Someone had passed on a beautiful vase of flowers which included lavander and pink roses in the mix to me just before memorial day weekend, and I was hoping to try and create rose petal covered polymer clay beads. The plan was to create hand molded beads from left over polymer clay and then “wrap” them with the rose petals which I was hoping to coat with resin as a sealant. Ambitious, indeed, and sadly, it didn’t work.
I ended up with quite a bunch of handmolded beads which I had made by pressing together two halves from a silicone rubber mold. If you look closely, the edges are not perfect although the face is smooth and the shape came out rather well. I pressed the two faces onto a gold eyepin to embed a bead hole and then “smoothed” the edges together with my fingertips to “seal” the two faces together.
I then created a polymer clay coating over it using earth tone colored clay. These are by no means perfectly round and are obviously handmade, but it will enable you to create your polymer clay beads without resorting to creating cane-related designs. I baked the beads over the weekend and have come up with quite a batch and will be creating a piece out of it before the week is out.
Please bear in mind that I’m experimenting here. The colors I chose were: Jewelry Gold, Pottery (Terra Cotta), Antique Gold, Brown and Copper. I also balanced out two matte or solid colors (Pottery and Brown) with three pearlescent colors with a shimmer (Jewelry Gold, Antique Gold and Copper).
I used two regular shapes, puff round and puff oval, and experimented with this swiss cross bead which was a little tricky to “coat” because the corners were blunted by the polymer clay coating. (Lesson learned.)
My original plan is to coat this with resin, but I am thinking now that the matte texture of the baked polymer clay looks good as is. I’m trying to weigh the pros and the cons.
Over the weekend, too, I created some square canes with leftover polymer clay, still using this same design. More on that later.
Gotham Chick 