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.

Idea for covering beads

As I've already mentioned, my latest problem has been deciding how to get the cane designs onto the finished beads. Aside from this I still have a lot of scrap clay and that in itself has been troubling me. Am I merely wasting all this clay and not producing anything to be proud of?

So a revelation came to me while having a surf on the internet, when I found Ponsawan Sila's blog post about making square flower beads and I couldn't quite believe what a great idea it was. It basically involves using scrap clay and marbling it. (Great, this I can handle!) Form a long log with the scrap clay. Then use your flower cane slices and place them on the log and slice into equal pieces. Then shape the sliced logs into square beads.

I was stunned by how something so simple can create something so effective and professional. I am so glad I found because it has raised renewed inspiration and that is definitely most needed.

The blog post includes a slideshow which is very handy too.

Chats with a close friend

Today I have been chatting with my friend Pat about my progress in polymer clay-land. He is always very keen to see my latest creations. I admitted that I have felt quite frustrated by my lack of skills, because although I am only just learning, I can't help wanting to run before I can walk.

I am still finding the basics quite difficult, and when I do successfully complete a cane, I sit there wondering what on earth to do with it. The best part is cutting through the finished cane and seeing the resulting design and there is a certain sense of achievement in that. However once I have moved on and want to take the next step I hit a brick wall. I am never quite happy with the finished beads and certainly need to concentrate more on getting the finish the best it can be.

Pat has being trying to motivate my creativity, but I have to admit that at the moment I don't feel very creative. He suggested I could use the mosaic idea to create something unusual, maybe a mosaic mirror, something like that. It's certainly an interesting idea, although where I would begin I do not know!

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.

Storage solutions

Today I found a great little video from Alice Stroppel about storing canes. I have been using little plastic tupperware boxes which I bought from my local supermarket, but it occurred to me last night that maybe I'm not being as organised as I should be.

I tend to have one box which is full of "good clay" ie. clay that is unused or half-used (some still in their wrapping). I try to keep the plastic wrapping around half-used clay so I can remember what colour they are. It can get pretty difficult to distinguish between white and transparent clay when there is no label on them! I then have a box for scrap clay, a box for baked items and a box for canes.

Unfortunately I noticed last night that the cane box is getting rather full. The question of how to best store the canes came into my mind, because you can't continue to add more and have them all stick together. The ideas in the video are really useful, so maybe I will invest in one of those 3 drawer stacks. I'm not sure what they mean about wrapping the canes in wax paper, but I don't think I would have the patience to do this! I think the best solution is probably just to store vertically within the box as suggested in the video.

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.

Almost...but not quite

Last week I took the plunge and bought Donna Kato's Millefiori techniques book. Admittedly trying to mimic anything that she does seems rather too ambitious, but her work is an inspiration if unattainable.

The initial part of the book was actually very useful for laying down some basics, such as choosing the right clay, storage etc. (It was useful to learn for example that Fimo is the hardest clay to use, so it makes sense for me to use Fimo Soft just to make the process that little bit easier.)

Surprisingly many of the tutorials in the book seemed achievable, although putting them into practrice may be considerably more difficult! I am yet to find out. Despite this I was drawn to one photograph near the beginning of the book, which had not even been created by the author herself. For some reason this particular piece of jewellery took my interest, so rather than starting to follow one of the tutorials, I decided I would try to recreate some of the beads in the photo.

For this I bought three packs of clay, chocolate, caramel and sahara in Fimo Soft. Donna Kato's instructions for creating a jelly roll cane were very helpful and I found this part of the process quite easy. The next step involved following her instructions on creating a stripy border. Again this was a fairly simple process of creating the stack and placing the strips around the outside. Then wrapping a layer of chocolate around the outside of the cane. All well and good so far.

The problems arose when I started slicing the cane and discovered that I was distorting the shape. I took an unused blade and sliced with that, confirming the fact that the blade I had been using was in fact blunt. With the new blade I sliced about 10 slices off the cane with the aim to bake them as flat round beads. Unfortunately I had sliced them too thin because, as you can see from the photo, the cocktail stick distorted the shape as I pierced them through.

I decided not to bake the final beads and have to admit that this minor setback left me feeling somewhat despondent. But from all of this I can say I have learnt something valuable, something which Donna in her book had also commented on. The problem was in the size of the cane to begin with. It was just too small. Far better to create a larger cane and reduce down. This no doubt retains the shape and pattern of the cane when slicing. I have been working on false economy; trying to use less clay in my projects which in fact has just resulted in more waste. My aim is to get back to the basics, roll a suitably sized cane that will retain its shape.

Petals

I spotted this technique of creating petals in the same book. It basically takes the process of the skinner blend to the next level. Again I chose white and cherry red clay to create the blend. The instructions are fairly straightforward: create the cane and then slice along the length so you have dissected the cane into quarter lengths. You then squeeze and shape the cane into a petal shape and cut in half. By combining the pieces side by side, and recutting the cane in half, the result is a more detailed veining of the petal, as you can just about see in the core of the cane on the left of the photo.

It's odd how as you layer the canes side by side you would think it's not going to work. It's only when you cut through the core that you see it has been a success. And with surprisingly little effort, I think this gives a real sense of achievement. The design can then be sliced off to create a flower design on a base bead.

The real problem I am finding at the moment is cross-contamination of colour, particularly with very strong colours, such as this cherry red. I have noticed that when creating the skinner blend my white clay doesnt stay white for very long, as it gets contaminated from rolling through the pasta machine, from residue off the rolling pin and of course from my fingers. The key to all this of course is using handwipes to clean the tools in between colours, but I have to admit that due to lack of patience and sheer laziness I have lapsed somewhat in this aspect.

Fortunately the whole process has made me realise just how forgiving the clay really is. You can in fact get away with making a skinner blend out of not-so-white clay, streaked with bits and still get good results. These blemishes seem to get lost in the process. And you can always of course right wrongs by adding a little bit extra to hide mistakes.

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.