Colour mixing

As well as making my mums birthday present (will show you soon - can't show you now as she might read my blog) I am also making cake forks for my other sister in law. She has Dorset Fruits Crockery by Poole Pottery so I decided to make her some matching cake forks. She has a set for each of the family with their own fruits and they have plums (as shown), apples, grapes and pears. I am still experimenting with inlaying or having a raised fruit (much easier!). Resisted the temptation to make fruit canes - overkill for 6 cake forks!

Dorset Fruits Plum Plate.

Anyway nearly all the colours I needed ( a yellowy cream for the background, a dark ultramarine blue, crimson red for the apples) are colours I haven't mixed before in Kato and it took me quite a while to figure some of them out. I am so pleased that I now have enough knowledge to be able to work out colours!

I was struggling with trying to think what colours I needed to make the crimson for the apples when I suddenly remembered I had printed off some Kato colour recipes from various sources on the Internet and wondered if they might help. In the folder with them I found the  Kato Colour Mixing Chart I had completely forgotten about. Wow that made life easier! I matched the colour  I needed to the chart and just slightly adjusted the amount of black - ta da perfect colour in a few minutes instead of about 30! Going to laminate one for my clay box!




The Kato colour chart I found along with some other useful recipes such as premo colours in Kato at http://www.shadesofclay.com/index.html . Hope it is useful to some of you Kato users out there!

Latest flower canes

Just a quick one to show you some of my latest canes. I am pretty pleased with how they worked out. This is the first time I have tried a rose cane or the reversed skinner blend one. The one on the far right with the green is from the Ayelet Beads tutorial I bought a while back.

If I was making the rose one again I would have less white in my skinner blend cane centre.

Conditioning Kato Clay

Having recently discovered Kato clay I am now a complete convert. I love the Kato clay to work with and I now find Fimo too soft and sticky (although I now realise this is a problem with fimo at the moment). The problem with Kato is it is SO difficult to condition. I haven't tried the latest formulation of Kato which is supposed to be easier to condition yet.

I have tried some different methods for conditioning Kato clay and here are my findings.

As I would Fimo
With Fimo and Premo you can just squash up a bit of clay and roll it through the pasta machine. The odd block of Fimo would be a bit more of a challenge and would need a bit of squishing and rolling in your hands first before it was soft enough to be rolled in the pasta machine.
This doesn't work for Kato, it is too firm for me to squish into a ball from the packet and many blocks just fall into crumbs the minute you try.

Cutting slices
I found out about this from Sue on Cindy Leitz's blog, she passed on the information given on an Australian clay suppliers website Over the Rainbow. 

Cut a bit of clay and roll it firmly to flatten the clay. Lift it and turn it so it doesn't stick to your work surface. Keep rolling until it is just a little thicker than the thickest setting on your pasta machine (that's a good time to get those thickness chips out to see how

thick it needs to be).Roll the clay through the pasta machine on it's thickest setting. Without folding or bending the sheet roll it through a thinner setting. And again without folding another thinner setting, the aim is to make a thin sheet as thin clay conditions faster. When you have thin sheet fold it and roll it and continue doing so until it is conditioned.

This works but it is slow and I am impatient. Each slice is small and if you are using big amounts of clay it takes far too long. The secret I worked out at last is the initially rolling. If the clay is crumbly roll it more with the rolling pin first or you get crumbles in the pasta machine as shown (I hate that!). I try to short cut putting several sheets together but I think it is best to have them part conditioned first on reflection before bulking up. This is also basically the method recommended by Donna Kato herself and she should know!




Food Processor

I bought a little chopper just for clay. I found I could put about 2oz of clay in at a time without stressing the motor (getting horrible grinding noises) as long as I chopped them into pieces about 2x1x1cm. Run the chopper in bursts until the clay is lots of fine pieces. I then find it easiest to put the clay crumbs into a Ziploc bag and then roll them with a rolling pin in the bag. This helps the crumbs to stick together with no fear of loosing them. The clay is nice and warmed up by now and should go through the pasta machine no problem. A couple of rolls and it is ready to use.

To be honest this is a fair bit of hassle too. It's great if you are colour mixing from a recipe as you can just put the parts in the chopper and it is more than half mixed already. I am buying big blocks of Kato the 12.5oz ones so will probably have a conditioning session at the start of a project using the chopper and then store the clay in sheets. They can easily be reconditioned by passing through the pasta machine.

The bottom picture shows what it looks like out of the Ziploc bag on the left and after first pass through the pasta machine on the right.






Jana whack
This is the method used by  Jana Roberts Benzon. Basically you take your block of clay and whack it. Leave the clay in the wrapper and whack it with a hammer, rubber mallet, wooden rolling pin. Works pretty well and is a good arm exercise, tension reliever. Not ideal with those who have problems with hands/arms and it means getting stuff not in my clay kit out. You still have to do a bit of rolling to get it thin enough to go in pasta machine but no crumbs in sight!
(more info in an article at Polymer Clay Express )

Conclusion

Since I wrote this I have found that if I am colour mixing a fair amount of clay I use the chopper but other than that I tend to use the slice method cause as long as I roll well to start with crumbs are avoided and it saves getting extra kit out. I am using the big blocks of Kato so I do 1/4 block at a time - about 3 oz. This would be 3 slices so it isn't so bad.

