Lime tutorial and soft fimo

FIMO clay became very soft recently. That is either my hands are hotter now, or they changed the formula of clay. Even Fimo classic is very soft, not to mention Fimo soft. You don't want your clay to be soft when you are trying to make a cane :) A few days ago I had to make a lime cane for one order, most of which is translucent clay (Fimo soft). It was so soft, it reminded me a used chewing gum. So I had to leach out some oil of it: placed a thin sheet of clay between two sheets of paper, put a heavy box on top of the stack, and left it for a few hours. I didn't even have to pass translucent clay through a pasta machine. I have just stretched it with my fingers.

After a few hours I have managed to make a lime cane:

Apple pendant and apple tutorial

Just a cute realistic apple :)


An apple tutorial below. Make an apple out of translucent clay, paint it with powdered yellow pastel first, then paint half of it with red, and another half - with green pastel. Add leaf and other details.

My new beads

I have bought these metallic open flower charms a while ago, planning to fill them with polymer clay, but then I forgot about them. A wonderful work by shimshoni reminded me of my flower frames, and soon I came up with these flower charms:

I am not sure yet, which way to use them, as a necklace or as a bracelet. I have tried to take pictures of different ways of using them :)


Here you can see that they are like little padded cushions :) They are very pleasant to touch :)))
I took photos when making one of those charms, so if you like you can find a little tutorial below :)

I prepared a millefiori sheet and a few open flower charms. I have bought these charms on eBay, I can even give a link

Place flower frames on the sheet of clay. One of the frames will remain in the charm, the other one is only used temporarily.
Press frames into clay, using your roller.
Cut out the excess of clay around the flower frames.
Lift clay and frame off the working surface.
Carefully stretch the clay sheet, so it becomes raised over the metallic frame. Keep an eye on the edges of clay sheet, don't let them pop out of the frame. Donna Kato taught us this thick at the Polymer Play Days last summer :)
The other side of a sheet. То, что получилось с изнаночной стороны.
Cut off the excess clay.
Two parts of the flower are ready.
To make a flower puffy, you have to place a piece of scrap clay inside it.
Put scrap clay on one half of a flower.
Take the second half of a flower out of the second frame.
Put it on top of the scrap clay.
Now pinch the edges of a flower, hiding the ugly inner sides of flower parts under the metallic frame. You can use a toothpick to push the most stubborn bits inside.
The clay has to slightly overlap with a metallic frame from both side of a flower. This way the frame will not come off the flower after baking.
Here is the resulting puffy flower charm.
I smoothed the surface of charms with corn starch. It removes fingerprints and makes it easier to sand charms after baking.
All charms - baked, sanded and glazed :)
I also have round open charms in my stash, I will definitely try to work them out in the same way. They are a lot smaller than these flower charms, I still did not come up with a pattern for such the small circles.

PS. Sorry for such a long post, I hope you liked it :)

Black and white bracelet and flower beads tutorial

We'll be making black and white flower beads like these:


The technique I am going to demonstrate below, has been created by Israeli artist Edit Zoota. Make sure to check out her Flickr album and Etsy shop! Edit generously shared her genious idea with the whole world. For me (and, I think, for other caners as well) this discovery has the same importance as Judith Skinner's technique of making colour blends using pasta machine.
It is a long process, so arm yourself with patience :) You need a lot of patience when making canes. To make a neat cane you have to pay a lot of attention to each detail, do everything without a hurry, smoothen every bit of a cane...

First of all we'll make a flower cane. Cut your petal cane into a few pieces. 5 or 6 is optimum for this method. More petals will make it difficult to remove background without distorting a cane.

Roll out a medium thick sheet of dough. Wrap it around the cane.

Next we'll fill our cane with a background. It is a very important step, because the shape of your cane depends on the accuracy of your background. Since you are going to remove background you cane use just a scrap clay for it. I use this particular piece of scrap clay for background for the third time already, so it is a great economy. Make a triangular cane out of your scrap clay and fill the space between the petals. To avoid your petals getting a square shape after reducing make sure that you put enough background between petals. See how I add another layer of scrap clay on top of the triangular cane between the petals, so that the height of the background between the petals is the same as the petals.

Cover petals with clay and put a final layer around the whole cane. There is no need to save on background clay here :)

Reduce and cut the cane. I've made a few canes of different size.

Clay does not stick to the dough, that is why you can easily remove it. Remove all of the background and putt your canes and used scrap clay in cold water. Leave pieces to soak for a few hours. Three hours is normally sufficient to dissolve most of the dough.

Be very careful whem you take canes out of the water. At this moment clay is very sensitive to your finger, so be sure to hold your cane very lightly, do not rub the surface of clay with your fingers.
Here you can see, that there is some dough left between the petals. You can brush it off with an artist's soft brush. Keep dipping your cane and a brush constantly into the water.

You can remove the most stubborn dough with a needle. Very lightly, without pressing, pass your needle between the petals, releasing the dough, then wash it off, using a brush.
Leave you canes and cleaned scrap clay to dry for a few hours. Overnight, perhaps.

Now the cane is ready to be used. Cut off a few slices of it. I used embossing tools and Sculpey tools for shaping my flowers. Although, I guess, you could use thick knitting needles for this as well.

With your fingers smooth the edges of petals of your flower. Shape the slice cane into a flower as you can see it on the picture below:

Then the usual - bake, sand (no picture there :)) ), glaze and make into a jewellery.


You don't have to shape cane slices into flowers, they are just the same pretty as the simple flat slices:

That's all from me :) This post was written with a big gratitude to Edit Zoota. Edit, thank you for your discovery and for your generousity!

Making coin beads

On request of one of my russian blog readers I made a quick tutorial on how to make coin beads.
We'll be making these beads:

Start with measuring out equal amounts of scrap clay for each bead core.

Roll scrap clay into balls. Roll out a very thin sheet of pretty clay, which will be a background for your canes' slices.
In order to get millefiori beads all of the same size, you have to be sure that at each step you add the same amount of clay: same size of a bead core, same size of a background wrap clay, same amount of canes' slices on each bead.

Wrap a bead core into a background clay sheet.

Pinch the ends of pretty clay, hiding scrap clay.

Roll bead into a ball.

The ideal spherical shape of the beads is not necessary at this step.

Slice your canes. I've picked my favorite colour combination of green and yellow.

Put equal amount of cane slices on each bead.

Roll bead into a ball, trying to make it as spherical as possible this time.

Now beads are ready to be turned into coins:

Prepare a surface for flattening the beads. The baking paper is ideal for this purpose. If you press raw bead onto glass or tile surface, you might deform the bead when pulling it of the glass surface or a tile. The paper can be easily peeled of the clay leaving a bead undeformed.

On top of the paper put tiles or thick paper cards. The height of this level will determine the thickness of your beads.

Put your beads between the tiles. Press your beads very lightly with your finger to make sure beads don't roll away. At this step you can choose which part of the bead you want to be a flat surface of the coin in future.

Leave enough space between the beads.

Put another sheet of paper on top of the beads.

Press your beads with a tile or a piece of glass.

I prefer to use glass since I like seeing what I am doing :))

Now you have coin beads all of the same thickness.

Bake the beads:

And here is my result :))