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Join us as we share with you the experiences we had while at this winter’s CHA show, the artists we met, the demos we saw, and the products we encountered.

While at CHA, we got a demo from Donna Dewberry on the new Studio clay, Marie Segal told us about the new Gclay by Cernit that’s being carried by Jaquard, we got other demos from Paverpol, Terra Bella, and Amazing Mold Putty (which was so amazing that we placed an order to sell it in our shop). We interviewed Ann and Karen Mitchell in the Staedler booth, Donna Kato did a book signing for us, Katherine Dewey built a face while we filmed, and Sue Kelsey showed us some features of Makin’s Clay.

Stay tuned for more video clips in the future.

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We returned from the Craft & Hobby Assoc. (CHA) industry trade show exhausted and both Kira and I are now sick. I think everyone on the planes we took were sick. I never heard so much coughing and sniffling in one place. We tried to keep ourselves hydrated and full of homeopathic remedies but unfortunately we just couldn’t avoid getting sick. My husband is at the store getting me some orange juice and other assorted stuff. I have been through 3 boxes of tissues and I look like Rudolph the Red Nose Raindeer.LOL

Even though the trip was exhausting we had a great time and taped a lot of footage. We taped lots of demos and met lots of great artists. You will be able to see some of the footage in the next few episodes of Polymer Clay TV.

We are off to the polymer clay conference Synergy put on by the National Polymer Clay Guild on Wed. in Baltmore, MD. I am really looking forward to it and getting to meet all the other artists. I hope we are well by then, I plan on taking it easy for the next 2 days.

Come back on Friday for Polymer Clay Podcast when Kira and I share some of the goings on at CHA.  There is a lot to share so you won’t want to miss it.

There is still time to enter this months Call For Creativity, the deadline to enter is Feb. 28th, 2008.  This months theme is to make something using texture. Have fun!

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Kira and I got in late last night from California where we attending the Craft & Hobby Assoc. show in Anaheim, CA. We had a great time and brought back a ton of footage and goodies to share. Tomorrow we will release the footage from the Bottle of Hope award ceremony in Amaco’s booth at CHA on Polymer Clay TV.

We filmed Marie Segal who was at Jaquards booth introducing a new kind of Cernit clay called G-series. It was nice but won’t be available until April but we should be getting samples and we will let you know what we think.

Staedtler who is the Eberhard Faber brand (Fimo) introduced a new microwavable clay. You microwave it for 10 minutes but it only comes in terra cotta & white. Ann & Karen Mitchell were demoing in the booth and we talked to them and filmed them as well.

We filmed Donna Kato doing a book signing. We filmed Katherine Dewey who did a demo of sculpting a face. We filmed Linda Peterson doing a demo in Amaco’s booth of faux turquoise. We filmed Donna Dewberry in the Polyform booth. We filmed Sue Kelsey in the Makin’s Clay booth and we filmed some products that work well with polymer clay. Stay tuned for all the footage. We are going to Synergy next week so there will be a bunch more. We had an exhausting time but it was a lot of fun to get to meet everyone and see all the new products.

We are still working out the schedule when the footage will be released so stay tuned as we may release some extra video over the upcoming weeks. Make sure to come back tomorrow for the Bottle of Hope award ceremony on Polymer Clay TV.

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Ilysa and I are off to Winter CHA 2008. We leave early Saturday morning, gain three hours on the cross-country flight, and arrive a little after noon. I have a cousin in the film industry in LA, who will be meeting me for dinner on Sat- fun, because we don’t see eachother often. And then, it’s buckling down for three days and three thousand booths full of art and craft delights. We will arrive home next Wednesday, beat and broken from lugging home 50 pounds of luggage each- but also full of information, new products, and new giveaways for our newsletter subscriber contests.

Enjoy and come back next week to see footage from the show!

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This months winner of the Polymer Clay Artists Guild of Etsy challenge is Naama’s entry. Here is her description of her  piece: “Meet Joe, a hopelessly romantic guy looking for some love to light him up. He is sculpted of a refurbished lightbulb.” Congratulations Naama!! A big congrats to all the other winners and entries. This month there was a record breaking amount of entries. You can see all the entries at http://www.pcagoe.com

This Saturday we are off to CHA in California and we won’t be back until late on Feb. 13th, so all orders placed between Feb.9th and Feb. 13th will be processed when we return. Thank you for your patience.

