When I’m learning a new medium, there is always a period where the medium dictates what you get. Sometimes, this is a long, and frustrating period, and sometimes it’s short and you’re able to start getting predictable results fairly quickly.
Polymer clay has been one of those journeys that’s been a bit frustrating. I know I enjoy it, and I always look forward to an opportunity to get the clays out and experiment, but it’s taken me a relatively long time to be able to plan a piece, and be able to bring it to fruition looking more or less as I intended with the only accidents being happy ones.
Last night, in a flurry of pre-bedtime activity, I created the first piece that looks exactly the way I planned, so even though there are other clay items to share, I wanted to show this one off first.
I bought the channel bangle at BeadFX yesterday afternoon, on a whim. As soon as we were home I got to mixing up some custom fimo colours. I used translucent fimo as a base, and added coloured fimo and alcohol inks as needed until I had the palette that was in my head.
I used my extruder to combine the colours and stacked them into a cane. Then I marbled what was left and used it to get a first coat of clay onto the bangle. I sliced up my cooled cane thinly and applied it across the bangle, blending carefully with the other slices, and also with the clay base.
When I was happy, I baked it and tried something I hadn’t tried before – when it was done baking I quenched it in cold water right away, which I had read increased the translucency of fimo. Then I set to work sanding, working my way slowly from a 320 grit through to a 12000 grit, over about half an hour.
I have not done it justice in these photos, but it’s definitely the best polymer clay piece I’ve done so far and I’ll be getting more of these channel bangles for the slew of ideas that came to me overnight!
