Thursday 27 October 2011

Polymer Clay

Unfortunately it was a couple of months before my class and having done a lot of research on the net I discovered that polymer clay can be made to look like glass beads and is a lot less expensive to set up.

Have a look at these:





Aren't they fabulous!

Having bought a small kit when I was in Bath I settled down to have a go. I started by making some plain beads and tried to put some holes in them so that I could string them. It wasn't easy - they kept going out of shape. Fortunately there is a wealth of information available and I think that this website is probably the best http://www.jewelry-and-polymerclay-tutorial-heaven.com/tutorials.html#axzz1biy0sF9j

There are tutorials for every aspect of polymer clay making.

I discovered that Fimo gets squidgy when warm so if you put it in the fridge for a while it hardens and then you can put the holes in the beads without them losing their shape.

It's amazing how quickly you find that you need this tool and that tool before you can make anything. I needed the following

Pasta maker - makies it easier to condition the Fimo and mix the colours
Blades for cutting
Acrylic roller
Assorted cutting shapes

This book:

was recommended several times by various different sites and as I hadn't done any colour mixing before I bought a copy. To be honest although I found the book interesting I found that most of the projects used an awfully large ammount of Fimo.

I started out by making these tasting tiles


I'm pretty sure I followed the instructions correctly but when I took the tiles out of the oven I found that they were very brittle and snapped very easily.

I then made these




I found they used a lot of clay and I couldn't work out how I could easily re-produce a particular colour without going through the whole complicated process.

Personally if you're new to polymer clay, I'd give it a miss. If you are interested yu can also find out a lot of stuff that is in the book on Maggie Maggio's(co-author) website: http://maggiemaggio.com/color/


I found it used a lot less clay and you could get some great colours using this method:

You can see the full instructions here:
http://www.tooaquarius.com/tutorials/learn/colours/two-methods-for-making-wheels/

I had great fun making these and the colours are easily re-produced.



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