so you wannabee a Domestik Goddess?

I went looking for polymer beads and found a Treasure Box! It’s called Pitch with Easter Trance Spirals, by Lauren of thickneckARTS.

I’ve always loved hemp jewelry but without going to a craft/art show I could never find stuff that was unique or if it was, it wasn’t my style. Then I realized I would never find exactly what I wanted outside of my own creation. Only I could create exactly what I wanted!

Long story short, I bought some primary colors to play around with and have been hooked ever since!
~ Lauren

But what brought her to making a treasure box instead of beads for her hemp-knotted jewellery? Lauren tells me she’d read that polymer clay could be used on “just about anything that could withstand the clay’s baking temperature” — around 225°F depending on the piece.

“It opened a whole other door for me with the clay,” she says. “I went from beads to candle holders to treasure boxes in a day!”

Basically, for the treasure box she used a wooden Home Depot giftcard box, black polymer clay, liquid polyclay and part of a polymer clay “cane” she’d already designed. (And for those of us who aren’t hands-on with the polymer clay yet, ClaySquared has an terrific photo show of the step-by-step process of how a polymer cane is built that, trust me, you’ll really enjoy!)

As Lauren explains her process, she wrapped the entire box — lid and all — with black polymer clay, attaching it using the liquid polyclay. Then she cut slices from the cane and stuck them onto the black clay in a random pattern — going for a polka dot-look.

“I had to use a roller to flatten it on all sides, then smooth the corners with my fingers. Once the box was completely wrapped and the “polka dots” in place, I made “incisions”, if you will, where the door and box would separate so that it could be opened once baked. Then I separated the door from the box, and baked both on a cookie sheet for about 15-18 mins at 200-215°F.”

If you want to try this project yourself, Lauren advises, it might be best to bake the wooden box before you cover it with polymer clay.

“The box I used bubbled sap up from its bottom into the box itself during baking. It still came out beautiful but the sap takes up a good bit of room on the inside. lol. Also, don’t try to make your corners too flush or too tight because when the clay bakes it will pull taut, so to speak, and may create cracks.”

Lauren made a wise design choice in the classic black-and-white theme for her first treasure box, I think, as almost anything black-and-white has an automatic touch of class!

(Another way to go might be with wildly funky colours and a lot of detail, if you’re afraid you might have an ‘ooops’ or two to disguise…)

As for the wood Home Depot box giving up some sap when it was heated — that sounds like these boxes are made with fairly green wood, so likely to have some shrinkage over the years in any case.

You might be able to pick up an old wooden box of the right size and shape at a yard sale, one that’s already well dried by age. Just be careful not to polymer-decorate a priceless collector’s item by mistake! So, come to think of it, I think I’d go with the Home Depot box and just try to plan ahead, to dry the box out gradually at a very low heat over a period of days, to prevent the wood from warping.

Why not get a couple of boxes, and just pop them into the oven whenever it’s cooling off after you’ve had a cooking spree? Saves on electricity, dries the wood out in a gentle way to prevent the box from warping as the moisture evaporates from its fibers, and gives you a couple of boxes all ready to go when a treasure box inspiration hits you!

Whomp!
Yep, that was inspiration hitting right now…

Find Lauren’s polymer beads, hemp jewellery, and other arts at thickneckarts.etsy.com.

I’m going to get into so much trouble with DJ for posting this — putting temptation in the poor man’s path! — but who could resist?

Besides, I’m sure there’s someone with a wannabe-Samurai Dad out there just desperate for a Father’s Day gift idea with more originality to it than a comic necktie or golf gear.

This is the Damascus Blade Japanese Samurai Fan Katana Sword from Handmade Sword, a thing of great beauty hand forged from a rich historical tradition.

It’s also a very real sword — “razor sharp” and not in any way a toy.
Just so you know.

I’ve always said that symmetry is overrated. Why should everything match up perfectly in pairs? After all, people are never perfectly symmetrical (except possibly in magazine photos of airbrushed Photoshopped super models, but that’s a rant for another day).

In most of us mere mortals, the left side does not quite match the right; one ear is slightly higher than the other; one foot is slightly larger than the other — as any shoestore salesclerk would confirm — and that’s not just me, that’s all of us!

So why the big hangup about having socks that match? We all know perfectly well that the gym locker or the clothes-dryer is just going to keep on eating up random socks and leaving us with singles.

It’s a scientific fact.

One solution is to embrace the random nature of the universe and shop for wild single socks at LittleMissMatched.com — I tip my clown hat to Toronto’s fabulous Bargainista for this find — not just for kids, and not just socks! Do check out the funky mismatched pairs of flip-flops while you’re over there, and bright mixable bedding, and furniture that’s all like a great big whiteboard to fill with colourful doodles…

Another way to handle the single sock crisis, of course, is to load up on many many many identical pairs of generic department-store tube socks. That way, when one sock goes missing, its mate can be matched up smoothly with any other solo sock, and no one will ever know the difference! Practical, yes… but which of these single sock solutions would be more fun?