Texture in shapes

Whilst making up some pendants I thought I would be clever and try and do 2 jobs at once. Well it didn't work out how I thought but I quite like what happened.

I wanted to make a circular pendant with a textured back, I decided to cut out the circle whilst the clay sheet was over some rough sandpaper thinking it would get textured as I cut. As usual once I saw what happened it was obvious that's what would happen but you don't always think about these things late at night.

I picked up the sheet and discovered that of course it didn't texture the whole back as pressure was only applied to the area that the cutter was pressing on. But I think this could be quite a neat thing to do - texture in shapes. I'll play around with it.

PS I am going to have a giveaway when I get to 100 followers - only 7 more to go

Improved star cane

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 sheet was about 1cm thick, could of made it thicker but it reduced OK

I am pleased with the end result. I wish I had some more interesting small cutters, I have some great ones but they are too big it would be very difficult reducing a disc 15cm wide but only 1 cm deep I imagine.

Colour mixing

Kato Colour mixing Chart - this post can be found on my new blog here

www.carajane.co.uk

Conditioning Kato Clay

Having recently discovered Kato clay I am now a complete convert. I love the Kato clay to work with and I now find Fimo too soft and sticky (although I now realise this is a problem with fimo at the moment). The problem with Kato is it is SO difficult to condition. I haven't tried the latest formulation of Kato which is supposed to be easier to condition yet.

I have tried some different methods for conditioning Kato clay and here are my findings.

As I would Fimo
With Fimo and Premo you can just squash up a bit of clay and roll it through the pasta machine. The odd block of Fimo would be a bit more of a challenge and would need a bit of squishing and rolling in your hands first before it was soft enough to be rolled in the pasta machine.
This doesn't work for Kato, it is too firm for me to squish into a ball from the packet and many blocks just fall into crumbs the minute you try.

Cutting slices
I found out about this from Sue on Cindy Leitz's blog, she passed on the information given on an Australian clay suppliers website Over the Rainbow. 

Cut a bit of clay and roll it firmly to flatten the clay. Lift it and turn it so it doesn't stick to your work surface. Keep rolling until it is just a little thicker than the thickest setting on your pasta machine (that's a good time to get those thickness chips out to see how

thick it needs to be).Roll the clay through the pasta machine on it's thickest setting. Without folding or bending the sheet roll it through a thinner setting. And again without folding another thinner setting, the aim is to make a thin sheet as thin clay conditions faster. When you have thin sheet fold it and roll it and continue doing so until it is conditioned.

This works but it is slow and I am impatient. Each slice is small and if you are using big amounts of clay it takes far too long. The secret I worked out at last is the initially rolling. If the clay is crumbly roll it more with the rolling pin first or you get crumbles in the pasta machine as shown (I hate that!). I try to short cut putting several sheets together but I think it is best to have them part conditioned first on reflection before bulking up. This is also basically the method recommended by Donna Kato herself and she should know!




Food Processor

I bought a little chopper just for clay. I found I could put about 2oz of clay in at a time without stressing the motor (getting horrible grinding noises) as long as I chopped them into pieces about 2x1x1cm. Run the chopper in bursts until the clay is lots of fine pieces. I then find it easiest to put the clay crumbs into a Ziploc bag and then roll them with a rolling pin in the bag. This helps the crumbs to stick together with no fear of loosing them. The clay is nice and warmed up by now and should go through the pasta machine no problem. A couple of rolls and it is ready to use.

To be honest this is a fair bit of hassle too. It's great if you are colour mixing from a recipe as you can just put the parts in the chopper and it is more than half mixed already. I am buying big blocks of Kato the 12.5oz ones so will probably have a conditioning session at the start of a project using the chopper and then store the clay in sheets. They can easily be reconditioned by passing through the pasta machine.

The bottom picture shows what it looks like out of the Ziploc bag on the left and after first pass through the pasta machine on the right.






Jana whack
This is the method used by  Jana Roberts Benzon. Basically you take your block of clay and whack it. Leave the clay in the wrapper and whack it with a hammer, rubber mallet, wooden rolling pin. Works pretty well and is a good arm exercise, tension reliever. Not ideal with those who have problems with hands/arms and it means getting stuff not in my clay kit out. You still have to do a bit of rolling to get it thin enough to go in pasta machine but no crumbs in sight!
(more info in an article at Polymer Clay Express )

Conclusion

Since I wrote this I have found that if I am colour mixing a fair amount of clay I use the chopper but other than that I tend to use the slice method cause as long as I roll well to start with crumbs are avoided and it saves getting extra kit out. I am using the big blocks of Kato so I do 1/4 block at a time - about 3 oz. This would be 3 slices so it isn't so bad.

Anyone else got any conditioning tips to share? I have heard people talk about driving over it with their car but that's a bit extreme for me I think!

Avoid contaminating your clay in the pasta machine with other colours of clay.

I am sure some of you know this already but I only just worked it out so I thought I would share it in case some of you don't know either.

I clean my pasta machine with a baby wipe between colours of clay. I wipe  the underside of the rollers (underneath the machine) where the crumbles sometimes collect and I wipe the top whilst turning the handle to make sure the rollers are clean. Sometimes though I still get annoying streaks of colour across my clay and I couldn't work out where they were coming from. I decided it was time to clean my pasta machine. My husband took it apart and cleaned it for me. Great!

Not  long after that a purple streak appeared on my white clay! Horror it had only just been taken apart and thoroughly cleaned! I played around trying to work out where the clay could possibly be coming from. I turned the handle to rotate the rollers backwards and there was my answer!

Pasta machine with stray purple clay on the rollers

I checked it out and if you turn the rollers backwards you get little stray bits of clay pretty much everytime. I am guessing my contamination comes when I inadvertantly rotate the rollers the wrong way a little. I guess it comes from the scrape plates at the bottom (where the crumbles collect on the outside).

Now I have incorporated rolling the rollers backwards as part of my cleaning routine and I haven't had any contamination issues since.

Lentil Swirl Bead Tip for Patterns

Well if you have made a lot of lentil swirl beads you will already know this but in case you haven't here's something I learnt about patterns today (I don't normally swirl with patterns usually it is just a pile of scrap).

I carefully placed a flower in the centre of the ball I started swirling thinking it would look nice swirled - but it disappeared!

Swirl lentil bead that started with a flower in the centre that 'disappeared' 

Desiree does say in her excellent tutorial on making lentil swirl beads that the rotation does draw the clay from the outer areas towards the centre of the bead. With pattern this means that the pattern at the edges expands and the pattern in the centre shrinks to the point of almost disappearing at the very top of the bicone. So when choosing where to place your round ball to start swirling put the pretty bit off centre! If it is in the middle it is likely to shrink very tiny the outer edge gets huge and somewhat distorted so the best place for that pretty flower is somewhere between the two.

 

Swirl lentil with flowers placed between centre and edge

This was using up my offcuts from some Paisley spoons I made for presents today (oh and one for me too ;).
I have refined my technique and can now make the fabric up (from the preprepared canes - I still have plenty!) and cover 6 spoons in about an hour. I have a feeling I will be making plenty more so that's good news.