Woo Whoo! The new Shades of Clay website is live!

We can’t believe the new website is finally live! It’s been a long journey but with the patience and skill of the website developer we finally have our new site. It takes a lot of hours to get almost 1000 products uploaded to a new site.

We hope to meet the needs of the growing realm of polymer clay and mixed media artists!
Shades of Clay originally catered to mostly polymer clay enthusiasts but now we have growing numbers of alcohol ink and mixed media artists as well!

The launch of the new site coincides (almost) with out 2 year anniversary which makes it extra special for us.
Yes, 2 years have come and gone since Margaret Scott, (the previous owner) handed over the reigns of her beloved company.
It was her wish to be a one stop shop to make unique art supplies easily accessible to Canadian artists and crafters.

It was Margaret that came up with the name Shades of Clay in 2002 way before the trilogy of 50 Shades of Gray!
It seems that everyone has heard of those books and it has made for some interesting conversations with our customers. The name Shades of Clay has even alleviated some tensions with  customs officers when crossing the border. The reference to the books, (never intentional on their part, just a slip of the tongue), produced  a sheepish smile giving us a slight advantage (momentarily).

From the beginning, this new website has been designed with our customers in mind.
We hope that you will enjoy your experience here.
We’ve improved (many) of the product  images and also added a gallery to inspire you and showcase the work of our customers and colleagues.

We have customers from around the world and we’d like to share what you do so we’ll be looking for images of what you have made with products from Shades of Clay.

We hope you  find it easy to navigate our new website and we know you will appreciate the ‘shopping cart’  feature that will allow you to shop over a period of time, placing items in your cart until you are ready to place your order..no more disappearing cart.  You can also create a wishlist for yourself.

If you create an account for yourself, you save having to re-enter all of your information on your next visit.

The entire checkout process is different. Now when your order is complete it will take you directly to a payment option, no more waiting for a PayPal request.
Best of all, our US and International customers will know exactly how much the ship cost will be.
Our Canadian customers will still enjoy a flat rate according to the province they live in.

Check our shipping page here.

We want our customers to know that the great customer service you expect and love will remain the same.
Thank you for the kind emails letting us know this.  We read them all and appreciate them immensely.

We hope to offer you ideas, insights, sneak-peeks and  free instruction on this blog.
If you feel you have something to contribute and you’d like to do a guest blog post then by all means get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.  (Just go to the “Contact” page)
This polymer clay and mixed media community is known for it’s generosity in sharing ideas and helping one another.

We’ll still have a newsletter.  We know they came few and far between when we were managing both the current and the new site.  This new site will make everything a little less time consuming and allow us to have more time for sending them out, sharing and posting. (If you have signed up in the past, please don’t sign up again as you will keep receiving the Shades of Clay newsletter).

We don’t expect that this site will be absolutely perfect,  if you see anything amiss, please feel free to point it out.

Thank you for being such great customers (and for reading all the way to the end of this long winded post).

Kindly yours,
Wendy Orlowski

Thanks again to the polymer clay artists that gave their permission for us to use their images on the banner!
Kate Church
Claire Maunsell
Helen Breil
Carolyn Good of 2 Good Claymates
Donna Kato
Janice VanBeek