I get fed up when I am wearing a pendant on a cord and then I realise the clasp has twizzled round to the front and is distracting from my beautiful creation. I keep meaning to design some necklaces where the clasp is a feature but until I get round to that here’s a couple of tips to avoid it happening. Tip 1 – Add a little extension chain (which also makes the length changeable) to the jump ring the clasp clips too and add...

 I am still busy making special things that I can’t show you – yet. In the meantime here are a couple of new things I’ve made with some of the scraps from my secret project.This was a birthday present for my soon to be (official) sister in law Heather.This you might recognise as one of the projects from the new Julie Picarello book – Patterns in Polymer.

 I came across Blogger in Draft thanks to a tip of from Doreen’s Backyard Beads Blog. It is an easy way to change your blog and I know several people have revamped their blogs using it and they look great. I haven’t really played around with my blog design yet but it has a host of other features that are much better than the standard Blogger. For example there is a spell check on the Compose toolbar and also an add video button.When...

Now I have decided on a brand to use, Kato Clay I have started working my way through some of the exercises in Maggie Maggio and Lindly Haunani’s book- Polymer Clay Color Inspirations . I am no colour expert having had no formal art training, I did a science degree and worked in scientific research for a while before retraining to teach in Primary Schools (4 to 11 year olds ). I do know the basics of colour mixing but I struggle a little...

I just realised that although there is a fair amount of talk on flickr and in the comments about these brown Kato Extruder beads I haven’t actually posted a picture of them here. I know you have seen the necklace which uses a disc pendant and some smaller beads using this technique but here are the beads I made first. I am writing the tutorial as we speak! It’ll be here soon.

Last night I delved into my big box of polymer clay things and liberated some to become jewellery. Here they are.Here are some of those Kato extruder technique beads (the tutorial is being written!)I am really pleased with how this turned out. Although normally I really don’t like brown or orange, somehow I love the colours on this. I wouldn’t wear it as it wouldn’t go with my normal colours so I will have to make the same but...