Tuesday, October 15, 2013

geometry and clay.

I had a bit of a crafternoon the other day with some lovely friends and one of the things we were keen to try out was making our own necklaces using polymer clay (quick apology, I only had my phone with me so sorry for the iPhone photos).


We ended up using Staedtler FIMO, which is an oven hardening modelling clay. We stood in Lincraft in front of their range of colours for quite some time trying to decide which to choose. I wanted to have a go at this with just one colour before committing to buying all the primary colours and experimenting with mixing (which does create some truly beautiful colours, I actually have to stop myself from trying to eat them). I ended up going for a colour called silver. This 56g little packet cost me $4.74.


It was a pretty warm day so once I broke off a piece to start working with it didn't take very long for it to become very soft and malleable. I began by working the piece of clay into a sphere.


I then squished the sphere down into a cube.


Next came creating those lovely asymmetrical geometric faces. This is were things got a lot trickier than I was anticipating. I used a knife to slice of faces until I got to an overall shape I was happy with. I'm not going to lie, this took quite a few attempts, lucky the very nature of clay allows you to squish everything back together and start again. The main problem was that by the time I got to slicing off the last half of the faces, my fingers would dent and deform the work I had already done, destroying those crisp edges I was attempting to achieve. This is probably due to a lack of skill on my part, and also because it was such a warm day the clay really was very soft. Anyway, after a number of attempts I reached a shape I was happy with.


Next comes poking a hole through the sides to turn this into a bead. At this stage I put the whole thing in the freezer for a few minutes to harden it up a bit so poking a hole through wouldn't end with me turning it into a squashed mess. I discovered that I should have put it in the freezer before I attempted to slice off the faces as this did a marvellous job of helping it hold its form better. Anyway, we used a crochet hook to poke the hole because that was slightly fatter than the chain we had to put through it later.


I put the hole almost in the middle, but slightly more towards the top so the bead would sit well on its chain. The chain I bought from Spotlight and only cost me $1.99 with my VIP card discount.


I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out, and am quite exited about all the possibilities of handmade necklaces! I think I will buy all the primary colours so I can start experimenting with mixing colours. 




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