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.

Lace cane experiment

The other day I was having a look through the photos of some artwork posted on Flickr. The jewellery I came across was clearly made by a professional, but what surprised me was how simple the basic technique was to create the final piece. The artist had simply used a lace cane of contrasting colours and used the slices to make a loop pendant. The final piece had been lovingly polished into a beautiful pendant.

The simplicity of this design intrigued me, so this morning I thought I would try it myself. I already had a black and white lace cane left over and even though it isn't the most exciting colour combination, it is neutral enough to try the experiment. I also wanted to test out my new circular cutters I have just bought from Ebay.

The first process was to roll out a blob of scrap clay into a fairly thick sheet and then cut thin slices off the lace cane to cover the surface so that none of the scrap clay can be seen. I then took a large cutter and cut a circular piece out of the sheet. Then I took the smaller cutter and cut a small disc from inside this circle of clay. (You do have to be a bit careful when you scrape up the final pendant as it can get a little bit mis-shaped.) The result was the pendant in the above photo. It is still not baked but I hope that once it is I can sand and polish it so that it will be smooth and shiny.

The back of this pendant has not been covered because I ran out of the cane! However as this is only my first test piece I will let this minor issue go this time.

Shaman cane

Last night a new book dropped on my doormat; Syndee Holt's Polymer Clay for the First Time. I had been looking forward to this, specifically because I had noticed there was a lesson in there about creating pictorial canes. The shaman cane particularly grabbed me, as I do have a keen interest in ancient carvings and paintings, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs etc. Creating a picture in the clay seemed particularly challenging, so I was keen to start straight away.

Fortunately I had some half used blocks of clay which were perfect for the task; sahara, black and blue. I decided to throw all caution to the wind in terms of the amount used and just conditioned whatever I had. So following the instructions in the books I started by making a checkerboard cane and then continued to construct the man by creating the head, arms and legs from black clay. It took me quite a while to construct (about 2 hours in fact) but at the end this is the result. It's a fairly large block and I used up all of my sahara, but I can see how making a large block like this means you are more likely to maintain the proportions of the picture.

I was a little disappointed with the feet because I rushed this part and of course the result is that they are not quite formed properly. However I was very careful in this case to constantly clean my hands with wipes, particularly after conditioning some dry black clay which is particularly dangerous for contaminating other colours.

The end result was fairly satisfying. The cane will need to be reduced and then I would like to add a border around it, maybe several different borders if I cut the block into pieces. I have decided to leave this piece to rest for a while before doing anymore to it, basically because I used some brand new sahara which, when conditioned, became extremely soft, so that when I cut through the core, the blade was dragging it rather than cutting it clean.

I do find that by trying out different exercises like this means I now feel more confident in my use of the clay, in understanding how to work it, how to avoid some of the basic errors I made at the start. I have learnt for example that the driest clay can be squeezed and "warmed up" in the hands and that this is a better technique than trying to condition it in the pasta machine. I find that some of the basics which seemed quite challenging at first, now don't seem so difficult once you get a better understanding of the clay.

Odd shaped bullseye kaleidoscope

Again I found this lesson in my Donna Kato book and for some reason had an instant desire to try it out. The process looked easy enough. I felt confident that I could make the skinner blend for the internal core of the bullseye cane, and I had some cherry red, black and white clay left. I also felt confident making the bullseye cane. Basically this is the same process as the feather, which involves squashing the bullseye cane, and then using the kaleidscope technique I had previously used for the scrap kaleidoscope. In fact I prefer the simplicity and definition of the pattern within this to my last kaleidoscope and I'm always surprised at how effective the pattern looks when it has been divided and constructed.

The only new aspect of this process was attempting to manipulate the swirl of the pattern by changing the cane from square shape to circular and then back to square again. Yet even this may seem a little daunting and yet is easy to achieve.

I haven't yet baked this, but I hope to finally produce something usable. Perhaps by slicing a thin section off the cane and poking a hole in one of the corners this could become a pendant.

