Friendly plastic butterfly

I made a friendly plastic butterfly for the Amaco butterfly competition - all the entries will go to the holocaust museum, each to represent a child who died. I had decided not to enter the competition, as I was very busy at the time, plus international postage is expensive. But somebody from Amaco emailed me and asked if I would submit an entry, which was flattering...

I made this in a bit of a hurry, and it's not as good as I would have liked, but I didn't have time to re-do it, so off it went! It was on display on the Amaco stand at CHA 2010!


The butterfly is about 4 inches across, and I used a colouring technique I learnt from Liz Welch - doodled alcohol ink. I didn't have time to take step by step pics when I was making the butterfly, but have included some from an earlier project (below) so that you can see how easy it is to do. To make the butterfly, I used 2 wing shapes cut from doodled sticks and a body made from a piece cut from a fuschia stick. I joined them all together by dipping the edges into hot water for a few moments then pressing them together and holding in position for a few moments. The antennae were made from copper wire.


To make doodled alcohol ink Friendly Plastic, take a stick of gold Friendly Plastic and drip some alcohol ink on it. The newer bright colours are good for this technique. You can blow the ink around using a straw if you like.

Keep adding aclohol ink. If you're blowing it with a straw, you will find that the ink you're blowing comes to a sudden stop when it touches dry ink. So, eventually you will have to drip or dab the ink into the gaps.

This is what the finished piece looks like, along with the inks I used.

Now take a white Sakura souffle pen, and draw around the blobs using wriggly lines, then infill with doodles, until the piece is doodled all over.


Easy to do, and looks very effective. Liz uses it to make beautiful pendants, by cutting it to shape and size and laying it into bezels, then covering with layers of resin and trapping doodles or tiny embellishments between the layers.

Conditioning Polymer Clay

This is a first - a blog post without pictures! I have been playing with polymer clay, but not nearly as much as I'd like to, and I haven't finished anything off to a standard that I'm happy to show off yet!

The problem with polymer clay is that you have to condition it before you can play with it. Clay is properly conditioned when you can fold a thin sheet in half and have no cracking at the fold.

Different brands of polymer clay have different properties, and as I have learnt this week, until you understand what they are, you won't necessarily be successful in preparing the clay for play.

I worked with Fimo Classic last summer, and found it a bit of a pain to condition, even using a pasta machine, so a friend suggested I try Fimo Soft. Fimo Soft is easier to condition, but I don't like the look or feel of the baked clay as much as baked Classic.

I worked with Sculpey's new lightweight Polymer Clay - it is a dream to condition as it is very soft and easy to knead. It also takes colour very well after baking - using alcohol inks and Johnson's Klear/Future acrylic floor polish. If I had found this first, I probably wouldn't have tried any other polymer clays! Except that I like to use black clay, and I haven't seen this product in any colour other than white - it may exist, but I haven't seen it.

I had read that Kato Clay is harder to condition, but worth the extra effort in terms of the finished product. I have tried it this week, and would agree completely that the finished product is the best I've tried, but the conditioning nearly defeated me.

I asked around for suggestions about conditioning polymer clay. Friends suggested that I place the pack of clay in my underwear or that I sit on the package for a while to warm it up before trying to condition it in a pasta machine. I have discovered that this works well - but only for some clays.

Fimo clay is conditioned by the use of gentle warmth and kneading, or running the slightly warmed clay through a pasta machine. So the underwear or sitting on it technique works well.

Kato Clay is conditioned by pressure, so warmth doesn't help at all. And even in thin slices, running it through my pasta machine just resulted in a load of crumbs which I couldn't get to stick together enough to run through the machine again, and which were too hard to knead. I spent an evening trying to get crumbs through the machine in enough quantity to stick together. It was really hard to get through the machine, and I had to run it through between 35 and 4o times to get it manageable, but it still wasn't properly conditioned. I gave up and left it alone for a couple of days.

And then I had a brainwave. I remembered reading that you can use your Wizard to condition polymer clay, so ran some clay through it, between plastic bags. The clay got softer, but the bags stretched and popped. I ran some more through between pieces of teflon craft sheet. The clay got softer, but I managed to split the craft sheet! After running the clay through the Wizard about 10 times it seemed much softer, but also seemed to be getting 'dry', so I moved it to the pasta machine and ran it through a few times. It was really easy to run through the pasta machine, and working it between metal seemed to make it less dry and more plastic and elastic.

So, I now have my perfect method for conditioning KatoClay - run small amounts through the Wizard ten times, then through the pasta machine 10 times. Combine the resulting small sheets into bigger sheets, until all the clay you want to work with is in one sheet, and can be folded without any cracking at the fold. This method is much easier than the pasta machine alone, and certainly much much quicker.

I need to experiment with what I use to protect the Wizard plates whilst running the polyclay through the Wizard - polythene is too stretchy, teflon craft sheet is not stretchy enough, and probably too thin. Ideally, 2 thin metal plates would be best, but until I can think of how to create those (cutting up the Christmas 'Quality Street' tins?), I will try using the thin plastic used for slot-together files & boxes, or acetate from Christmas Card packaging, or transparencies. I'll edit this post and let you know what works best when I have tried a few things out!

