Trying the scrap flower bead idea

So following on from that flower bead idea yesterday, I decided to give it a go last night. I followed the process from memory because I hadn't printed off the instructions, but it wasn't that complicated. First I conditioned the old Natasha bead clay I had left sitting in my plastic box and marbled it so that I had a log of mainly red, black and white clay. I decided on the safe side to stick to this colour scheme and so I chose to use my orchid flower cane to experiment with.

The first task is to put thin slices of the flower cane onto the log in a random pattern. I admit that having more than one flower cane in different sizes would have helped but I was just experimenting. The log had a diameter of about 1cm. I then cut pieces from the log using a ruler to ensure they were the same size.

I tried initially to make round beads (this is my comfort zone) by squeezing the ends of the logs together to try to wrap the outside over the inside and then rolled in my hands to get the bead shape. This worked quite well and is fairly easy to do. I then tried making square shaped beads by again squeezing the ends of the logs together and pinching the corners. These didn't seem to turn out so well and I ended up leaving them as scrap. I repeated the round bead process using a blue marble log and my blue flower cane.

What I am left with is some beads which I'm partly happy with and partly not. What ruined it for me personally is that some of the inside pattern from the log remained outside during the rolling. Perhaps I should have pinched the ends a bit better. Also by making the beads round the slices that had been cut in half during the slicing of the log looked odd on the final beads, making me think it is probably better just to add the slices after. For that reason I think this is definitely a technique for square beads not round. On a positive note, it shows how effective it is to add slices to beads and have an interesting background on the base bead other than, for example, white. I also think that choice of colour is important to ensure variation between background and bead slice.

Mosaic cane

Last night I thought I would try something new but not too complicated. So an idea I had seen on the internet looked like a fun challenge. I was encouraged to try this indirectly by a friend who lives in Ireland, who one day had showed me some mosaic work on the internet and suggested I should try using polymer clay to make mosaics. I have always been attracted to mosaics, especially ancient works of art, and so I thought I would give this a go as a start.

I had already seen this tutorial on the internet. The process is amazingly simple. It's just a case of rolling various colours of clay and wrapping them in white and then rolling them together in a cane. You then cut down through the middle and add a layer of white between the slices and recombine. You do this repeatedly to form the mosaic pattern.

My cane turned out quite well, and I'm happy with the colour combination. So I decided to do as the tutorial suggested and made a heart pendant from some of the scraps. This is where the problem starts, in that I don't really understand how you effectively add a layer of the mosaic cane to the pendant. I ended up using small slices to cover a ball of scrap clay, but clearly there are better ways to do this. I also find difficulty in producing the heart shape even though I found a nifty tutorial on how to make hearts, but it still takes a lot of reshaping and moulding to get a half decent heart shape.

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.

Using the clay gun: Lazy mokume gane

I have already said I have been keen to try out the mokume gane technique which creates a wonderful pattern by shaving layers of clay. So far though I have never actually attempted it. So when I saw a lesson posted on a polymer clay community it really caught my eye.

The tutorial was titled 'Lazy woman's mokume gane', in other words achieve the same effect but with less work. Sounds great and the best part is it involved using my new clay gun.

The process is pretty much the same as how I created the Klimt cane, the only difference being that instead of using a square shaped disc I used a circular one. So you have to prepare the same variation of coloured discs of clay to form the log and then extrude it through the clay gun.

On this occasion I spent more time conditioning the clay and the result was much better, althought the extrusion was still very difficult. I suspect that the best option for using the gun is to only use brand new opened clay for this. It's a shame I find it so difficult to extrude because the best thing about this process is that it involves so few tools ie no pasta machine, no acrylic roller, just your hands and the clay gun.

The result is of course a long log of circular clay. Again the process is to cut into lengths and combine but this time the precision is not really needed because you want that variation of shape and size in the pattern. When you have the final block, what you end up with is a sort of mokume gane effect which is very pretty. (I used the same colours leftover from the previous extrusion).

Again I sliced and created a sheet of this pattern and wrapped it around a ball of scrap clay. Then after a bit of messing around ended up with this heart pendant. I'm quite pleased with the shape of it and with the pattern on the surface. I finished it by poking a hole from the top of the heart throught to the bottom and then baked it suspended from the cocktail stick.

Using the clay gun: Klimt cane

Last night I finally took the plunge and unpacked the clay extruder (or clay gun). I had my eye on a lesson in Donna Kato's book on making Klimt canes with the clay gun, ie creating a pattern that looks a bit like a work of Klimt.

So following the instructions, I inserted a square disc in the end of the clay gun and then prepared the clay. The gun comes with a surprisingly large number of discs with a variety of shaped holes in. I'm really pleasantly surprised at how much variety there is.

The instructions then tell you to roll a number of clay logs from several colours. I didn't use the new clay packs for this, I just used some leftovers, because actually you don't need much of each colour. You just need enough to cut some discs of the same size and then combine them randomly into a log. I chose a few colours that I thought would work well together: peppermint, brilliant blue and a light blue mix I had made previously. I then pushed the clay into the gun for the extrusion. Unfortunately, despite Donna's good advice, I didn't condition the clay much at all and this was a really big mistake. The clay was already leftover which means it had gone slightly hard, and even though I had made it fairly soft, I should have spent a lot more time softening it.

