Results: Ponsawan Sila's Texture Plate & Bubble Beads

Well folks, I gave it a good shot.  And I gotta say, I found this series quite frustrating.  And I wasted a ton of clay.  It was a seemingly simple concept, but there are little tricks and things that must be obvious to the author of the tutorial which were not at all obvious to me.  The first set of texture plates I made I guess I didn't make deep enough because the resulting "bubbles" didn't come out too hot:

I also failed to follow the directions on the thickness to make the clay sheet layers which probably added to the fail. Nothing to brag about, right?  So I made a second bubble texture plate with deeper impressions and tried again. It came out only marginally better.

Another problem with this tut was the part where we had to "carefully slice off the bubbles one by one".  But with the bubbles so close together, I found I would end up slicing adjacent ones thereby screwing them up.  I think this is the point where I gave up, at least mentally. I bullied through though as I wouldn't be a very good hostess if I didn't complete my own projects, right?

I opted to make a cuff bracelet instead of a bead for the end product.  I wanted the knobby texture, which I thought looked neato for a bangle so I didn't slice of the bubbles low and I didn't flatten out the sheet when I was done slicing as they appear on the original tut.

I actually like the bangle.  However, the size of my wrist is not conducive to a cuff, and I didn't realize that the heat of your arm would make the cuff flexible while you wore it (Donna Kato has a great tutorial about adding wire armature to cuffs to avoid this bending issue -- which of course I found after I was done).  So this cuff is headed for the bin!

I made a couple of other texture plates while I was at it. I don't know if I will use these ever, but that remains to be seen.

My biggest gripe, besides the problems with the execution, was that this same pattern / texture could have easily been made just doing a simple bulls-eye cane.  I thought of this while in the midst of frustration.  I sure wish I had realized it beforehand.  Oh well.

Sadly nobody else did the tutorial this time around.  I hope I have others for the next one!