Some time ago I presented the Skinner blend beads necklace, the ‘skewer’ beads shown here are made in the same way.
I call them ‘skewer’ beads because I made them by rolling polymer clay sheets which I wrapped around wooden skewers. Then I cut the sheets in sections before baking.
For the beads on the photo I
- used a rest of white polymer clay as support,
- mixed some green and blue rests and used as base,
- cut razor-thin slices of my canes and added them as decoration and
- smoothed the surface carefully with a glass rod (it was meant to stir one’s tea ;-) But after I used it for polymer clay it won’t touch food anymore!).
Afterwards I threaded the beads on a simple leather string that matches wonderfully the colour of the beads.
The used polymer clay canes are mostly transparent just as for the egg and the flower canes of the polymer clay box.
I still enjoy this necklace.
I really wanted to play around a little with ‘jade’, especially because this is a wonderful way of using up rests of coloured, perhaps self-mixed polymer clay ;-)
As for the subject ‘jade’: Glassattic was a great help to me.
For the beads on the photo I
- mixed transparent polymer clay with a little blue green polymer clay to get ‘jade beads’,
- made black polymer clay beads that I carved slightly with the back of a knife after cutting them (but before baking them!) and
- made wire beads by wrapping the wire tightly around a metal rod (a metal kebab skewer) and cutting it with sharp wire cutters in regular intervals.
If necessary you must file the ends a little bit!
For this necklace I
- used up the ‘rest jade’ of the carved candle holder and
- made silver coloured mica beads (metallic polymer clay) that I carved slightly with a credit card (the dent is larger than for the black beads further up).
But of course you can embellish the tubular beads that are made on skewers with other techniques and in other widths, also (as you can see at the Skinner blend beads necklace ;-)).
Here I varnished the black polymer clay sheet to be wrapped around the skewer (with I don’t remember what) in red, let it dry and pushed then the whole sheet through the pasta machine to let the varnish crack.
Additionally I made some black-only beads of the same width.
I still find this combination beautiful ;-)
Links:
On the topic of ‘faux jade’: Glassattic — Faux many => click there on ‘jade’
Here at unikatissima:
Skinner Blend Beads Necklace
Transparent Polymer Clay
Polymer Clay Flower Canes
Carving Polymer Clay
Entries containing the word ‘cane’
I tried it with one of our multiple sockets and it simply didn’t look good because I couldn’t insert the tealight deep enough into the sockets because of the noses inside, so I will go back to a traditional Advent wreath this year again ;-)