The result was that pushing the clay through was a really hard job. I can't emphasise how hard it is. Even when you think the clay is quite soft it is still difficult to extrude when packed into the gun. Of course the fact I hadn't conditioned it well also meant that the extruded clay came out with cracks in the sides. My hands are still sore as a result of the extrusion.

The result is a long snake of square clay which you divide and press together to form a block and then the result is a rather lovely pattern. Again I still haven't got my head around the magic of how the pattern is created but you can see how the gun creates the variation of colour throughout the extruded clay.

The great thing about this is that it is very easy to slice the end of the block and create a sheet out of this pattern. You can roll it and make the sheet larger and even if you warp the pattern it still looks great. However, one extrusion is really not enough, so in future I would definitely make several to form a bigger block.

The final part of this was to decide what to do with the final sheet. This is where I find the task quite difficult. I chose some scrap clay and wrapped the sheet around it to form this sort of triangular pendant. I'm not really happy with the final shape and I really need to find a better way of doing this as its a real problem. Finally I poked a hole through the top corner and baked on the cocktail stick.

Natasha beads and a little bit extra

I don't accept defeat very well and admit I wasn't happy with my Natasha bead attempt, so when I discovered this tutorial for feather beads on Polyzine I had to try again. I picked three remaining lumps of brilliant blue, peppermint and a pale blue mix that had resulted from using the pasta machine on some leftover mixed clay. This seemed like a fairly nice combination, and besides I am now running low on my choice of coloured clay.

Following the instructions, I decided that this time I would surely succeed! Starting with a basic bullseye cane and wrapping with sheets of varying colours I finished the cane. Simple enough. You flattern the log into a square cane and then using a 'credit card' to make indentations into the log on all sides, thus creating the pattern on the inside. I'm lazy enough not to go get a credit card and instead grabbed a square cutter (part of a set I had just purchased on Ebay). The thick edge of the cutter was just right for making the indentations without slicing too thinly. Then the tricky part: cut the cane up into pieces and again use the Natasha bead technique of mirroring the internal pattern of each piece by slicing it in four. Again I couldn't really follow the instructions and while puzzling over it, I noticed one of the photos on the webpage which showed that in fact all you need to do is slice in quarters ie one slice vertical, one slice horizontal. You then literally turn all four corners inside out. It's far easier to see how this works working with the bullseye cane because you can see where the joins are!

So now, I think I've understood it, but despite this I still found it a little tricky to recontruct the four corners, because I usually find I have cut one corner slightly larger than the other. I managed to correct this by slicing off the edges to resize. This is also useful for when you smear the faces or get some bits of clay contamination, as it's so easy to just slice the edge and it is once again perfect.

I decided to experiment with the shapes of the final beads, in a smiliar way to the photos on the webpage, so I made a few oval and some I left square. I could use these interchangeably in one necklace, depending on how they look together, but I would need to find something to string them on.

At the end I was left with one small lump of clay from the bits I had sliced off and tried marbling a heart out of it. Not overly impressed with the result, I rolled a log and chopped it up into small tube shaped beads. I then poked a hole through them using cocktail sticks and dangled them from the ledges of my takeaway tray and baked them in the oven. So the result was three different shaped beads, and I was fairly pleased by all, strangely even by the little tube beads which show how effective marbling can be. The main things I would improve if I repeated the process would to be to add more colours in the original bulls eye cane and to make far more indentations to create a more intricate pattern.

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.

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.

Tackling the skinner blend with a rolling pin

Considering that the last time I tried the skinner blend using the pasta machine the sheet of clay ended up in bits, I decided to try a more controlled method using the rolling pin. For this I chose a very strong blue clay and white clay for the blend. Following the instructions I found on the internet I rolled out two very small sheets of each colour, cut them into rectangles of exactly the same size, and then cut a diagonal across each sheet using the tissue blade.

It's been a while since I took the time to do any crafting, and unfortunately the clay I have stored in plastic boxes is not as fresh as it once was. In fact, it is now a little crumbly. This means it's quite difficult to condition with the fingers and cracks when folded, and makes the process considerably more difficult! Unfortunately this is all I have at the moment, so I had to persevere. With some rolling and squeezing, the clay begins to get more workable, but I am sure using older clay like this is best avoided.

After placing two rectangles of each colour and softly pushing them together to form the sheet to be blended, I used the rolling pin this time rather than the pasta machine. It's interesting that although rolling by hand is much harder work, I found it easier to control the sheet. It wasn't quite as easy as I had seen on the YouTube clip, but I was certainly able to maintain the size and shape of the sheet during the rolling and folding process. I didn't count how many times I folded, but it certainly wasn't anywhere near 30 times!

Despite this, the sheet was a success. I was able to roll a small cane from it, starting from the white end of the sheet and rolling to the blue, finishing with a completed cane with the white gradient at the core. And then I became really ambitious and decided to create a basic flower cane by cutting the cane into sections and combining around a white core. The cane isn't anywhere near large enough to make it worthwhile, but this is only my first effort, and I would definitely take the time to make a much larger and more intricate design next time. You can just about see the skinner blend in the outside 'petals' of the flower design.

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.