Polymer Clay turtle for my challenges...

For my Thing a Day challenge and also my personal challenge to actually use my books and tutorials I made a turtle today.

Father Christmas brought me the Christi Friesen 'Under the Sea' book this year so I decided to try a turtle. I like the way Christi does these 'beyond projects' books: there's a whole heap of ideas to help you customise your own creations. I'm tired today so didn't want to get too adventurous so mainly followed the turtle that Christi made in the book. I didn't happen to have any lovely lampwork beads around like Christi uses to make her lovely turtle so I found some scraps of brown clay and marbled them a bit to make an interesting little focal. My plan is to add some resin to that when the turtle is cured so I made the framing swirls a little proud to help keep the resin in place - I'll let you know how that works out!

Anyway here's the little turtle (well I say little he's a lot larger than my normal tortoises which are 2 or 3cm long), he's about 8cm long.

There's a lot of things I would do differently if I made him again, that's the thing with doing projects like this - different from your normal things, you learn new things! I should of cut my nails first - there's a few nail marks I didn't really want but those are of course part of what makes it handmade and unique! I didn't like the mouth when I first made it. It just didn't seem right and it had gone too close to the eyes. For some reason I decided to poke the end of a knitting needle into the slit I had made and hollowed round to make a mouth cavity - it changed the whole look of the face which I much preferred. Colours aren't really my colours but they are quite turtle I guess.

I had fun playing with my clay and I enjoyed Christi's humour which she has infused throughout her book. If you are at all interested in sculpting with polymer clay and you like Christ's unique style of polymer clay work you will love her books. They are packed full of inspiration pictures, tips and techniques, subtle variations, things to get you started. You can use it as a step by step book or just as a starting point with some tips to guide you - I like that and I think it works well.

If you want to keep up with all my Thing a Day's for February I suggest you check out my flickr set as that seems to be the only place I have put them all so far.

I'll be demonstrating in Hobbycraft Bristol tomorrow between 12-3pm so I am sure I will have plenty of things made tomorrow! I'll update you with my things in a couple of days.

Have fun !!

Cara