Almost...but not quite

Last week I took the plunge and bought Donna Kato's Millefiori techniques book. Admittedly trying to mimic anything that she does seems rather too ambitious, but her work is an inspiration if unattainable.

The initial part of the book was actually very useful for laying down some basics, such as choosing the right clay, storage etc. (It was useful to learn for example that Fimo is the hardest clay to use, so it makes sense for me to use Fimo Soft just to make the process that little bit easier.)

Surprisingly many of the tutorials in the book seemed achievable, although putting them into practrice may be considerably more difficult! I am yet to find out. Despite this I was drawn to one photograph near the beginning of the book, which had not even been created by the author herself. For some reason this particular piece of jewellery took my interest, so rather than starting to follow one of the tutorials, I decided I would try to recreate some of the beads in the photo.

For this I bought three packs of clay, chocolate, caramel and sahara in Fimo Soft. Donna Kato's instructions for creating a jelly roll cane were very helpful and I found this part of the process quite easy. The next step involved following her instructions on creating a stripy border. Again this was a fairly simple process of creating the stack and placing the strips around the outside. Then wrapping a layer of chocolate around the outside of the cane. All well and good so far.

The problems arose when I started slicing the cane and discovered that I was distorting the shape. I took an unused blade and sliced with that, confirming the fact that the blade I had been using was in fact blunt. With the new blade I sliced about 10 slices off the cane with the aim to bake them as flat round beads. Unfortunately I had sliced them too thin because, as you can see from the photo, the cocktail stick distorted the shape as I pierced them through.

I decided not to bake the final beads and have to admit that this minor setback left me feeling somewhat despondent. But from all of this I can say I have learnt something valuable, something which Donna in her book had also commented on. The problem was in the size of the cane to begin with. It was just too small. Far better to create a larger cane and reduce down. This no doubt retains the shape and pattern of the cane when slicing. I have been working on false economy; trying to use less clay in my projects which in fact has just resulted in more waste. My aim is to get back to the basics, roll a suitably sized cane that will retain its shape.

Lollipop

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.