Fimo tutorial: Make bead caps & cones

To make beautiful (fimo or not) bracelets and necklaces, we use bead caps, spacers, cones and other beading accessories. 

For example these silver bead caps on the" Little India" necklace: 

 

Bead caps can be directly bought from shops (if we find the right sizes and that's not always as easy as it seems!), but they also can (and it is much funnier!) be home-made. 

Here is a tutorial to make your own silver or golden bead caps from fimo clay.

Equipment
Some gold or silver powder and a brush
Some ugly left over fimo clay

Fimo beads  (already hardened in the oven) matching the size you wish for your bead caps

Needles (toothpicks, needles, cooking needles for fimo)
A small punch (no matter its shape) or the extremity of your fimo extruder

Tutorial:

Stretch the leftover fimo clay with your pasta machine or rolling pin and use your punch to cut identical shapes inside it. Cutting identical shapes allow to have the same quantity of clay (and thus the same final size!) for every bead cap.

 

Depending on the size you want your bead caps to be, make balls out of one or several of the shapes you previously cut. Think about: these balls will then be cut in two... Now you've been thinking, cut them! 

 Plant a needle in the middle of every half sphere:

And push it into the hole of your hardened fimo bead:  

What's left to do is to sculpt your bead cap to make it fit closely the shape of the fimo bead, then to sculpt it to give it a nice look:

 I use small tools (they look like dentists' tools a bit...) to make different patterns & curves in my bead caps:

Once your bead cap is shaped, you just have to cover it with gold or silver powder (with a small brush) and remove it from the fimo bead to put in into the oven (you can leave it on the needle you used).