Today I have been playing with Mokume Gane (I meant to make a ghost flower cane but…). I am much happier with my results. I cut and restacked a lot more times (thanks Arlene for the tip!)I’ll make some things with it later – off to pick up the kids from school now

I often admire other peoples Mokume Gane pieces but am always dissatisfied with my own. I’ve played about with the mokume gane technique a few times and tried various different  colours and methods.Finally I got round to buying some texture sheets and decided to have another go.Starting stack before rollingThe swirl texture sheet and the clay stack after passing through the pasta machineThe end sheet after slicingNot quite sure what I...

So I was just sitting down trying to figure out how to make them neater when I remembered I had a small star cookie cutter. I was going to use it to make an impression on the end of the block of clay to use as a cutting guide when I remembered seeing somewhere someone making a cane from cookie cutters (sorry can’t remember who or where or when – I do remember it was elephants and it was a neat idea). Here’s what I did. The...

Finally after what seems like forever I managed to grab some clay time today. I have been having a lovely time on holiday with my friends and family but I have also been aching to create! My daughter’s school remained closed today after the holidays for a teacher training day but she was happy playing by herself for a bit so I had a go at making a star cane. Over on the Polymer Clay Central Forum there is a June Cane Challenge where...

There are hundreds of polymer clay tutorials out there on the internet, some you pay for ( in my experience these are excellent, the authors have put in much more time and they are very detailed) and many are free. There are lots of creative and generous artists out there! Some people have kindly collected the tutorials together onto pages of links and I would like to share a couple of these with you now so perhaps you can find  a new tutorial...

My favourite necklace right now is my spliced flower cane one that I made recently with the matching bracelet.   one of the spliced flower cane beadsI decided to play about with the spliced flower technique to see what would happen. I turned them inside out (I normally put the white in the center) the starting skinner blend logs rolled so the white is on the outsidethe restacked logs after first bit of squashing  The finished flowerI tried 3...