Monday 31 May 2010

Revelations

Nothing profound but...I made some discoveries today. Going back to my teenage years (many moons ago now) I remember working with slips, glazes and clays to sculpt all kinds of wierd creations, in particular a huge male head which unfortunately met its demise during the firing process when it exploded. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I've suddenly realised how much I miss it. It was dirty, messy and the clay ended up everywhere, but I enjoyed it, and to some extent a part of me has been missing throughout these years of dull office life.

Discovering polymer clay has opened up that world of possibility to me again. It's highly unlikely I will ever have the space, time and expensive kiln to create earthenware, so for me polymer clay is a revelation. For one it doesn't require any water, it can be fired or baked in a normal oven, and the choice of coloured clay replaces the difficult task of using coloured slips and glazes.

I've also started to see how the fundamental process of building canes can be used to create endless designs, so now I'm inspired to try something of my own using the basic techniques of the skinner blend and flower cane.

Sunday 30 May 2010

Lollipop

Lollipops

With the skinner blend sorted out, I really wanted to try something with my new skill. I found this little project in one of my books 'How to make polymer clay beads' by Linda Peterson. What is nice about this project is the minimal amount of materials needed for the task: just three colours of clay. For this I chose a red, white and a purple clay. (I have only ever tried using Fimo so far.)

This time I used the pasta machine. It's very good for conditioning bits of my left over clay to transform a crumbly mess into something usable. I find that passing it through the pasta machine a few times helps to create a usable sheet. I then used the tissue blade to cut three triangles of each colour and place them side by side to form a sheet. By rolling them into a small cane you are effectively creating the graduation of colour needed to make a skinner blend. You then roll this out with the rolling pin so that you have a stripy sheet. I must say at this point I didn't quite understand where all this was going. The instructions told me to pass the sheet through the pasta machine five times. I did this before realising that you need to fold it in between passes! Then I realised of course that it's the same process I took using the rolling pin - folding and rolling to make a basic skinner blend.

By cutting the finished sheet into pieces and then stacking, followed by slicing, something miraculous happens. A pattern emerges from the irregularity of the stacked sheets. Just seeing how easily this is done brought a smile to my face.

Now you can lay the pieces on a background sheet and use to wrap around a log of clay. (I used the scraps I had cut to form the base bead.) I found you have to be careful when pinching the ends of the log together, as you don't want to mess up the stripy design. Giving it a careful twist means you get the nice swirling effect of the two colours combining. You then thin the ends down and curl the log of clay up to form the lollipop.

Friday 28 May 2010

Tackling the skinner blend with a rolling pin

Blue skinner cane

Considering that the last time I tried the skinner blend using the pasta machine the sheet of clay ended up in bits, I decided to try a more controlled method using the rolling pin. For this I chose a very strong blue clay and white clay for the blend. Following the instructions I found on the internet I rolled out two very small sheets of each colour, cut them into rectangles of exactly the same size, and then cut a diagonal across each sheet using the tissue blade.

It's been a while since I took the time to do any crafting, and unfortunately the clay I have stored in plastic boxes is not as fresh as it once was. In fact, it is now a little crumbly. This means it's quite difficult to condition with the fingers and cracks when folded, and makes the process considerably more difficult! Unfortunately this is all I have at the moment, so I had to persevere. With some rolling and squeezing, the clay begins to get more workable, but I am sure using older clay like this is best avoided.

After placing two rectangles of each colour and softly pushing them together to form the sheet to be blended, I used the rolling pin this time rather than the pasta machine. It's interesting that although rolling by hand is much harder work, I found it easier to control the sheet. It wasn't quite as easy as I had seen on the YouTube clip, but I was certainly able to maintain the size and shape of the sheet during the rolling and folding process. I didn't count how many times I folded, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near 30 times!

Despite this, the sheet was a success. I was able to roll a small cane from it, starting from the white end of the sheet and rolling to the blue, finishing with a completed cane with the white gradient at the core. And then I became really ambitious and decided to create a basic flower cane by cutting the cane into sections and combining around a white core. The cane isn't anywhere near large enough to make it worthwhile, but this is only my first effort, and I would definitely take the time to make a much larger and more intricate design next time. You can just about see the skinner blend in the outside 'petals' of the flower design.

Thursday 27 May 2010

Gradients

One of the most fundamental techniques you need to learn for working with polymer clay is how to create a gradient of colours in a sheet of clay. There's loads of information on the internet on how to do this, and before you can start building anything more complicated than a monochrome bead, you have to get this one right.

They call this a "Skinner blend" after the lady who discovered it. It involves a pasta machine or a rolling pin and two blocks of different coloured clay for the blending process. I found a very clear set of instructions on how to do this on a professional's personal website.

