Swirly Studio Spotlight!

Happy summer.... or is it still spring? The time is flying by this year (can you believe we are approaching the half-year mark already?) In the studio here we are juggling many hats... with designing new collections, creating how-to projects and working on getting more attention for our company.
We are happy to share some fun news:

Our swirly studio was profiled in a two page spread (above) entitled: Cool Spaces: A peek into The Artist's Studio of the spring 2012 issue of The Polymer Arts magazine. The magazine is targeted to professional and aspiring polymer clay artists and we were so happy to be asked to share our work space with our peers.

Since we took some many shots...hundreds I think (thank goodness for digital) and they only used a few in the piece, we thought we would share some more detail shots of our Swirly work space. Enjoy!

Now we are sure you are wondering if this is how the studio looks all the time and we say to that....

Of course it is.......Kidding! When we are in the middle of designing a collection the studio is one BIG organized MESS. Thank goodness getting into a magazine made us clean and clean some more to make it look so pretty.

Here are a few silly shots we did took after a long day shooting! 

It's hard to keep it serious sometimes. 

Enjoy the week!

Happy Birthday to our little girl!

Max & Ruby theme party

Our little girl turned three this month...so as soon as we wrapped up our Easter collection we jumped right into party planning mood creating and planning a sweet little party for Chloe and a handful of her little friends.  Her theme was from her favorite book Bunny Cakes by Rosemary Wells.
Oh how they grow so fast!
Happy Birthday to our silly little girl!
xo  

Happy Easter!

We want to wish all you a very Happy Easter weekend!
xo
Lianne & Paul

Easter Egg Carton Basket How~to

This project is for personal, non-commercial use.

This mini egg carton basket is a sweet treat that you can also decorate your Easter tree with! Or use as a place setting or to give tiny treats to your guests this Easter time. They are so fun and simple to make you'll just want to make A LOT of them.
Here's how:

Materials This is for a purple basket but you can choose any color you desire.
• empty egg carton (one carton will make 12 baskets)
• glitter eyelash yarn (We picked Martha Stewart yarn because we loved the colors!)
• Silver glitter pipe cleaner
• 3/8 purple satin purple ribbon
• Craft paint (MSC color Hydrangea purple) and brush
• 1/16 circle paper punch
• glue gun
• scissor
• needle nose pliers


Step 1.
Begin by cutting out the egg cups. One carton will make 12 mini baskets.


Step 2.
Cut and level off the top of your egg cups so it looks like the picture above. You will have a few that have circle openings; this is fine because they will be filled in with yarn. Your cup should be at least an 1" tall.


Step 3.
Paint your egg cup basket inside and out. Let it dry.


Step 4.
Heat up your glue gun and take out the glitter eyelash yarn. We used the Martha Stewart line because we loved the colors it came in, but use whatever brand you prefer.


Step 5.
Start in the inside of the basket and glue a little dot to start your glitter eyelash yarn.


Step 6.
Then just keep adding a little hot glue and wrap your eyelash ribbon around the basket.


It will look like this when done. Let the glue dry.


Step 7.
With your 1/16 circle, punch two holes across from each other and approx 1/4 down for the handles of your basket.


Step 8.
Insert the silver glitter pipe cleaner into the hole. Adjust the size to of the handle.


Step 9.
Now take and twist up the remaining pipe cleaner that is facing into the basket. Use the needle nose pliers to squeeze the end down and get rid of any sharp wire sticking out.


Step 10.
Add a 3/8 wide purple bow to the top and you are done!

You can embellish your basket even further with paper flowers or a paper Easter message. Then fill your basket with sweet treats like jelly beans, mini eggs or a mini chocolate bunny or even a small toy.



Happy Easter!
Lianne & Paul

Our Easter designs

Is everyone getting ready for Easter? We've been busy playing catch up here at the studio, making sure we post everything we wanted too for this season like these beauty shots of this years 2012 Easter designs.

We all know the early timing of Easter made everything feel rushed. We weren't able to take a lot of extra photos of the Easter collection. Even though the majority of the designs are sold out, we still wanted to share a few favorite shots that we captured of some of the designs.


















Happy Easter!

Etching during lunch

Spent some time after lunch etching a few of the Easter eggs we dyed over the weekend.

Love making Egg Dioramas

Before we start cleaning up the studio to get ready to start designing our next collection, we pulled out the materials for the egg dioramas that we created for our seasonal how-to project for Polyform last month. We had such a fun time making them we just had to jump back into it and create another one. This time around we created a sweet little white bunny surrounded with yummy carrots in a field of greens.