Wooden Texture Stamps!!

I've recently been playing with these lovely textures!!! I saw them a while ago and thought they looked fun. They are made by Sandra and René of Metal Clay Shop in Luxembourg. After I asked them about the the textures they very kindly sent me these two designs to have a play with!! Lucky me 😊

They are crisply cut in natural wood and there are five different designs to choose from. Each side of the wood block has the design on so you get the same design in three different sizes. Large on one side and medium and small on the other. 

If you are looking to buy new textures why not try these out, they will post them worldwide! 

AND there's never been a better time than now to support each other in our metal clay community too 😊

Being made of wood you get a nice wood grain texture in the recessed areas of design when impressed onto metal clay. 

Of course, me being me, I wanted to play a bit more than a straight imprint from the textures 😉😂

I started off with the giraffe.  I wanted to add eyes and also shape the pendant. First I needed something to dry it on so it had a more 3D shape. A spoon seemed perfect so I taped a teaspoon onto a card. 

As I wanted to enamel the pendants I worked in Art Clay Silver 999. 

I rolled the clay out and then textured it on both sides. After using a needle tool to cut out around the giraffe shape I shaped the neck over the handle of the spoon and the head over the back of the bowl. Then I left it to dry on the spoon.

(NOTE - if you have a go at this make sure your spoon is not made of aluminium as that will react with the silver clay and then it won't fire properly 😉)

Once the giraffe was nice and dry I refined the edges and added a disc of clay behind each eye to add thickness. This was so I could use a stone setting burr to set a black fireable stone in place for each eye 😊 I also used a baby wipe to wipe very lightly over the texture to just smooth the very top of all the raise parts so they would polish up nicely after firing. 

I also added a bail onto the back of the pendant. 

For the owl I wanted sparkly orange eyes so I added a little disc of clay onto the eye area and carved a little texture onto it. Then I set orange fireable czs in place.

All ready for firing!!! 

Once fired and polished it was time to enamel. 

I went for nice bright colours on each of them...of course!!  😁

One rainbow owl...

...and this is the back of the owl...

...and one rainbow-ish giraffe!! 

...and the back of him

I had a lot of fun with these textures. The detail on them is really nice and lovely for enamelling!! They would also be great used with patinas or resins 😁

I do hope you try them out, and until next time...

have fun!

Joy x