I am not sure why I haven’t shared this on my blog before as these experiments date back some years!As you may know, I used to work as a scientific researcher and had access to lots of cool tools and data loggers. I wanted to know what was happening to the temperature in my oven. I had been using those metal oven thermometers but I recognised that it was slow to respond as the temperature is indicated by the metal spring in the back that...

Hurray I have just received my copy of From Polymer To Art – Purple! I’m so excited because have an article in it! You can see me in the top left hand corner of this ‘contents’ picture. I was asked to write an article about my curing experiments. If you have been following my blog for a while you will probably have read all about my tests to try and cure Kato clay so that thin bangles wouldn’t break. I also did...

When I was doing my curing experiments I wondered if the quenching, plunging into ice water straight from oven, really did help with translucence. I had a few things ready to cure made with translucent Kato clay so thought I would quickly test to see. I made 2 samples from translucent Kato polymer clay on a mid thickness in the pasta machine, setting 5 on an Atlas. Not sure of my reason for the  thickness, just what seemed right at the time. On...

So in part 1 I discovered that for optimum strength you should turn your oven off at the end of the curing cycle and leave your polymer clay pieces to cool down slowly in the cooling oven. This was just an initial test to see if the set up was going to work before I made lots of samples with more complicated curing, and something I had always been curious about. I was happy that the test worked and set about making more samples (got a blister...

In order to find out how best to make strong bracelets I have a series of experiments planned. The first thing I wanted to find out was if polymer clay is stronger if it’s quenched, that is plunged into ice cold water straight from the oven. I’ve heard people say this makes it stronger, polish better and it will keep transparents more transparent. Well I’m using grey coloured scrap Kato clay so can’t comment on...