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...

First of all, I’d like to wish you a happy new year and I hope 2018 is a peaceful year full of health, happiness and creative fun for you all! When I came to tidy up my workbench I found some little leftover scraps from some scrap clay Mokume Gane, there were too small to do much with so I decided to do some polymer patchwork. Nice bit of polymer clay recycling 🙂 I was pretty pleased how they turned out so I cured them and added a back...

A long time ago I did a lot of experiments with the curing of Kato polyclay and shared the results with you in a series of blog posts.  It all started with trying to make these bangles and having issues with their durability, I am still wearing them now 3 years later so the effort was worth it. I also did some testing on Fimo and the results of these experiments were published in the From Polymer to Art purple magazine. I have just realised I...

A fellow polymer clay artist was asking about glue for brooch backs the other day and it got me thinking. What happens to the superglue I use when the piece goes in the oven?  My normal procedure for adding a brooch back is to superglue it in place then cover it in a decorative layer of polymer clay and cure the piece again. Here’s a sample back   I use the super glue to hold it in place whilst I am working and I know the polymer...

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...

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...