Long way round – petal pendant

Tags

beads, floral, flower, hollow, pendant, petal, polymer clay, teal, tutorial

I have been having great fun making hollow polymer clay doughnut pendants, however I have found it slightly irritating that the back of the pendants end up being sucked in and not completely flat (it still looks ok, but sometimes it’s not what I want).

Therefore with my latest doughnut pendant, I tried baking the backing disk before adding the domed front. This was a BAD idea. Firstly I had imagined that by using liquid clay I could get the front clay to stick to the back when I cut out the hole – this didn’t work. Also I had planned to cut out the corresponding hole in the backing while the clay was warm (I forgot this step until it had cooled completely so I don’t know if this would have worked). Besides once it was baked I decided I liked the solid back visible through the doughnut hole and I decided to keep it as a decorative feature. I drilled a small hole for stringing instead.

After baking, the edges of the doughnut were mostly stuck down, but the central hole had puffed up so it wasn’t touching the backing clay (sorry there’s no picture to explain). With some struggle, I managed to stick the front of the doughnut to the back around the hole using super glue. To do this I had squished the two together which resulted in the nice flat backing disk ending up domed so that the two could meet (this is what I was trying to avoid in the first place!).

Bake again and… disaster!

The super glue had stayed stuck, and the back went back to being flat causing the front to crack and go with it. I really loved the mokume gane surface of the clay so I didn’t want to abandon the pendant. So plan C? D? (I’d lost count by now)… petals!

I made three petals to cover the gap repair between the front and back, and I put a layer of micro beads around the edging.

The back of the pendant is beautifully flat. (I used Tania Podoleanu’s method to create the wavy pattern.)

I love the final result of this pendant, but I got there the long way round. Hopefully I can find a more elegant way to get a flat back to my hollow pendants. I’ll let you know if I do.

Cracking up with time

Tags

cracks, curing, Fimo, polymer clay

I like to wait until I have several polymer clay items ready for curing before doing a bake as it seems extravagant running the oven for half an hour with one bead in it. Unfortunately I have discovered that if you are mixing raw and cooked components they need to be baked promptly otherwise they cause each other to crack (this is using Fimo, I am not sure if other brands do the same).

The following unfinished pendant is an example (please ignore the general ugliness). I made a thin convex side using the coloured canes which I baked, I then back-filled this with black clay which I textured and embedded “crystal” gems into the centre.

** Insert time elapse montage here… more than a week, possibly a month (I had a day job and morning sickness in the evenings). **

Large cracks along the edges of the pendant

When I finally got back to the pendant, tragedy had occurred in several ways. Most obviously the raw black clay had cracked around the edges. Then the “crystal” gems (which were admittedly cheap and unlabelled) turned out to be some species of plastic and had melted into a sticky mess.

Previously baked clay had cracked and warped

On checking the other side of the pendant I discovered that it too had a large crack and the edges had warped backwards (probably causing the cracks on the black side) so it was no longer a nice dome shape.

None the less I baked this monstrosity and I will probably cover it again at some point and see if it can be resuscitated.

Another cunning plan that went disappointingly wrong was boiling beads. This came about while I was waiting 2 weeks for baby to arrive. Naturally making beads was the best distraction but I had packed my mini clay oven away and I had no intention of cleaning our food oven. My plan was to boil the beads so that I could store them without them getting mushed and bake them properly at a later stage.

cracked bead

Unfortunately when I finally baked my boiled beads they ended up with tiny cracks in the surface. I am guessing that this occurred because the boiling cured the outside layer but the inside remained raw and so the same cracking happened as it did for the pendant.

Yellow Eureka

Tags

colour mixing, Fimo, polymer clay, skinner blend, yellow

I haven’t paid much attention to colour theory or mixing, preferring to muddle my way through and recognise the right colour when I see it. However I have been getting frustrated trying to mix a nice juicy orange colour, and secondly my skinner blends from red to yellow have been disappointingly devoid of orange. So Carol Simmons’ post about Orange had several eureka moments for me:

Firstly how to get an even skinner blend by NOT using a triangle. And the second point is that yellow is slightly transparent. She is talking about Premo zinc yellow, but I have discovered the same applies to Fimo yellow.

2010 Easter Egg by C van Alphen

I made this Easter egg in 2010, the cane was made only from yellow, white and blends of yellow and white. The transparency of the yellow finally explained why the areas of pure yellow appear to be a slightly different shade, and somehow sunken into the surface of the pattern.

Plaquing visible in green clay mixed with high yellow content

Knowing what I was looking for I could even see the plaquing (circles that occur in transparent polymer clay once baked) in colour tiles where the mix had a large proportion of yellow.

Three baked colour tiles of yellow. The top one does not include white.

Carol recommends adding 1/8 or 1/16 white to the mix which I have done with the lower two tiles. The one on the left has 6% white (just under 1/16) and the one on the right has 12% white (1/8 rounded down). There is not a big difference between these two, but the tile at the top (which is pure yellow) is almost discoloured and seems insipid in comparison. There is also plaquing in the top tile but this is not so visible in the scan.

So now that I am able to give my yellow more mojo by including white, I have mixed my oranges again. The two tiles below have the same amount of red (10%) but the one on the right includes a small amount of white. I am amazed that although the one on the right actually contains less yellow (since it is part white), the hue appears more yellow. And it finally looks more like what I was after.

Two shades of orange with the same amount of red, but one with white.

Why foil core beads need holes

Tags

beads, foil core, polymer clay

Using kitchen foil as a core for polymer clay beads is an excellent idea. The beads are lighter as it uses less clay so they are great if you want to chunk up your beads, or balance the weight so your jewellery sits correctly. For example with a bracelet you want the focal piece to be lighter so that it sits on the top/front of the wrist and the clasp to be heavier so that it naturally slips underneath/behind, and for necklaces you want the opposite.

The first batch of foil core beads I made, I put holes into some and others I decided to wait and decide which orientation I wanted to use after they had been cured. The beads which had been cured with holes were fine, but the ones without had two problems:

Firstly although I had compressed the foil as much as possible, small air pockets remained under the clay which resulted in large air blisters that distorted the beads as they baked (I think due to the air expanding as it heated). Presumably for the beads which had been pierced the path of least resistance for the air was out the hole (don’t know how to say this without innuendo!).

Foil core beads distorted by air bubbles

The second problem was that after drilling through the clay veneer I could not drill the foil inside without making horrible sharp splinters (probably not healthy for the drill bit either). As the bead was unusable anyway, I decided to use force and shove through the spike I use for piercing beads. The resulting pressure from within caused the polymer clay veneer to crack.

Cracked polymer clay veneer

Still, not all is lost, I intend to shave off the bubbles and cover the beads again. One of the things I love about polymer clay is that it is hardly ever wasted.

I have a tutorial on making a foil core bead.