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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leftovers reused: Natasha beads

Within the depths of Syndee Holt's book I found an interesting technique for using up those scrappy bits of clay. Apparently these kind of beads are called 'Natasha beads' after the person who invented ithe technique. The instructions in the book didn't look too complicated so I decided to give it a go.

Basically the idea is to marble up some bits of clay to create a log and then shape this into a block, then make four cuts in the block to turn the pieces around. By doing this you are creating a mirror pattern on 'all sides' of the block according to the book. Yes, this does sound insanely easy, and for the average person it probably is, but not for me for some reason. I sat there with those pieces trying time and again to piece that block back together and make some vague mirror pattern, but for some reason I just could not get my head around the process. The top face is fairly easy - you just place the faces of the two sides you have just cut opposite each other and you see the mirror image. But the next challenge is to get the back to mirror. I managed this on the blue slab in the photo. As for the other sides of the block I still have no clue.

It is quite worrying to think that something which appears to be fairly simple, could in fact turn out to be so complicated. Maybe it was the instructions, maybe it is my pea sized brain that can't comprehend it. After several attempts though I ended up with these slabs, which do look quite pretty. It amazes me how those random bits of clay can produce something of a pattern. And yet despite this I don't feel it was a success. I'm still not really sure what to do with these slabs, if I really like them, or if I want to try turning them into usable beads. Maybe I will come back to them later.

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.

Leftovers

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with various colours and have ended up with a lot of waste. Bits off the ends of canes, old stacks and so forth. Not wanting to throw good clay away I have just dropped them into my storage boxes and left them. I picked up a few bits the other day and they've gone dry over time, but it did make me wonder if I could put any use to them.

A colleague I work with, (who is much more skillful then me) dropped her latest creation on my desk this morning. She had created a number of cylindrical beads which had simply been rolled from multiple colours of clay scraps. and created a rather lovely multicoloured necklace.

So I had a look on the web again for some ideas on what to do with some of these old scraps (assuming that they are still usable) and found this really useful page on Polymerclayweb which gives lots of options for how to use them, including mixing new colours, marbling and my favourite: creating swirled lentil beads. It's good to know that no clay has to go to waste, and maybe even with the scraps I could possibly create something useful.