We will return with a ton of footage, products, magazines and a bunch of new friends. I am really looking forward to it, even though I hate traveling, I always enjoy going to these trade shows. It is rows and rows full of thousands of craft products, believe me I feel like a kid in a candy store. It is definitely overwhelming as this show has about 3000 booths and tons of classes and events. We have a ton of things scheduled while we are there, including filming the Bottle of Hope award ceremony which we will share with you on Polymer Clay TV when we return. We are going to also try to head over and catch Carol Duvall speak at the Page Sage booth, she has a video coming out with them and a few other artists, including Judy Belcher. We have an interview lined up with several artists and will be meeting up with many others that I am sure will be there. Needless to say CHA is not a place to break in new shoes. So I have decided I have to wear my scrubbie sneakers or risk the threat of blisters. So if you see me in my scrubbie sneakers, you will know that it is because I am trying to avoid blistered feet.LOL  I wanted to go out and get a new pair but thought better of it and will just get some new ones when I return home. They should be ready for the next CHA. LOL

Hope to see you there. If you are going  and would like to meet up, send us an e-mail and we will give you our cell phone number and hopefully we can meet up.

Come on back on Friday for a new episode of Polymer Clay Podcast.

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This Friday is another episode of Polymer Clay Podcast, we will be talking about our upcoming trips and some of the upcoming plans and interviews we have. On Friday a box arrived from Polyform containing every color of the new Studio by Sculpey line and some of the new tools. The colors are gorgeous and come in a wide range. There were a lot in the green family, so that must be a popular color for the home. I guess it is because my house is green, I have green carpet and accents throughout my house and that is what the clay is about, making home decor. There is a color called Pomegranite and it is almost like the true red that Fimo Classic used to make many years ago. This is the closest I have seen to the color of yesteryear and I really like it. Another favorite of mine was the Blush color which is like a vibrant pink color that is nothing like any color I have seen before in polymer clay. A lot of the colors are different from any colors you have seen before by any brand of polymer clay and that is what is most intriguing to me, having a whole new color palette to work with.

Some of the colors are pastel-lish, to make my own word.LOL I am not into pastel colors, I prefer a true vibrant and bold color, which is why I have been searching for a true red, ever since Fimo did away with it. I love the Sunny Side Up color and the Fuchsia color and the Tropical Teal is another favorite. The Peacock color is the color we got samples of over the summer that we shared with you. You can check out one of the reviews from one of our winners of the Studio by Sculpey clay at Angelas site Crafty Goat

We will be having an upcoming show about the Studio by Sculpey clay so you will be able to see it in action and we will share our thoughts about the clay as well as some of the things we make with it. Stay tuned for that.

Our newsletter has gone out and there is a great sale in there for newsletter subscribers only, it is for a couple of days only, so if you haven’t checked your mailbox, you will want to look for it and if you don’t see it, you should check your spam filter. Don’t forget to add us to your allowed e-mails so the newsletter doesn’t end up in your spam next time.

This months Call For Creativity is to create something using texture. This is really going to be a fun one to experiment with and try some new textures. We have some cool texture plates in our shop as well as some rubber stamps that would be perfect for this project but you can use anything you want to create texture. Make sure to upload your photos to the forum by Feb. 28th, 2008 to be entered.

The PCAGOE challenge is live and we would love for you to go vote for your favorite. There are a record breaking 40 entries this month, so there are a bunch to choose from. If you vote you will be entered to win some cool prizes.

We are heading to California on Saturday to attend the Craft & Hobby Assoc. show and we will be filming while we are there so we will have a ton of things to share so make sure to come back next week to watch Polymer Clay TV when we share some of the footage from the show. Enjoy your week!

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We’ll talk about the topic at the end- basically, if you have a lump of scrap clay and you would like to make something out of it, covering it with thin slices of canework is a great way to transform it. We show you how to make a skinner blended bullseye cane and then cover clay, embed a chain, and create a fan pull in polymerclayclassroom next week- in our demo, you will see how to cover your scrap clay with cane slices and smooth and shape it.

As you might have read last week, Polyform has told us that Studio by Sculpey clay is going to be $2.99 per 2.8 ounce brick. This was confirmed when I went to www.munrocrafts.com today to buy something else- they will be selling the new clay.

