Today I want to share with you how made my first signature cane. When I looked for good tutorials I couldn’t find any with detailed descriptions or lots of images, so I decided to photograph each step of the way for you. For this cane I used the Makin’s Clay Extruder Gun and a variety of discs. You might be able to use alphabet cookie cutters instead, but these tend to be much bigger- which means you spend a long time reducing the cane (reducing means making the cane longer and thinner/smaller) plus you can’t be as flexible with the way you want the signature to look.
I just realised that I posted my last entry in May. Upps. Well to be fair I have been very busy making things and taking part in a three-day polymer clay workshop “Polydays”, which took place in September in a small village called Toddington. It was taught by some of the world’s best polymer clay artists – Carol Simmons, Alison Gallant and Bettina Welker and it was quite intense – and back breaking. I came away with lots of new techniques and unfinished projects – as most of the projects taught were quite time consuming. In the next weeks I will finish those projects ( a reversible necklace, a hinged bracelet and beautiful Mokume Gane slices which I will use for pendants and bracelets.) and will write a bit more about Polydays.
In the meantime I wanted to share how I made this pendant:
On the final day of the Polydays workshop Alison Gallant showed our group how to create her reversible necklace and also how to create Mokume Gane canes with ripple effect – a great technique that creates beautiful patterns. Somehow though I wasn’t so happy how they turned out when I cut them and placed them on the clay – so I mashed up the clay and put it through the pasta machine a few times -and the colours changed into something I really liked – so I cut out some small circles, used some of them for the necklace and the rest for future projects.
I only read about “spiking” in polymer clay books which advise you to regularly check the temperature during the curing process. As our normal oven in the kitchen takes ages to warm up and I don’t want to bake polymer clay in it,we bought a table top oven from Morphy Richards, which was on sale. I also have a professsional thermometer for the oven. However the oven is not super accurate and after warming up the temperature rises quickly and way over the required 110 C for Fimo (or 130 C for Premo) so normally when I bake I tend to check on the oven and keep changing the temperature. It also goes down quickly so I have to increase it again.
As it’s Valentine’s Day this month, hearts are obviously playing a part in my new designs and I decided to make two wire wrapped heart pendants – but not just with round wire. Instead I used square wire. I have a nifty little device from Beadalon with which I can twist the wire into a nice shape. So for the two hearts I made, I used two square wires of different colours (copper, silver plated for the first one and brass and silver plated) and twisted these together. Only downside is that the wire hardens using this method, which means it’s harder to manipulate into a nice shape.
In this post I want to show you how I created a necklace with stabilized chalk Turquoise beads, drops, donut and 20 gauge wire (0,8mm wire). I always wanted to learn more wire-work techniques and when I bought the donuts I experimented with 18 inch silver plated 20 gauge wire until I settled for this design:
I have decided to share with you a few images of some of my jewellery, which show them in the process of creating them and you can find these under the new category “The Making of..”
This bracelet was made on a beading loom, with tiny Japanese seed beads.
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