About me

It would be too much to say or too little. So I'll try to sum it up.

- I'm over 50 years old. Well, more towards 60 now.
- I live in Oklahoma, and I have three furbabies:

Whisper, a Whippet/Italian Greyhound (more Whippet than Italian Greyhound) mix dog. He is 13 and has been surviving liver cancer since October 2017.

Seamus, a short-haired cat (that I suspect of having some British short hair in the ancestry because of the shape of his head)

.. and Conor, a Maine Coon mix fuzzy gorgeousness.

Conor is the one you see at the end of my videos, with the "like and subscribe" message. He seems to love polymer clay and would always rub his head on the folders and boxes I keep my raw polymer clay in and steals the beads I drop when buffing and goes and puts them in his stash he has in his "cat cave"

- I'm a breast cancer survivor for over 10  years now. I do have a few suspicious spots that keep coming up on imaging tests (especially in the rib cage) but for now my tumor markers are in the "safe zone" so I'm good. Because of life-time side effects of cancer treatment, also

- I'm disabled. I mean real deal disabled. I have several conditions that make me that way. The two most important ones that affect the love between polymer clay and me are chronic pain and nerve damage in my hands. Chemotherapy shot my nervous system and now nerves send pain signals to the brain where there is no physical reason to be a pain. They took muscles from my back (the latissimus dorsi ones) to reconstruct my breasts. And the multiple surgeries I had coupled with the aromatase inhibitors I had to take for 5 years (I had strongly estrogen positive tumors) caused severe osteoarthritis that is the worse in the cervical area with displaced vertebrae, almost non-existent intervertebral disks, severely pinched nerves and the spine cord pushed out of place and squeezed - that affects greatly the function of my hands, from the plain strength to the ability of grasping, pinching, holding, etc.
I also have attacks of extreme fatigue, that may cause me to practically narcolepsy whenever it hits. Then the fact that the remaining muscles in my back can't compensate for too long the lack of the other big muscle, makes it so I have to take frequent breaks and lay down very often or I get in awful uncontrolled pain. Well, there are more, but these are the ones that affect primarily my "making tutorials" life.
Also in the last year I had to deal with cataracts in both eyes (got surgery for that) and a frozen shoulder.

So it might happen that I can show you how to do stuff but I wouldn't be able that day to do it properly. Or that out of 8 hours in a day I would be working on tutorials, actually there are only about 2 of effectively working, the rest is me taking breaks because I hurt if I sit in the chair too long.

- I like gardening. But I had to stop gardening two years ago as I couldn't do it anymore.

- I'm a gamer. I mean, an MMO gamer. The past few years I've played Guild Wars 2. I don't have time to play as much as I'd want to though. This return to creating is taking all my time.

- Also, related to that, I've been pretty much a nerd all my life. I am still quite a "techie" and very conversant with SEO and integration and all that. Sometime in my past, when there were no "ready-made", I used to make a quite comfortable living designing, developing, maintaining and optimizing websites.
- I'm also a nerd in other areas - like quantum physics, for example, or philosophy, or theory of communication, and even history of religions. I'm fascinated by history and cultures. and what is called now "ethnoarchaeology" (been on it a couple decades before they put a name to it). I do have a few academic degrees under my belt but got those for purposes of knowledge, not to show off.
- I speak several languages
- I studied Fine Arts for 8 years.  From painting (I mean watercolor, oil, etc) to drawing to sculpting to restoring antiques to home decorating and industrial design. I studied it all.
- I took a long break from creating anything due to medical and life issues. I'm slowly coming back to it. Well maybe not so slowly, haha
- I've sculpted a lot, starting with regular clay - about... Gosh, 40 something years ago? Goodness I'm old. Then as new stuff came along, I tried it. I think I tried polymer clay sometime in February or March 1990. Once I left Romania in 1999 I took a break from polymer clay (still painted and did computer graphics).
I started back on it about 10 years ago doing OOAK dolls, mostly. I remember I bought 3 "bricks" of clay and my first sculpture was done with a needle, a toothpick and my fingers. Ah, and a cuticle cutter, it was a mermaid. I still have it.Then I just sculpted all kinds of fairies, trolls, mermaids, pixies, baby fairies.

At one point through this journey I discovered that jewelry can be made with polymer clay. Truth be told, for a long time in the beginning of my working with polymer clay I still did the jewelry by sculpting it, not using all kinds of techniques. I still fall on that from time to time when I'm not paying attention.

- You can call me Day. I chose "Kalyana" for my web presence because in sanskrit it means both "beautiful" and "auspicious".

- Due to being disabled, my only income is the social security disability. Hence the donation button on the home page. Sometimes it's hard for me to budget even for buying the polymer clay I need for the tutorials. So you can help - if you want more interesting tutorials.
You can either: use the donation button on here; become my sponsor (check that page); or access my wish list on Amazon (link to the right too) and just get anything that's on my wish list - it will be shipped directly to me with no confidential information exchanged - or put any amount on the Amazon gift cards - the website defaults them to $50 but you can put as little as $1 if you so wish after you click the link.
As a sponsor you'll also have access to even more interesting tutorials.
You can also buy my pieces from my online store - either my unique creations or sometimes even the pieces I made during the tutorials, I'm in the process of slowly  uploading every day (or at least I try to do it every day).
And of course, you can buy tutorials as well.

- Hi! Nice to meet you!!!