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.