Polymer clay flower cane

I found out this beautiful flower cane on the Internet and decided to give it a try.

 Everything starts with a polymer clay gradient, made of three shades:

We roll it, starting with the white part. Then we cut the cylindre to create some space for the patterns of the petals:

 The pattern is simply made of brown clay sheets and yellow cylinders wrapped in polymer clay sheets the same color.

We roll the cane inside another sheet of brown polymer clay. We reduce it and cut it into as many petals as we want. 

 Then we do the same with a thicker sheet of white polymer clay.

And we reduce the final cane, once again !

New polymer clay earrings

It's raining over London. I had a few time to make two new pairs of earrings. 

Both of them are made of wood and polymer clay beads (made with a clay extruder). 

The green ones have a nice "natural" look, with their small stone beads. The second ones are more colorful!

Polymer clay tutorial: "fire flower" cane (blue version)

Here is a complete (or at least I hope) tutorial concerning the method to realise this "fire flower" cane out of fimo clay.

Here is the orange & black version of the same cane.

I am not very good at taking pictures (I mean pictures without cat ears or tails in the corners) as you probaly already noticed but I tried to do my best to illustrate the process.

We start with two color gradients, each of one made of three different colors. I chose these ones:

I realize color gradients with my pasta machine, flattening and folding the three colors together. I’ll try to write a short tutorial on gradients as soon as possible… Anyway here are the results:

After reduction, our two gradients are identical cylinders.

We cut each of them into four identical parts. One of the parts will have to be cut in half once more. We now have five parts of the first gradient ("blue" one) and four parts of the second one ("yellow" one):

We now have to put the pieces back together (the two smallest parts go on the extremities):

Then we reduce, pressing the sides to obtain a cane this shape (this has a very strange appearance but don’t worry, that’s fine!):

We cut the cane into the number of petals we want (often 6 in my case) and give the pieces a “petal shape” by pinching their sides.Here we are :

Polymer clay tutorial: dotted beads

Now we learned how to make stripes (here), here is my method to create dotted beads out of polymer clay. This is a bit tedious but it works perfectly to obtain regular dots and very good-looking fimo beads!

Here is the result we want to achieve:

First we take some regular plain beads (I'll write a tutorial on how to make regular round beads soon).

Then we choose the color of our dots (of course you can choose several ones for a more "funky" result!).

Depending on the size of your round beads and the size you want the dots to be, flatten (with a pasta machine or rolling pin) your color(s) into a more or less thin clay sheet. As an exemple here the diameter of my round beads is around 1 cm and the blue sheet is flattened to the thinest.

Then, using a razor blade (or better a special "fimo blade" such as these ones), divide your clay sheet into very small regular square pieces :

Each of these small square pieces will be a dot (I warned you it was a bit tedious)! Take the small piece, roll it and stick it on the round bead. Do it again until you have enough dots (of course leave enough space between them as they will be a bit bigger once flattened on the bead!).

Then we just have to roll the bead to smoothen its surface.

Of course this "dotting method" can be used to realise dotted clay sheets, donuts or whatever!

Here is our final result:

Fimo tutorial: stripped donut

Donuts are one of my main passions (I love making them, not eating them), with dots (the same). For that matter, I would like to buy this so nice cat cushion:

Well, anyway, I felt like making polymer clay donuts a few days ago and took advantage of the opportunity to write a short tutorial about half-stripped donuts. This, for example: Polymer clay donut

By the way there is a good (well, I hope so) tutorial about stripes on my blog.

To start, we need stripes. When we have some, we cut a thin slice of them (don’t do what I did, my slice was much too big and I had to cut it again afterwards).

Then, we flatten with a pasta machine a sheet of clay of the colour we want the back of our donut to be (black, for me). The sheet has to be bigger than the diameter of the future donut. 

We arrange on this clay sheet our stripped slice and another clay sheet the same thickness (than the stripes). This sheet will be the second half of our donut (as we want only half of it to be stripped). Will also be black for me. The two parts have to perfectly (well, or almost) meet.

(Just for you to know, if the black sheet that will be the back of my donut looks strange on my picture it’s just that I often texture  the back of my donuts, so it is not smooth.) 

Be careful, when sticking the stripes and plain clay to the first sheet, to proceed from the middle towards the side to avoid air bubbles to get stuck between the layers. 

Then we have to use our two « cookie cutters » to give our donut, well, the shape of a donut. One cookie cutter is for the donut itself (the biggest one) and the other one, for the hole in the middle. If you struggle to find a suitable cookie cutter for the middle (as it has to be quite small) you can use everyday stuff such as the cap from a felt-tip marker for example). Place cling film on your clay sheet before cutting, the donut’s edges will be smoother.

If the edge of the donut has to be “cleaned up” (using everyday stuff as a cookie cutter is theoretically nice but may turn up to be a little bit hazardous) you can use a blade to remove the biggest part of the clay, the rest will be removed by sanding after having baked our donut. If holes have appeared between the stripes (sometimes happen with very bad handmade cookie cutters) use your finger to smooth the donut’s surface (be careful to not accidentally mix the colours!). 

Now is the best part: choosing how to decorate our brand-new donut!