Self-identifying as an artist has not come easily to me.  Now, in my 60th year of a happy life, I do take some liberties.

Always an artist, my creativity was let free in 1990 when my old Deer Lodge Buddy, Sara MacCalman turned me on to Polymer Clay.

Bruce and I were vacationing in Seattle.  We arranged to meet up with Sara and Doc Halsell at the Japanese Gardens at The Arboretum.  We were enjoying the beautiful sunny day of conversation, catching up on each other’s lives, when Sara pulled out a bag of things she had made with polymer clay.

Sara had been to a workshop.  She showed me beads, cane slices and a Margaret Magio color graduation bracelet of bi-cones.  I had a hard time figuring out what I was looking at.  Would it be too dramatic to say; I felt a slow thrill as I came to feel that this was the stuff I had needed my whole life?

Not knowing if this stuff could be had in Alaska, I stocked up on FIMO before we left Seattle.  Back in Anchorage, my nicely equipped darkroom became my polymer clay studio.

Yet another flash in the pan obsession?  Obsession, yes, but my fascination with polymer clay has endured, these many years later.

I returned to Seattle for the first of many subsequent polymer clay conferences organized by what became the Northwest Polymer Clay Guild.

This was Camp Long; the first Ravensdale.  No one who was there can express how rich was the experience.  We shared and we learned; the juices were flowing.  Camp Long was our Woodstock.  Many of today’s famous and successful polymer clay artists were there.  Naming names is a hazardous game, so I will not start.  I did make many new friends and here, I will mention the friendship I made with partners Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes, whom I adore.

(fast forward to the present)

I have been retired from a different life for over two years.  Bruce and I just marked our 24th year of a content and loving partnership.  We have lived full time in our crumbly old house here on the ocean in Mexico for nearly two years.  I have a wonderful studio and all the toys and tools that this creative person could want.  I have no end of ideas and enjoy putting things together in my mind.  I have a ton of incomplete projects.  What I actually produce is not much.  Laziness and the distraction of the next idea are my challenges.

Tom Plattenberger en Studio

at Casa Libertad

La Peñita de Jaltemba

Tom’s Art Trip