This week I decided to launch headlong into a few different polymer clay techniques. The first was the Casablanca beads featured in Desiree's How-To Desk. I followed her wonderful tutorial through the steps of creating skinner blends to the unique Buesseler cuts to achieve these vibrant, football shaped beads. My skinner blends were lovely, but my technique for keeping them narrow fell apart about halfway through and they ended up too wide. I also thought my final roll was too thin, consequently my beads turned out rather long and narrow compared with Desiree's. I still quite liked the final result (Image 1) and I'm keen to try this again. Another lesson for next time, I sanded these in my tumbler and obviously that is not the way to go, since they ended up getting quite scratched up (as you can probably see in the image).
I also had my first attempt at creating a picture cane this week. I really wanted to make a butterfly picture cane and so googled some tutorials and found this one from Carolyn's Clay Creations. Making the wings themselves was easy, my trouble came in reducing the components and packing the cane effectively enough to roll the cane at the end without completely distorting my picture. My first butterfly looked rather like roadkill! I had another go with some leftover wing components, this time much more successfully as I spent more time and effort on reducing, reducing, reducing! The final result was a beautiful butterfly with underdeveloped wings such that it more closely resembled a mosquito (but a pretty mosquito none-the-less!). I'm still proud, I made my first picture cane ;) and learned a lot in the process (Image 2).
And I found a home for one of my first batches of beads in this pretty bracelet:
I also had my first attempt at creating a picture cane this week. I really wanted to make a butterfly picture cane and so googled some tutorials and found this one from Carolyn's Clay Creations. Making the wings themselves was easy, my trouble came in reducing the components and packing the cane effectively enough to roll the cane at the end without completely distorting my picture. My first butterfly looked rather like roadkill! I had another go with some leftover wing components, this time much more successfully as I spent more time and effort on reducing, reducing, reducing! The final result was a beautiful butterfly with underdeveloped wings such that it more closely resembled a mosquito (but a pretty mosquito none-the-less!). I'm still proud, I made my first picture cane ;) and learned a lot in the process (Image 2).
And I found a home for one of my first batches of beads in this pretty bracelet:
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