Saturday 28 March 2009

Two tutorials in one post - flower canes and daisy buttons

We are going to make two kinds of flowers from this lot:


Making a skinner blend using pasta-machine:




Making a shaded plug. Cut the plug into 4 segments.


Place 2 thin sheets of dark clay on sides of 2 segments.


Making a "stamen" :) I mixed light part of leftover clay into one colour and rolled it into a snake. Place a snake in the middle of one segment, cover with another one. Press and shape resulting cane into roundish cane.


Join the two remaining segments of shaded plug, so the white sides face each other. Roll them to get the right length, and to fix two segments together. Wrap the resulting piece around the first cane, and wrap the whole thing with a thin sheet of dark clay.


Here you can do whatever you want with you petal cane. You can reduce it and cut it into 5-6 parts, form them into a flower and fill the background with translucent clay.
I prefer keeping petal canes as they are, as you can use them just for petals as well you can make flowers out of them any time.


Making a flower. Cut a small piece of petal cane, give it a shape of a drop. Slice this cane into small single petals. Place petals on a rolled sheet of clay and press them gently onto a base.


For the flower center I took some yellow clay, placed it in the middle of the flower and pressed it with an embossing tool.


A second flower will be a quick daisy, a very basic cane.

Making a cane for the center of a flower. Make a yeloow and orange cane out of many smaller yellow and orange bull's canes.


Making a petal. I used Fimo "Sahara" for contours and lines inside petal.




I tried two colours for the base of a flower. In the final creation you don't see a base att all, so the colour of it doesn't matter. In one of the daisies I've bent the petal slightly down, which makes a future button less fragile. Buttons of a last photo are still unbaked.


These are some of my fresh petal canes.


For these yellow and red flowers I used the same petal cane.


An Altoids box, covered with my new canes.



Making polymer clay cakes

Making a cake base:
I mixed white, translucent and ochre Fimo to get the right colour. Roll out the clay to a required thickness, then cut out the shape. While the cutter is still in clay, press out a hollow in a cake base. Remove a cutter and give a cake base right texture with a tooth brush and shape it with a knitting needle.

For giving a cake the baked look I mixed two pastels into a colour slightly darker than the clay itself. Then applied it just to the top of the base.

Making whipped cream. Mix some white clay and liquid clay to a smooth uniform condition. Fill a syringe with the paste and sqeeze it out onto the cake.

Decorate a cake as you wish. I used my strawberry cane and made a few whole strawberries.

I made a second cake from leftovers of the first one.

Slicing a cake. Give a rough texture on a slice's cut :)

That's it :) Bake a cake in the oven and then cool it down. Glaze the strawberries.

Then take lots of pictures :)))







Bon appetit!

My first cane



Being cross stitch addict in the past, I made my first cane with cross stitches :). Cross and square canes were extruded using Makin's clay extruder, then placed together to make a "cross-stitched" letter Z.