Here is my one of latest pieces of polymer clay  jewellery – a Kaleidoscope tile pendant in blue and white. I love it and have been wearing it a lot (I wear a lot of blue – you might have noticed from my jewellery I like blue). I made a couple of similar ones, I don’t like to make anything exactly the same and they have all been snapped up so I must make another cane in the same style soon.   I’ve been busy...

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...

As you are probably aware I am a huge fan of Kato polyclay so I was over the moon when I was asked if I could demonstrate with it at the Craft, Hobby and Stitch International trade show at the NEC last weekend. I spent 2 whole days showing people the magic that is polymer clay – I can’t think of anything better to do (well apart from spending 2 days being shown how to do new things with polymer clay!). I was amazed at how many...

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...