Adventures in Polymer Clay

When it comes to polymer clay I'm still very much a beginner. I've made a few things I like but haven't developed enough of a technique to be able to make really perfect pieces. Not that perfection is always important. As with everything handmade, sometimes leaving your mark is actually a plus and, like everything else, the more you work the better you get.

I've picked up polymer clay again now because I wanted to do a specific pendant with color gradients. When I picked up the clay I noticed it had gotten really hard and flaky - it had been at least a year since I last used it for anything so that was no surprise. It was just a bit frustrating because instead of making my pendant I spent days reconditioning clay before I could get anything else done.


To recondition the clay I tried using baby oil, sewing machine oil and even a glycerin lubricant. Each seemed to work fine and none of the initial experiments seemed to have a negative effect on the curing process or the end result. I decided to stick with baby oil because it seemed the most harmless.

This was my reconditioning technique: I hammered the dry clay with a plastic hammer until it was reasonably flat and then rolled it on the pasta machine. It came out in flaky bits at the bottom so I added some baby oil and mushed it all into a ball. I let it sit for a bit (while rolling another color in the pasta machine, for example) and then come back to it, hammer it again and roll it again. After rolling it in the pasta machine about 10 times the clay started to get to the right consistency one more. Once or twice I added too much oil and it got really sticky so I let it sit for a few hours or overnight and it was fine again.

So after a day or two of this I finally got the pendant done and decided I should stick with the clay for a while longer, learn a few things and use up the leftover clay so it won't get hard again.

I started by making a necklace from a tutorial by clay artist Christi Friesen. I had the tutorial for ages because I love the organic look of those leaves, even though it's not a look I would have ever come up with on my own (I naturally tend towards more geometrical and abstract patterns) but I never got around to trying it out. I like the way the necklace turned out and I think I managed the general feel of the thing but some of the tendrils got a bit more squished than I would have liked and I'm sure it will turn out better if I make it again. I didn't have mica powder to brush over the leaves so I used a loose powder eye shadow that worked just as well.

The matching earrings I made later turned out a little better.

At this point I wanted to explore color palettes so I picked up the last book I bought on the subject called Polymer clay color inspirations. It's a really good book to help you brush up on color theory. I studied that in college and I've always been rather intuitive when it comes to color but it's always helpful to refine some concepts once in a while. Also, I've used color in webdesign for many years but that is totally different from mixing clay in order to come up with a specific tone. It's harder to fix mistakes, for one. The theory is the same but to instinctively know how much magenta or yellow to add is a trial and error process.

I wanted to make an Art Nouveau pendant and a flower cane seemed like a fun way to do it. Unfortunately I didn't like the end result so I scrapped the cane. While I was cutting up the clay I decided to roll some of it that had an interesting color scheme through the pasta machine and ended up making a pendant and some earrings out of it.

I like the earrings because they look like a painting. I textured the surface to add a little extra interest.

After this failed attempt I decided to stick to color schemes that can't go wrong and went with warm colors and a different technique.

I made a bunch of sheets in tones of yellow, orange, red and burgundy, cut circles out of each, stacked them up, extruded the resulting log that I then cut into nine parts, arranged them into a cube and cut that into slices. From these square slices I made a brooch and some earrings that remind me of Kandinski's farbstudie quadrate painting (only not so colorful).

You can still tell where the seam is because I didn't want to mess with the surface of the pendant too much. Apart from that I think it works.

Next I think I'm going to tackle surface textures. I just need the picture of the finished product to pop up in my head first because even when I'm working on book or tutorial projects I never like to do something that's exactly like the example given. What's the point in that? I believe you should always put a bit of yourself in everything you do even if it's based on someone else's work.

Stacked beads earrings

 I wanted to use gemstone chips to make some earrings. The simpler way is to stack them onto a simple ear wire with a hammered end.
 Unfortunately, most chips have very small holes and the garnet chips were the only ones that would fit. The other option is to wrap them around the ear wire like some previous earrings I made with small rondelles.
 In order to prevent the beads from slipping out the other end, I hammered the curve slightly (after I took this picture).

 The stacked chips idea didn't quite work but I liked it, so I made a couple more earrings with the same feel but using glass rondelles.

These two examples have a different feel because the rondelles are all the same size and shape, creating a much tidier par of earrings, unlike the chips that give the piece a rougher, more natural and casual look. They still look good, though.

The red ones are my favorite of the two. The underside of the beads has an AB coating so they change color between a lighter or darker red according to the light.

Silver rings

I've been working on silver rings. The first one was made with thick D wire, standard for rings, but with the ends hammered and filed round. I used D wire instead of round because this way I can have the inside of the ring flat while the outside stays rounded. I could also hammer round wire to make it flat (like in the next ring) but then the outside would also be flattened.

This ring was made much in the same way but using round wire. I hammered it in the center to make it flat and then hammered the end at a 90 degree angle and filed the ends round. This wire was longer to allow the ends to overlap creating the 'bunny ears'. A variation on this theme would be tying a knot at the top - something I'm planning on trying as well. The dowside is that with a knot the ring is no longer adjustable, so this model is more versatile, especially when you don't make it for yourself.

