Polymer clay challenge week 22 – toggle

Tags

2015PCchallenge, buttons, Cate van Alphen, green, handmade, kaleidoscope, polymer clay, shank button

This week I made green toggles for my 2015 Polymer Clay Challenge. I do intend to come up with some more interesting mechanics for my clasps, but I haven’t had the time to experiment. So for this week I went back to making shank buttons.

Green shank buttons by Cate van Alphen

I did start making a wire hook to go with a button to complete the clasp, but then I couldn’t find my hammer to harden it (and add some texture). I’ll have to finish it later when I’ve unpacked.

Back of shank buttons by Cate van Alphen

The different designs all came from the same pattern sheet.

Kaleidoscope shank buttons by Cate van Alphen

I’ve just realised there are only two days left of green and I’ve hardly been able to give it a fair go.

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My first polymer

Tags

buttons, cane, gradient, kaleidoscope, pendant, polymer clay, reducing

I’ve just been invited to a new Flickr group, Your No.1, sharing the first things we made in polymer clay. I thought I’d show them here too. I started off fairly reasonably with something simple – buttons to match a multicoloured cardigan I was knitting.

Success! I managed to get the colours matching pretty well and they are not too mutant either (I did make a mold off an existing button to get them all consistent).

Then I got more ambitious and decided to make a complex kaleidoscope cane… less successfully.

The main error with this cane was that I didn’t cut the ends off after reducing. I added scrap to the ends which got sucked into the centre of the flower cane as it reduced so when I cut it to make the kaleidoscope repeat I ended up using bad cane throughout. (Also note the poor photo taken in direct sunlight).

This detail image shows more clearly the problem. There are supposed to be two flower canes surrounded by concentric circles mirrored along the yellow diagonal. The lower flower has a blob of scrap obscuring half of it and the top one has almost completely disappeared and is mysteriously much smaller.

I do like the colours in this one so perhaps I should see if I can make something similar again. Hopefully my skills have improved a bit since 2009.