Flowers to hearts

After my mild disappointment with the Natasha beads, I decided to go back to creating a basic flower cane. To do this I used the same technique as before to create the petal cane which I had been so impressed with and constructed it around a very basic black and white lace cane for the centre of the flower. (I just built it using a few black and white bullseye canes squashed together).

I've been trying to use what colour clay I have left over before I use new packs, so black and white wouldn't have been my first choice here, but it's all I could think of at the time. The construction went quite well, but as usual I hadn't made enough skinner blend rolls so when I constructed the flower cane the depth just wasn't there and the reduction resulted in a rather distorted flower. Again, not overwhelmed by my final piece.

So, feeling very cheesed off, I started messing around with the remaining bits of clay and came up with the bright idea of experimenting with the transparent clay I would have used for wrapping the flower cane with. Up to this point I have never worked with or baked anything with transparent clay in it. I have seen a lot of pieces of jewellery which use transparent clay to make the most fabulous beads, and I've been looking forward to trying it myself.

So with a bit of cherry red and some transparent white I marbled and shaped the clay into a heart, poked a hole through it and baked it with the aim to create a simple pendant. I wasn't really bothered too much about the shape, as the most important aspect was to see what the transparent clay would look like after the baking process.

The above photo is the baked bead. I have mixed feelings about it because I see that there are flecks or bubbles under the surface and I'm not sure if that is the usual result, or if I have messed it up in the marbling, or if I accidentally included some white clay in there. The other thing I dislike is the colour change to the cherry red clay which has gone a little pink. I actually preferred the colour combination before it was baked. The final piece doesn't look that impressive, but it probably needs to be polished so I might try this and see if it improves.