Metallic Mokume

It's amazing to me how much time is spent just mixing polymer colors and then arranging them into a pleasing stack to create mokume gane beads. This pile on the bottom is only about 1/3 of the colors mixed today, all metallics in various shades of teal, green and copper metallic. For this stack and the others from today? About two hours. I ponder it for a good while, though, so I waste as little clay as possible. Because I over-conditioned all of it to the approximate consistency of superglue gel, I had to wait quite a while to begin work. I had already conditioned a lovely ivory shade as a base for some tube beads. Then I used a four part combination of metallics to create some mokume gane slices. The tubes at the top, two jumbo and one slightly shorter focal tubes, had to sit about an hour to firm up. The ends were cut and went into the cooker at 11 p.m. 45 minutes later, they looked quite lovely even in their unsanded, unpolished state. The light blue metallic gleamed especially well against the maroon copper. I was a little disappointed that the orange copper metallic mix didn't look as cohesive in color with the other three shades of green/teal, but there's always a million and one ways to recombine and try it again.

Tomorrow I have a job interview at 3:30 so I will spend the morning trying to see which of my outdated interview outfits still fit. Since pending job interviews always make me physically ill, I'm glad to wait until afternoon for the ordeal. Of course it's a panel interview, then a writing test, then a math test. I'm doomed with the last phase, I'm afraid... I've been counting on my fingers for 35 plus years.