Next month we are going to the big CHA show in California, where we will be filming the Spring contest for Bottles of Hope. Amaco and Staedler are teaming up this year to hold the Awards ceremony.

Belle Armoire’s Jan/Feb Issue has a great polymer clay tube bead bracelet project, by Linda Hess, using the Makin’s Extruder to make colorful faux-bullseye canes. Unfortunately, through some kind of mistake, the directions printed for finishing the bracelet don’t go with the one pictured. Hopefully they will be able to rectify the situation in a future issue or on their website, but if you are confused after reading it, that is why. I couldn’t find a website for Linda, but her email is on polymerclaycentral.com as polymercreations@aol.com, if you want to contact her maybe she can give you directions for finishing her lovely bracelet.

I promised links to Maggie and Lindly’s blogs- but right now I am having server issues and can’t search for them. I will do it over the weekend and you must promise yourself to come back and check them out. They will really inspire you to play with color. Speaking of which, why not answer our Call for Creativity in January? Simply make something purple out of polymer clay, and load it into our forum. We will invite voters and pick our favorite at the end of the month and give out a prize as a thank you gift for participating.

If you enjoy the show, which we produce right now in our “spare time” and at our cost, why not consider supporting us in one of the many ways we have outline on our Support our Show page? We appreciate all of you! Have a great New Year!

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Now that we are coming to a new year we are working towards making this upcoming year even better than last year. We have all kids of things in store for the new year. We will be attending and covering the Craft & Hobby Association show (CHA) in Feb. in California and then the following week we go to Maryland to the Synergy conference and then in March we will be covering the Orlando Clay Fandango in Orlando, Florida. So as you can see we are starting off the year with some great things. We hope to see some of our listeners and viewers at some of the upcoming events. If you are planning on attending any of the above events, we would love to hear from you and hopefully meet up at the event. You can send us an e-mail at polymerclaypodcast@yahoo.com or call us at 206-333-1751

We will also be launching our own line of rubber stamps this year as well as some other products and we are planning a teleconference so that all of you can talk to Kira and I and ask questions and share ideas. I think it will be a total blast and I am really looking forward to it. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about all the exciting goings on at Polymer Clay Productions.

We would love for you to be a part of our community and the best way to do that is by heading over to the forum and sharing photos, ideas, links and anything you would like or by joining our Flux community on the right hand sidebar. We are happy to answer all questions, so don’t be shy.

This week we are talking about creating polymer clay ceiling fan pulls or light pulls on Polymer Clay Podcast. We will also be doing a magazine review and will be announcing the winner of last months Call For Creativity. We will also be announcing the new theme for January’s Call For Creativity so you won’t want to miss it. Make sure to check it out this Friday on Polymer Clay Podcast.

We also have some great interviews lined up for the new year, so stay tuned!

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A great big thanks to these three, who met us for the first time at CHA and allowed us to interview them, on camera, for global distribution!!! That’s huge guys. And absolutely no stagefright. It is so great to put faces with the names you know. We’ve seen and spoken together in forums at Polymer Clay Central, Kira and Lynne Ann have swapped dragon pendants, but none of us had ever met. Thanks again- and please visit their sites if you get a chance-
Lynne Ann
Cat
Tommie- well I can’t find a website for him but here’s a great article he wrote-

And, check out our new friend Linda Peterson as well. We got to watch her demo a few techniques at CHA, and she appears in the Amaco video too.

Here is the necklace that Lynne is wearing in the interview, it was the polymer clay first place winner for “Bead Dreams” at the Bead & Button show this year.

Here is some of Cat’s work:

Enjoy the video, and thanks again for interviewing with us!

Online Videos by Veoh.com

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I am going to break this post into two- just for the sake of archiving it for later. In this post, you can watch part 2 of Amaco’s Bottle of Hope awards. If you are not familiar with Bottles of Hope, check it out. Many of us have people in our lives who have battled cancer. Some have won, and some have lost. Bottles of Hope began when an artist covered a medicine bottle with clay and gave it to a cancer-stricken friend as a gift and an encouragement. Please check out the show, and you can also visit Amaco’s website where entries in this year’s Bottles of Hope challenge are being auctioned off to benefit the Gilda’s club of Chicago.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

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