 This ring I made for my husband using silver sheet. After cutting the sheet I filed the ends round and then texturized the surface using a hammer, screw-driver and a greed scrubbing pad. I stamped the letters and then I oxidezed it with liver of sulfur. The letters didn't come up as dark as I wanted (probably because I keep the punches oiled to prevent them from rusting) so I used a permanent marker to darken the grooves.
After shaping the ring I polished it with steel wool, leaving the dents dark to accentuate the texture.
The texture and width give the ring a masculine feel and I was pleased with the result.

For this ring I just expanded on the previous. I used the same silver sheet base with rounded corners but made a more subtle texture and didn't oxidize. Then I soldered some wire ends with a ball tip along the front of the ring. After pickling and cleaning it, I weaved thin silver wire with amethyst chips around the wire ends, using them as supports. When the front was covered I bent the wire tips into an arch so that the ball ends were touching the base of the ring and then polished it with jeweler's rouge and a dremel. I should probably do the polish and even bending the tips before attaching the beads, but I was improvising a bit so the order of steps didn't come out quite as perfect as it should be, but the end result is quite striking and next time I'll find an easier way to do it - for example: it would have saved time to solder a single wire across the base instead of two tips but I didn't think of that until I was halfway through. Silly, hum?

Going Victorian

I love to get inspiration from history when it comes to making jewelry and, after trying out egyptian, celtic and medieval inspired pieces I decided to try making some victorian-looking ones. To make the dainty flowers that serve the purpose of focal beads on the first few necklaces and earrings, I used flattened bead caps as backing to support small beads and crystals wired together to make little flowers. This gave me the oportunity to finally use some of the multiple seed beads I've collected over the years but rarely use. I used thin wire instead of beading floss to make these flowers because I hate the way beading wire tends to strech or come undone so I don't trust it to last. Wire can also break, sure, but even if it does you don't usually lose all the beads in one go like you do with beading floss.

I started working with purples because I had a wider selection of beads in those tones and it suits the time of year but I'm also thinking about making some pieces in black for a more gothic feel and in red, possibly with coral beads.

Seed bead hell

Well, I guess you can tell from the picture what the problem is.

When I started making jewelry I got a good collection of sed beads. I made a few simple pieces with them but I soon figured out I had no patience for it.  I'm a bit of a klutz so I kept finding new ways to spill all the beads over myself or the floor and then taking hours trying to find them all again. And even if I didn't drop them, the beading needle or stringing material would just fling a couple of beads across the room once in a while or the beads would stick to my hand and fall off at inconvenient times. It just got on my nerves.

I stored the seed beads in boxes with dividers and never looked at them again. Then I moved, and somehow the beads escaped their dividers and got all mixed up. I let them sit another year because I just couldn't face the task of untangling that mess.

Now, however, I started making designs that call for seed beads. Not entirely in the conventional beading way, where you use nothing else, but as smaller beads in flower designs, for example. That means I finally had to open the boxes and start organising thee beads by color and size so I can quickly figure out if I have what I need while i'm working on a new piece.

The first part wasn't too bad. Since the deviders proved to be unreliable, I decided to store the beads in little plastica bags instead of having them loose. It also reduces chances of spilling a whole box full of beads - learning from past mistakes is always a must, right?

Soon enough, though, I got to the bigger mess: the beads that got all mixed up. This part is going to take me days, I'm sure. Oh well, enough procrastination. Lets start sorting...

Spring berries bracelet

It's been raining all day so I made a colorful bracelet to cheer me up. It's more appropriate for a spring collection than fall but I don't really care :)

The design has a nature theme, kind of like a berry bush or a creeper plant and I chose carnelian beads for the berries, perdidot and aventurine for the leaves and rhodochrosite for the small flowers. The wire is silver and I thought about oxidizing it at first but I think it might be too dark after all so I'm leaving it shiny for now.

I love these plant-type pieces and had made a necklace in the same line a few years back with brass wire and glass leaves. I used onlye blues and greens and the space between the beads was much wider, making it look lighter but the basic idea is the same. The necklace also had a leaf-inspired clasp that I still like. I didn't do that for the bracelet because it looks better if it's a wide uninterrupted band all around the wrist instead of having a big gap for a clasp.

There are many possible variations within this nature-inspired model - using small pearls for a bridal version, making side branches of different lengths, and so on - and I plan on making more along the same lines.

Tumbling small beads

Someone gave me some old necklaces a while back that I hadn't used for anything else. Most of the beads were damaged but they had some nice bead caps and small metal spacers that I could reuse so I took them apart. As would be expected from used jewelry, these small metal items were rather dirty and oxidized so I decided to clean them in the tumbler. It worked fine and a couple of hours later I had clean shiny metal beads and caps.

The only trouble was separating the beads from the steel shot since they wer pretty much the same size and some even a similar color. After rinsing, I picked out the ones on top and then spread out the contents of the tumbler onto a frisbee (my favorite tray for small items since the rounded edges make it very easy to remove even the tiniest beads or jump rings) and picked out all the beads I could see. When I couldn't find any more I picked up a spoonful of steel shot at a time, examined it carefully and when I was absolutely sure there were no beads in it, tossed it back into the tumbler. It took a while but I found the last few beads and after adding water and some barrelbrite to the shot to keep it from rusting, I was finally done.

In the end it was worth it because some of the tiny beads look brand new and will come in handy, I'm sure.