Tutorial links

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 to play with.

http://www.everclay.dk/1_Tutlinks/tutlinks_US.htm is a very organised and comprehensive list of links 

http://beadyeyedbrat.com/polymerclay.html has a whole host of links both under 'Our Clay Tutorials' and 'Tutorial links' again they are well organised and comprehensive.

Not forgetting of course the wonderful http://www.polymerclaycentral.com/ . That link will take you to the master index of projects but there is a whole host of other things that are great about PCC - if you haven't been to the forum yet you should!

Textured Beads, mini tutorial

I'd love to show you how I got this great texture over on my new blog - you can find the post here
http://www.carajane.co.uk/2010/05/textured-beads-mini-tutorial.html

Look forward to seeing you at www.carajane.co.uk

Clayworks by Kim Detmers Tutorial

Kim Detmers has kindly shared a tutorial on her blog of how to make this lovely Spring Bouquet. Check it out here http://claybykim.blogspot.com/p/tutorial.html

Playing with the extruder - square sticks

I have been playing a lot with  polymer clay recently, trying out new things.
I thought I would share some of them with you, here's the first...

Square sticks

I didn't quite take the right pictures so you will have to piece it together a bit yourself.

I put some sticks of polymer clay in the extruder barrel instead of the usual discs to see what would happen. As you can see I was just playing around and not taking my time to be neat. I would cut them into neater square cross section sticks of even size in future. On the right are 2 bits of the extrusion you get with a triangle pattern.

Here is a shot I took for my reference. I used square sticks in the barrel and the square extruder die and I got out the square diamond patterns. Here you can see what they looked like put together. There are 16 of the extrusions in that pattern piece. I put 4 together to make a larger square and reduce it, then cut and restacked into the slice shown.



I guess if you rotated the square extruder die in relation to the square sticks you would get a quarters pattern.

(just playing about with the e-pen I am trying out hence the sketch - I drew it on paper with the e-pen which also captures it as a jpeg)



You could of course just cut square or triangular  pieces of polymer clay and put them together to make this but it might just start you of on an experimentation with the extruder of your own.

The tutorial is here!

The Surfing Cat Graduated Pointy Stripe Extruder Technique - Polymer Clay Tutorial

Kato extruder beads

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.

Tutorials from Parole de pate

Having been off my feet recovering from surgery for quite some time last year and now again  I have probably had more hours than most people to trawl round the internet. There is an amazing amount of information and inspiration for polymer clay artists out there. I am sure you all have your favourite blogs and sources of information (feel free to post a link in the comments to any of your favourites as I may have missed some).

I wanted to share a few blogs that aren't in English with you as it took me a while to come across them and then I was put off initally by the language problem - my French is rather rusty and not that technical anyway. Then I discovered Google Translate! To start with I loaded the web link into the google translate page everytime but then I found the translate button. If you scroll down to the bottom of this linked page you can find a button you can drag to your tool bar for your language. I now have the English one on mine and if I find a site that is in a different language I press the button and it translates it (often rather ammusingly but you can get the gist - cane is translated as duck in French by google )

So check out the French blog   http://paroledepate.canalblog.com/  It is described as a 'living newspaper' of all things polymer clay. There are plenty of tutorials on this site, from artists around the globe.
In the Canes tutos archieve there are 7 pages, yes 7 pages!, of different tutorials of all sorts of canes.Polymer clay addict heaven!
They have even kindly translated some into English and these can be found on the translation__traduction page

The first tutorial on that page is from Nathalie is to make these beautiful extruder flowers  as seen in some of these beads above. I have very briefly tried this with a few bits of scrap clay but without the Core Adapter as I don't have one, I replaced it with a disc with 7 holes in as shown by  Galina in her Russian Blog (again that google translate came in handy!) Here is my first attempt.

 

Need a bit more contrast next time but they were the colours I had out at the time

Cindy Leitz has a video which shows this technique as part of her members video library - Extruder flowers video information

Polymer clay cane tutorials put to the test

For the review please see the post on my new blog -  ww.carajane.co.uk

I have found and used lots of free polymer clay cane tutorials on the internet, thank you to all those clever people out there who share their knowledge.

For a while I have come across tutorials that you have to buy and I have always wondered if it would be worth it. Well one day I decided I would splash out and give them a go. I have been delighted with the canes I have made and I hope I can now take what I have learned from these talented artists into some amazing creations of my own.

The main difference between these tutorials and the ones people share freely is the level of detail. They are complex canes and there are many pages of photographs to make sure you can follow them easily.

I have bought 3 now and love them all.

For the review please see the post on my new blog -  ww.carajane.co.uk

For the review please see the post on my new blog -  ww.carajane.co.uk

My Hippy Flower Cane Tutorial from Sigaliot Designs 

My Flower with curling petals cane tutorial from Zuleykha

es.

 My Ayelet beads tutorial flower

For the review please see the post on my new blog -  ww.carajane.co.uk