This or that. That.

I'm fooling around with making brooches from combinations of clay tiles and vintage buttons. I liked this orange one, and tried two sizes of clay tiles on the top.

Then I tried a smaller tile and I think I like that better. Proportion seems to be a pretty set thing to me. Things look better to me when there are almost equal distances between elements. 

Sorry for the (lack of) picture quality - I'm sure you can tell I took these with my phone. I'm going to assemble a bunch of these this weekend, and am looking forward to piecing together the elements. That's the funnest part of it for me. The gluing, not so much. Happy Friday, wherever you are!

Inspiration

I try to keep my eye out for pleasing color combinations. Here's one from Design Seeds (a fabulous site full of awesome color combinations). 

I picked stamped clay tiles that matched the color palette, and I love how it turned out. I don't always see good color matches ahead of time, and this helps. I think it's a skill, though, something that can be developed over time.  

Button clay mini

I made several of these and I like how they turned out. I tend to go monochromatic when I first start with a new style, but they do have their appeal to me. I started with a smaller bracelet blank and used smaller sets of buttons for this one. It's been my experience that when people sell vintage buttons, they don't really sort sizes much. It's usually by color. The result is a variety of sizes to work with. In the 600+ lot that I bought off of Ebay, there were a bunch that are too big for me to work into the two sizes bracelet blanks I'm currently using. 

I've seen people string large buttons together as a platform for smaller ones, and might try that at some point. Another idea I had is to use the larger ones to make brooches, mixing clay tiles and buttons again. I like the variation in color and texture. It's interesting to me that the process of putting the elements together isn't easily rushed. I have to sit down with a bunch of buttons and tiles in front of me and try different things until I get combinations I like. There's an orange one I love and I'll post that one soon. 

Olive striped tiles

There is a house in my neighborhood that has a color scheme that is olive green with navy and white accents. It looks different, yet it goes together really well and fits with the old style of the house. I decided to mimic the colors for some large clay tiles. Above, you can see where I have mixed the colors, cut them into strips and am in various stages of rolling them into thin ropes.

An overexposed shot of the sheet of clay with the thin ropes before I roll it through my pasta machine once. These ropes ended up being just a little thicker than I thought they'd be, but I'm still happy with the results.

The light green kind of gets lost agains the foil, but each tile has the three colors in roughly the same order. I like that effect of that, where the colors repeat, but the tiles don't look the same. I took the rest of the thin ropes and the strips of clay that didn't get rolled out, put them together, and made the mostly blue tiles. It's a good way to use up the leftover clay and it's fun to see how they'll turn out.

Order

This is about half of my current stock of small clay tiles. As I've made more of them, I'm expanding and organizing better. I started out with everything I made in a clear pint gelato container (I highly recommend the sea salt caramel). It was an easy thing to spill it out on the table, pick what I needed and scoop everything back into the container. 

Then, I decided that I needed to organize by color groups, so I found several containers at a garage sale and had blues in one, then, purples and pinks, oranges and reds, and yellows and greens across the four containers. That worked great for a while too, but sometimes I make what is virtually the same color twice, and the two shades are hard to tell apart when everything's in a big jumble.  

Enter the bead organizer. I bought a couple of these last week and have transferred my stock into them. As you can see, there isn't quite enough space for each shade, so I've had to double up. On the list of weekend projects is buying a third one so I can separate out everything into its own little cubby.

I enjoy (more than I thought I would, actually) the sense of order that comes from having these things organized. I guess it's partly because I can see the fruits of my labor. I've made a lot of colors over the past almost-year that I've been doing this. Of course it makes it easier to find several of one color when I need that. It also lets me see what colors I might want to make next. Good and good.

Vintage button and clay tile bracelet - yellow khaki neutrals

These are pretty substantial bracelets, but I love the visual interest of them. Lots of subtle changes in color and texture. $16.00 in the Etsy shop. 

Mixing it up

I haven't gotten my 600 buttons from the Ebay purchase yet, but I had a few laying around, so I went to work on a new bracelet style. I really like it. It's easy to assemble, which is always a plus, but also has the very engaging and interesting (to me) part of picking colors, shapes, and locations for the various components. 

I knew I wanted to combine my hand-stamped clay tiles with buttons, and also really like the look of layers of buttons. So the first incarnation of this had layers of buttons, and just the larger clay tiles. I was eating my morning cereal, looking at the bracelets, and the muse, that little creative something came along and I thought, "add another layer of tiles". I'm very happy with the result. 

Experimentation

I made some buttons with this sheet of clay and had enough left to make circular tiles for a bracelet. I like the smooth look to the tiles and it's a light bracelet, even though it's kind of chunky. I'd like to fool around more with color combinations to see what looks nice together.

Texture Tile Bracelet

One of my favorite parts of all this is to mix different colors of clay to make the clay tiles. I have a bunch of bracelets that use the tiles plus upcycled vintage watch parts, and wanted to make some with just the tiles, too.

So, Texture Tile Bracelets were born. Does one always need a catchy title? It helps, I think. But here's a recent one. I love purple and green.