and marbled together herself.  She actually figured out that she could make the tube-shaped bead evenly shaped by rolling it with a flat piece of plexiglass.  Her most impressive bead is the gold and fuchsia "swirl" bead, also known as a "lentil" bead, at the bottom of the photo.  She wanted glitter on all of her beads, and unfortunately, the glitter makes it hard to see the pretty swirl she got in the center of her bead. 

I learned how to make Lentil Beads from Cindy Lietz's  (the Tutorial is here) and that is the technique that I taught my niece. 

While Paityn was busy making her beads I made three mushroom beads, which I learned from Cindy's Mushroom Bead Video.  Later I strung them into necklaces for Paityn and her two sisters.  I would have preferred to use my own colors, but after Paityn watched the video with me, she said she wanted the same colors that Cindy used.  It was her weekend, so her wish was my command.