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.

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.

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.