Glazing crazy

The other night I had the bug for taking my beads to the next level. I have been putting the glazing off mainly due to my own laziness. (My old paintbrushes were up in the loft and despite all good intentions, I had not actually managed to encourage my legs to take me up there.)

So I decided to put an end to this procrastination and retrieve the brushes. Still as good as new, I picked a medium sized brush and painted the glaze on my beads. The Sculpey glaze had been sitting there for some time, and was at last unleashed. Instantly when you apply the glaze you can see a wonderful transformation. The glaze really does make a difference. I am not sure if I mixed it up enough, as the bottle suggested, and found that when the glaze had dried after about 30 mins, it didn't seem as shiny as when first applied.

To make matters difficult I have no polystyrene, otherwise I could have put the beads on cocktail sticks and dangled them by poking the sticks in the polystyrene. So to get around this problem I applied the glaze to one side of the bead and had to wait for it to dry before applying to the other side. Of course impatience meant that it's hard to stop myself from messing with the bead before they dried, and I wonder if most of it ended up on my fingers rather than on the actual beads!

Mosaic pillow beads

I have been determined to finally produce something which I feel proud to wear, and so gazing down at the various canes I have so far created, I decided to make some beads. Over the past few weeks I have seen some rather nice examples of pillow beads on the internet. The process is manageable, if yet untested, and so I took the plunge. It is easy enough to make pillow beads - just roll a small ball of scrap clay for the inside and add two square slices of clay to each side and press the edges and corners together. I used 1/2cm pieces of the marbled log I had made previously which was about 1cm in diameter. I then cut these into half because I found that the clay was too much for the interior of the bead. In other words, that's 1/4 cm of the log piece for the interior.


I was pleasantly surprised at how nice the pillow beads looked in the end. I'm not saying that they were perfect by any means. I managed to smudge one while trying to pinch the ends. It also took quite a lot of squeezing around the edges and corners to get them into a uniform shape. But not bad for a first attempt.

I baked these in my oven in the usual way (by hanging on cocktail sticks) and when they cooled I decided to string them using the elastic cord my friend had lent to me, and using some random beads I had bought from Ebay. The result was a very pleasing bracelet, which (I admit) brought a smile to my face.

My own personal critic

The other day I received a lovely little pack of blue and black beads in the post, just perfect for adding a little bit of sparkle to a bracelet. I still have the elastic cord I borrowed from my friend, so last night, while watching tv, I started to experiment with stringing the beads on the cord in various combinations. What I ended up with is a bracelet consisting of my flowers beads and some little blue bicone beads. Since making it I have gazed at the finished bracelet for some time and decided that something is not quite right. Yes the colours match quite nicely, the cord is about right to grip around my wrist, but something is nagging me. It's the voice of my personal critic.

I finally worked out what the problem was. It's the beads I made that I'm not happy with. The finish is just not good enough. In truth there is no finish to speak of. To start with I didn't measure the clay to make the beads, so they vary very slightly in size. Secondly, I think I should have sliced the flower cane much thinner. The beads with the thick slices have not been smoothed enough and so you can see where I have added the slices. Thirdly, I should not have used the transparent clay for ther base bead.

What I really need to do is stop procrastinating and start sanding. Now that I know where I have gone wrong I can repeat the process again and hopefully end up with something better. By chance I found a very useful FAQ page with tips on finishing beads.

Flower beads

Yesterday I had the whole day to myself (how lovely!) and decided to make good use of the time to do some clay work. So with the aim of actually creating a complete bracelet, I decided to use the flower cane I have already made to make some beads. This part of the process is fairly easy. Cut some small pieces of transparent clay for the base bead and then roll in the palms of your hands to make a simple round bead. I made about 10 beads. I then sliced a short piece out of my flower cane and used that to reduce to a smaller size. I do this by squeezing lightly round and round the cane to make it smaller.

After the reduction I started slicing the end off the cane as thinly as I could, although to be honest, sometimes I think it could have been a lot finer. I had to be fairly careful about this because at times I still get some drag, which flattens the flower, but by some gentle squeezing back into shape this wasn't too problematic. On each bead I placed three slices of cane roughly a third way round the bead. This gives a nice even distribution and also leaves some gaps for poking the hole through. I am still using the cocktail sticks for poking the holes.

Here comes my unexpected pleasure of seeing the final beads, followed closely by mild disappointment. Seeing my final beads I was astonished how good they looked for something fairly simple. And I felt a certain pride in what I had achieved. That was until after I retrieved them from the oven. When they were finally baked the transparent clay obviously is no longer white, but at the same time not transparent either. In fact they came out with a slightly yellowish tinge. I have read that clay can go yellow in the oven, but I have never seen it so far until now. I think the real problem is with the transparent clay and I am starting to think that I should have used plain white. In fact I may redo this whole exercise in white to compare.

I did manage to finally string the beads on the elastic cord that my friend gave me, but 10 beads are certainly not enough to go around my wrist. So I am now waiting for a bulk of beads to arrive in the post which should supplement the bracelet and make it more attractive.