Fortunately, I already own a pasta machine, which sadly will now never see a piece of pasta in its lifetime. It was bought by my in-laws (probably as a Christmas gift), and was gathering dust in the loft, until I freed it from insignificance.

So with brand new pasta machine set up and ready to go, I attempted to do this process a few months ago, but it did not end well. Clearly more practice is needed. I followed the instructions and started rolling the clay through the machine, folding and rolling it through again. In the first couple of passes the blend looks awful and you do start to wonder what you are doing wrong. But the blend does improve as you persevere.

This is where I think I went wrong. After a few passes, the clay became quite wide and thin. For that reason it became too wide to pass through the machine, which I presume is where you are supposed to push it back with your hands on both edges. Unfortunately the next time I passed it throught the machine it became so thin that the sheet started to break up. Not perfect but at least I could see the effect even if I couldn't use it for any useful purpose.

I have seen video tutorials on YouTube where the presenter has used a rolling pin instead. This looked surprisingly easy although she said that you need to roll and fold it about 30 times to get a nice gradient.

Wednesday 26 May 2010

Here's what I did earlier (part two)

Blue beads
Of course there's nothing more exciting than bringing a bit of colour into the equation. The black beads were a good start, but I really wanted to try something a little bit more ambitious. This certainly did not disappoint! I picked up this idea off the internet, and it's probably a good example of wanting to run before I can walk. These are called "chevron style" beads. The colour choice itself is pretty vibrant and there's no mixing involved, it's just a case of rolling out black, blue, red and white pieces for this cane. The process involves cutting different colours of rectangular sheets, laying them on top of each other and cutting diagonally across the block, then laying the striped wedges together to form a star pattern. You then reduce the cane down in size. The original cane is on the left hand side of the photo. When you cut through the cane you can see the star effect at its core. The rest is fairly straightforward to make the beads from this cane. You simply cut off a length of the cane and then you have to shave off the ends to create the rounded shape of the beads.

I found this project very exciting, for the reason that it involved using multiple colours of clay and a fairly tricky process of combining the pieces together. The cane did lose its form a little during the process of reducing it down to size, which involved squeezing and pinching it until the cane is the required size, but I suppose this comes with practise. I also found that shaving the edges of the beads to make them round is easier said than done and in actual fact if you look closely, you can see that the final beads are not perfectly round.

On the positive side I added a little twist of my own. The original design of the cane was to have straight lines running through it to create the star shape at each end, but at the point of shaving each bead, I found it added an extra sparkle to the design by slightly twisting the bead to create the swirling effect on the outside.

Here's what I did earlier (part one)

Black beads
My very first experiment using polymer clay was simple: make a bead - in a vaguely bead-like shape using one colour. Nothing fancy. For these I bought a bead roller, which is useful for creating beads of mostly the same size and shape. You can probably manage without, by cutting pieces of clay to the same size, but using the bead roller is interesting in itself. It gives you a little circular tool to press a bit of clay in and that is your measure so that all your beads end up the same size. My bead roller makes 3 different shapes.

I used cocktail sticks to pierce the bead at each end. I think you can buy special bead pins for this purpose but I'm improvising! The cocktail sticks are useful for the baking process, because you can't really lay a round bead on a flat surface in the oven, it's better to suspend them. Otherwise you could end up with a gloopy mess. To suspend the beads I've been using aluminium take-away trays and cut slits in the edge to hold the cocktail sticks. It kind of works but it's fiddly and I'm sure there are far better ways to do this.

The black and white bead at the back was the next step - trying to incorporate two basic colours and add a pattern. It's a fairly straightforward process. You start by rolling a basic bead of any colour. Then you roll out two pieces of different coloured clay with a rolling pin -they have to be the same size so you need to have something to cut it with, like a tissue blade. Then you put one piece on top of the other and roll them together to create the spiral. So this was my first cane. You then slice little pieces off the end of the cane and press them onto the outside of the bead until it is covered with little swirls. It's obvious in the photo that I haven't quite got my tissue blade to make a clean cut as the swirls have been smudged. You can also see where the pieces have touched on the surface of the bead. I've read that this can be sanded down after firing but I've yet to try it.

Tuesday 25 May 2010

This is my first post...

...but not my first blog. Although I'm hoping this one lasts a bit longer than the previous. Putting this into context, it looks like I'm going to have a good deal of time on my hands over the coming months and this seems like a fine opportunity to do something with it.

Firstly, I have to admit that when it comes to polymer clay I'm a complete novice. There: I've said it. I've bought a few slabs of clay, skimmed over a few beginner's books, even got as far as acquiring a second-hand oven for the princely sum of ten quid. Hey, it's not much, but I'm on my way.