I’ve played with metal clay and love the versatility of it. I want to add classes with metal clay at my studio and you may know that the focus of my studio is glass…so I went searching the internets a bit to find a tutorial on using glass with metal clay. And dichroic glass too. Yay!! Now I’m sharing it with you guys. The site that has kindly provided this tutorial is ugotglass.com. In this tutorial they’re using PMC3, which is a low fire clay. This is so that it can be done with glass. They provide two different options for working with glass and firing schedules. Metal clay opening up all kinds of design opportunities for those that aren’t necessarily silversmiths. And it’s fun to work with. Once I’ve made a few pieces with glass and metal clay I’ll post some pictures. If you make something send me a picture I can post here.
Have you read?
How to Store Embroidery Needles
I have a complicated relationship with my embroidery needles. Which is a fancy way of saying I don’t really take care of my needles at all. Even though I know I have embroidery needles to use for cross stitch and sewing, needles that are certainly still in their packages, I can rarely find them when I need them.
So when I saw this post from Crewel Ghoul about how to store your embroidery needles, it hit close to home for me.
It doesn’t really say anything I didn’t already know, but it is good advice that might also serve as a reminder for you to take better care of your needles when you cross stitch or do other hand-sewing projects so that you’ll be able to find your needles again when you need them.
It would help me a lot if I had a dedicated place to keep needles I’m not using, including the needles that are still in their packages from when I bought them. You’d think I would keep them with my embroidery floss but apparently you would be mistaken about that.
Another good idea for me is to have a place to put needles I’ve been using when I am done with them. Because goodness knows I’m not going to put them back in the package. (Which may actually be a good thing because then I know which one I’ve been using and which ones are fresh. Not that I replace my needles regularly, but still.) I own pincushions but I don’t really use them for anything, which is silly.
Check out the post at Crewel Ghoul to see all the options available for storing your embroidery needles properly. I’d love to hear what you do, especially if you have a better system than I do (which, honestly, would be any system at all).
[Photo: Crewel Ghoul]