Anyone else got any conditioning tips to share? I have heard people talk about driving over it with their car but that's a bit extreme for me I think!

Friends spoons

 I have been busy claying with friends today. I helped a friend and her children (aged 4 and 6) to make some spoons as a present for her mother. Here are the spoons the children made - pretty cool! I am sure their Granny will love them!










In the evening a friend popped round but I already had my mind set on making some faux turquoise so she made herself a spoon too (I had made one for her boyfriends birthday and she felt she needed her own special spoon too - her birthday is New Year's Eve so a way off!). It's very groovy! The rose on the end was inspired by a spoon my 4 year old daughter made a while back which had a rose on the end too.

It has been really nice claying with my friends and I have realised you can learn a lot by watching what other people do even if they are fairly new to polymer clay!

I am off to finish of my faux turquoise and I shall  post some pictures later I hope. It's lovely and sunny here but I am suffering with my hayfever today :(
Hope you are all having a lovely weekend.

Cara

Finally finished that bracelet

Thanks to those of you who commented on my bracelet either here or over at Polymer Clay Central (which you should check out if you haven't already. I only recently discovered it thanks to Anita (again check out here blog if you haven't already seen it http://melobeau.blogspot.com/)).

I tried a zillion things this afternoon, different sized beads, different colours, different combinations. Annoyingly I had been to the bead shop this morning but forgot to take my chip beads with me to try out. I bought some lime green and brilliant blue beads but none were quite right. i tried some copper spacer beads but the chips are fairly translucent and the copper seemed very heavy next to them. I decided that the chip beads needed to be in clusters, they looked a bit weird separated I think.

Nothing said " this is right " to me so I went for quick power nap. Whilst I was napping I had a dream of a snake of seed beads wrapping round my chip beads so took that as suggestion and went with it. Here it is.

Finished turquoise chip bracelet

Close up of finished bracelet

 I added a bit of chain on to make up the extra inch I needed (I have shortened it a lot since I took that photo) and used the spare chip bead to make a little dangly end. I quite like it. I have been wearing it this evening. My husband said he thought it was a bit boring but I don't rely on his judgement on things like these!

So much for just quickly stringing up the few trial beads I made!

PS I ought to add that I have noted how different the colours appear in my pictures - need to sort out the white balance I guess - it's a daytime, night time difference.

Turquoise things and how to string?

Here's the necklace that I have been talking about. You can see the silver flower pendant I made a polymer clay prototype for (still haven't played with my PMC yet).

It is from 'Make Jewellery' magazine issue 4














I started stringing those chip beads with the focal bead I showed you the other day. I find it difficult to see how things will look and have to string up a bit to see. I started off with just the chips but there wasn't enough (the problem of playing around rather than planning!). I then tried putting seed beads between each chip.

At that point I suddenly decided to make it a bit more complex and try multiple strands. I am fairly new to beading, in the past I have mainly made pendants and strung them on cord or a silver chain.

I took 3 lengths of tiger tail and using crimps fixed the focal bead in the centre (I used crimp covers cause I still haven't got round to buying crimping pliers yet). I then threaded 3 different strands with different beads, a mix of chips and 3 different colour seed beads - matt turquoise,silver and a shiny turquoise.

I then tried with 1 strand chips and 2 strands seed beads - didn't like it.

I then wondered if I should just go back to a string of chips with seed beads or silver/crystal spacers. Then I got all indecisive and decided it was time for bed (I am making an effort to go to bed early at the moment in the hope I will be less tired sometime!). So I will sleep on it but any thoughts about what you would do with it would be gratefully received.
Cara

What I've been up to

I can't tell you about the main polymer clay project I have on the go as it is for my mum's birthday and she sometimes reads this blog. I'll tell you about it early May!

Whilst I was with family over Easter the kids, my niece and I had a quick polymer clay play. This is what I made having been reading Polymer Clay and Mixed Media-- Together at Last by Christi Friesen

Fimo polymer clay flower with beaded centre

 The beads were inserted before baking. It was a bit rushed but I decided it was worth baking. I tried out a few others that I did scrap before baking. It's soft Fimo Soft hence all the finger prints. I didn't sand it but gave it a light patina with silver acrylic paint. Not sure what I will do with it now.

I am trying to be a bit more strict about not baking stuff I am not sure about it. If you aren't sure before it's baked that isn't likely to change once it is baked. Unbaked scrap is more useful than baked scrap!

I also gave the bead I made the other day a patina whilst I had the paint out...

Not sure why I chose the light blue but it called to me when I went to my paint box. I think it works. I shall make this up into a bracelet with those chip beads I showed you a while a go.

I had another go at sanding those fopals a bit more too, I think they might come good with some more sanding, got fed up so will carry on another day.

I have a load of things I want to try out and lots of half finished things but the kids are back at school Monday so I hope to have time to do some.