Leftovers reused: kaleidoscope

This was another lesson from Donna Kato's book that appealed to my objective of using up all those bits of old dried up clay. I have had a little dabble in making the odd basic cane here and there and they haven't really gone anywhere. So now they are just dried up little canes that break easily. So rather than throw them away, I decided to use them for something a bit more intiricate. This great little idea is so easy to make, because it's basically just a case of rolling out a flat sheet of colour (I used black) and placing a layer of whatever you like on top eg. old canes etc, different colours, stripes, whatever you like really. Then you just roll it up and shape it into a triangular cane and reduce.

In this case I didn't spend a lot of time trying to coordinate colours, I just used what I had and it's easy to see the little canes that have been embedded inside. Then to create the kaleidoscope, you just divide and combine to create the pattern. Easy to do and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. It's not really that well designed, and not carefully crafted, but a very useful idea. I hope that I can improve on the kaleidoscope technique because I have seen some fabulous effects by a number of artists. It's also comforting to know that none of the clay has to go to any waste no matter how dry it is.

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.

Here's what I did earlier (part two)

Of course there's nothing more exciting than bringing a bit of colour into the equation. The black beads were a good start, but I really wanted to try something a little bit more ambitious. This certainly did not disappoint! I picked up this idea off the internet, and it's probably a good example of wanting to run before I can walk. These are called "chevron style" beads. The colour choice itself is pretty vibrant and there's no mixing involved, it's just a case of rolling out black, blue, red and white pieces for this cane. The process involves cutting different colours of rectangular sheets, laying them on top of each other and cutting diagonally across the block, then laying the striped wedges together to form a star pattern. You then reduce the cane down in size. The original cane is on the left hand side of the photo. When you cut through the cane you can see the star effect at its core. The rest is fairly straightforward to make the beads from this cane. You simply cut off a length of the cane and then you have to shave off the ends to create the rounded shape of the beads.

I found this project very exciting, for the reason that it involved using multiple colours of clay and a fairly tricky process of combining the pieces together. The cane did lose its form a little during the process of reducing it down to size, which involved squeezing and pinching it until the cane is the required size, but I suppose this comes with practise. I also found that shaving the edges of the beads to make them round is easier said than done and in actual fact if you look closely, you can see that the final beads are not perfectly round.

On the positive side I added a little twist of my own. The original design of the cane was to have straight lines running through it to create the star shape at each end, but at the point of shaving each bead, I found it added an extra sparkle to the design by slightly twisting the bead to create the swirling effect on the outside.

Here's what I did earlier (part one)

My very first experiment using polymer clay was simple: make a bead - in a vaguely bead-like shape using one colour. Nothing fancy. For these I bought a bead roller, which is useful for creating beads of mostly the same size and shape. You can probably manage without, by cutting pieces of clay to the same size, but using the bead roller is interesting in itself. It gives you a little circular tool to press a bit of clay in and that is your measure so that all your beads end up the same size. My bead roller makes 3 different shapes.

I used cocktail sticks to pierce the bead at each end. I think you can buy special bead pins for this purpose but I'm improvising! The cocktail sticks are useful for the baking process, because you can't really lay a round bead on a flat surface in the oven, it's better to suspend them. Otherwise you could end up with a gloopy mess. To suspend the beads I've been using aluminium take-away trays and cut slits in the edge to hold the cocktail sticks. It kind of works but it's fiddly and I'm sure there are far better ways to do this.

The black and white bead at the back was the next step - trying to incorporate two basic colours and add a pattern. It's a fairly straightforward process. You start by rolling a basic bead of any colour. Then you roll out two pieces of different coloured clay with a rolling pin -they have to be the same size so you need to have something to cut it with, like a tissue blade. Then you put one piece on top of the other and roll them together to create the spiral. So this was my first cane. You then slice little pieces off the end of the cane and press them onto the outside of the bead until it is covered with little swirls. It's obvious in the photo that I haven't quite got my tissue blade to make a clean cut as the swirls have been smudged. You can also see where the pieces have touched on the surface of the bead. I've read that this can be sanded down after firing but I've yet to try it.