Hi guys, its Cindy Lietz, your Polymer Clay
Tutor, and today’s studio tip is saving
your blends.
Now if you’ve ever done project like these
Sweet Pea earrings where you’ve made a blend,
and you’ve cut out the pieces from it, your
left over strips can look like this, and what
a lot of people do is just ball them all up
and use them for scrap.
Well, you don’t need to do that, you can
actually salvage this blend, it won’t be
exactly the same, but it still will be a blend,
and the trick to doing that is a couple of
things.
First, you can take… if you have more than
one section of the blend what you can do is
lay the colors on top of each other where
they match.
So for example, I’ve got the white on this
side, Purple on this side, and I’m just
goin’ to line this up where the Blue would
match right like that, and lay it right on
top like that.
Then, what we can do is we can just fold this
up, making sure to line up everything, the
way…color to color, and then we’ll do
that again, just fold this up, color to color.
Now there’s gonna be a little bit of some
missing color in the middle here, but that’s
not gonna be too much of a problem.
What we’re gonna do is just sort of bunch
this together like this, flatten it out with
the roller, and run it through the pasta machine
a few more times, and lets do this at the
thickest setting, just keep my fingers to
the side of the blend, run it through, a few
times, and as you can see, we’re starting
to save that blend.
So you don’t need to just ball it all up,
you can get a pretty good blend just by gathering
that together in a neater way.
Now if you want another way to save your blends
or any of your veneers or sheets and things
like that… say you’re done with the project
for the day, you don’t wanna make any more
earrings, but you still have a lovely piece
of blend that you wanna save for another day.
Well, this idea actually came from Carolyn
Good from 2goodclaymates, and I think there’s
several other people that have done it as
well, and what this is… is I’ve got a
binder here where I’ve filled it up with
plastic sheets, they’re the protector sheets…
I’ll move this out of the way a bit so you
can see it better, and what I’ve done is,
I’ve sliced open one side of the sheet,
right along this side, and just so that you
can open it up and then stick the blend right
inside.
Now because these are, you know, acid free
and stuff, and this particular… this is
the heavy duty kind, I tested it ahead of
time to make sure that it was polymer clay
compatible.
And you can tell it by just putting a piece
inside the plastic sheet and leave it for
a day or two, and see if it gets all sticky,
if it gets all sticky and gummy then that’s
not compatible and it won’t work.
But this works beautifully, I can just flip
through my sheets, I’ve got all sorts of
faux wood veneers, Mokume Gane, even a little
bit of faux Raku, some rainbow blends, and
it’s a wonderful way to save your sheets
of polymer clay and veneers.
Don’t use these ones that are the frosty
kind, they’re sort of a frosted look to
the sheet, I haven’t found them to be compatible,
just the nice clear heavy duty ones will work
beautifully, okay?
So I hope you enjoyed that, and instead of
just balling up your blends or scraps, you
can use them again in a nice way.
So, I’ll see you next time and bye for now.
