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.

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.

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.

Orchid experiment

Taking the petal idea further, I was really driven by the idea of making something of my own design. The basic ingredients were there, I had already crafted the petal cane (see my last post) but just slicing these off and placing them onto the base bead to form a vaguely flower shape just didn't seem enough. I was on a roll and didn't want to stop. So with petal cane still intact I decided to experiment further.

My inspiration was a pink orchid, which sits in my lounge, and has surprisingly flowered after a couple of years of lifelessness. Taking the petal cane I started building my orchid cane by attempting to mould the shape of the petals into the orchid petal shape, cutting the cane in half and combining to form a vaguely cane like shape around a small white core. Adding some tiny rolls of white clay in between the petal canes helps plugs the gaps. Then I trimmed the ends off so that all pieces were the same length. The final part of the process was to wrap the cane in a layer of white clay to keep it together. After some further rolling and reducing, you can see how it turned out.

Well, OK it's not how I imagined it, but at the same time, it's not a complete disaster. But seeing how this was built taught me a few things about caning. Firstly, the design wasn't properly defined. I kind of rushed into it, and built it on a wing and a prayer. So the point is that I didn't plan it very well to start with. I only had the petal canes I started with in the last post, and a few bits left over. As a result the cane wasn't nearly large enough to define the design and I should really have used more colours and layers to better define the borders between the petals, because it resulted in much of the colour being merged in the reduction process. Also the petals have sort of lost their shape at the ends and this is down to the layer of white clay around the edges. For one, the layer of white clay was too thick.

On the positive side you can still see the veining in the petals, but I think I will spend more time learning the basics of creating different pictures within canes before I move on further.

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.

Lollipop

With the skinner blend sorted out, I really wanted to try something with my new skill. I found this little project in one of my books 'How to make polymer clay beads' by Linda Peterson. What is nice about this project is the minimal amount of materials needed for the task: just three colours of clay. For this I chose a red, white and a purple clay. (I have only ever tried using Fimo so far.)

This time I used the pasta machine. It's very good for conditioning bits of my left over clay to transform a crumbly mess into something usable. I find that passing it through the pasta machine a few times helps to create a usable sheet. I then used the tissue blade to cut three triangles of each colour and place them side by side to form a sheet. By rolling them into a small cane you are effectively creating the graduation of colour needed to make a skinner blend. You then roll this out with the rolling pin so that you have a stripy sheet. I must say at this point I didn't quite understand where all this was going. The instructions told me to pass the sheet through the pasta machine five times. I did this before realising that you need to fold it in between passes! Then I realised of course that it's the same process I took using the rolling pin - folding and rolling to make a basic skinner blend.

By cutting the finished sheet into pieces and then stacking, followed by slicing, something miraculous happens. A pattern emerges from the irregularity of the stacked sheets. Just seeing how easily this is done brought a smile to my face.

Now you can lay the pieces on a background sheet and use to wrap around a log of clay. (I used the scraps I had cut to form the base bead.) I found you have to be careful when pinching the ends of the log together, as you don't want to mess up the stripy design. Giving it a careful twist means you get the nice swirling effect of the two colours combining. You then thin the ends down and curl the log of clay up to form the lollipop.

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.