Friday, May 18, 2007

Polymer clay


I've made my first shy steps in the polymer clay world. With a little help from my daughter.
And I have some urgent questions:
1. I can make the beads round between my hands, but when I start making holes they deform (pressure of hands and needle). How do you get nice round beads?
2. How do you avoid/remove finger tip prints? Polish with what?
3. When covering a bead with gloss, on what do you dry them? I imagine you cannot lay them on a piece of paper without them sticking to it.

I'd appreciate all the help out there for it is quite enchanting craft and I'd like to continue.

1 comment:

Angela said...

To avoid fingerprints, you can wear gloves. Or to remove the fingerprints after baking, you can wet sand the beads.

For glazing the beads, you can thread them onto a skewer or wire of some sort (I suppose even thread?), then brace the wire across a pan or something. This should hold the beads up off the paper.

And if you're getting a lot of distortion while piercing the beads, you might try letting the clay cool a little -- sometimes they're softer & more likely to distort right after you've finished rolling them. I've heard some of the bead racks on the market have some nice bead-piercing tools, but I haven't tried them.

Good luck with your beads -- I just love polymer clay!