Leftovers reused: Feather

I'm literally drowning in bits of old dry clay and I really wanted to try using some of that up before I start a new project. So last night I started messing about with the scraps. One pile of clay was an old stripy stack of white and purple that's not going to any good use, so I chopped it up into tiny pieces to create a mix. One thing I can say about the dried up clay is that it's very useful for this kind of activity because it's easy to chop.

I saw a recipe for a Starry night cane in Donna Kato's book which seemed a good idea for these bits and was fairly simple to do: just roll out the chopped up clay and roll through the pasta machine a few times and you get a really great marbling effect. I did this but found it hard to stop and consequently overdid it a little with the pasta machine. So by the time I had created the stack for the Starry night effect I had lost a lot of the line definition. In fact I was closer to creating a plain sheet of lilac! However, this was the first time I had tried marbling and even colour mixing, so still an interesting process.

I gave up on the purple and white and instead took a multicoloured chopped up mix of old clay, and remembering the feather idea on Polymerclayweb, I decided to tackle that from memory. I twisted the clay into a streaky log, which gives a pleasing effect and then rolled a black layer around the outside. I then squashed the cane and divided, layering the parts not directly on top of each other, to create the feather. Surprisingly simple to do and makes me realise that with more care a more intricate feather could be achieved. I'm not really sure how I can use this feather, as I imagine it's fairly difficult to reduce, but maybe I'll come back to it later.

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.