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda - Happy New Year

I'd just like to wish you all a very happy,
healthy and creative 2010 - or,
as we say in Wales -

BLWYDDYN NEWYDD DDA!!!!

I'll drink a toast to you all at midnight. Chink chink.

Perfectly clear

I signed up for a swap called 'perfectly clear', where I had to make an item which incorporated a clear element. I made a votive 'shade' by stamping on 2 pieces of acetate with several shades of Brilliance ink. I used acetate recycled from Christmas card packaging, but you could also use transparencies suitable for lazer printers, the acetate just needs to be either reasonably heatproof or stiff enough to stay clear of the candle flame.

I used 4 eyelets to hold the acetate pieces together. I included a clear tealight/votive candle holder, which can take either a real candle or one of the small battery operated votive candles.


It does have a wintry theme, and makes snowflake patterns all over the wall - maybe my swap partner will like it enough to bring it out each Christmas!

Green & gold Friendly Plastic mask

My step daughter asked me if I could make a mask similar to the one I had made for my daughter:

but in greens.

A mask takes between 3 and 4 sticks of Friendly Plastic, so I checked my stash and found 2 iridescent green sticks and 2 gold. I cut one of the gold sticks in half and then cut each half lengthwise into 7 strips. I did the same with one of the green strips.


I have a paper mache mask form, which I covered in aluminium foil, so that the Friendly Plastic wouldn't stick to it.


I then set my melting pot to 140 degrees and filled it with water. I dropped a gold strip into the water, coloured side down, and after about 10 seconds I fished it out (using a wooden handled pointy tool), and laid it onto the mask form. I repeated with all my gold strips, until I had my mask base. I pressed the pointy tool into each joint as I worked, the joints are what holds the mask together and I wanted them to be as strong as possible.


I topped up the water, and repeated the process using the green strips, overlapping and joining onto the gold strips as I went.


Next, I put a green strip onto a piece of non stick craft sheet and heated it with my craft gun until soft. I pushed a cutter into the Friendly Plastic then dropped the craft sheet, plastic and cutter into a bowl of cold water. After 10 seconds I took it all out, removed the cutter, peeled the plastic off the craft sheet and used sharp scissors to separate the shape I had cut out from the plastic. I repeated with the green and gold until I had 6-8 shapes of each colour.


I heated the centre of the mask with my heat gun, just enough to make it tacky, then laid a shape at top centre, and continued heating until I could see the shape was soft. I pushed into the shape with the end of the pointy tool - this gave a 'crease' down the 'petal' and also pushed the shape firmly into the layer below, making a strong joint.

I repeated with more heat and more shapes until the mask was finished. You need to be careful not to apply too much heat at once, or the mask will melt so much that it loses definition and oozes off the foil...


Once happy with the mask, I left it to cool on the mask form for an hour or so, then just popped it off.


All it needs now is elastic!

Stampbord triptych

Trizzy sent me a stampbord triptych a couple of months ago, and I loved the idea, so I made this one to give as a Christmas present.

I took two of the 2 x 1 inch pieces, drenched with water and zapped with a hot heat gun until they bubbled.

I used fluid chalk inks to colour the bubbled pieces and a 2 x 2 inch piece, then stamped images using Chapel Road stamps and Stazon ink.


I scraped and scratched here and there, but you can hardly tell as when I added a layer of glossy accents to seal it and give it a shine, the ink dissolved just enough that the scratches disappeared!


Finally, I added tiny hinges, and coloured the edges and hinges with a brown Sharpie pen.

Copper & agate brooch

I had some 16 gauge copper wire to play with, and decided to make a brooch as a Christmas gift. I had an agate heart which had a pre-drilled hole of about the right size, so threaded that onto the wire. I used round nosed pliers to bend the wire into the shapes I wanted, then used a chasing hammer to flatten all the bends, which stiffens the piece so that it holds its shape.


I hammered and flattened the end into a point, and used much finer wire to wrap around the bottom of the brooch to hold the last curve of the wire in place. Thankfully the recipient likes it!

My new play space

Well, I've finally moved out of the dining room into a proper play space. I'm not fully organised yet, so please excuse the messy piles of stuff here and there!

This was once a bedroom, and is still the spare room if/when we have a house full, as the sofa is a fold out bed. To the left of the sofa is the filing drawer unit that I store my unmounted stamps in. To the right of the sofa are the iris carts which were almost the whole of my storage space in the dining room.


But now I have cupboards... no curtains yet, but lots of cupboards!


And spaces on top of cupboards and underneath cupboards... the cupboards were once a mini kitchen which is no longer needed, so we moved them in here. We had to buy new worktops as we've organised the cupboards differently, but we managed to find a cheap worktop at a bargain price.


I have invested in lots of plastic boxes so that I can organise things in the cupboards, but a number of them are empty as yet, as I haven't sorted everything out into its final home yet. I m determined to be properly organised, and have even started putting labels on the boxes so I know what's in each of them. I've already used one dymo cartridge and need to buy another to carry on!






I bought a spice rack for the inside of a kitchen unit, and then had a 'eureka' moment, as I realised that fitting these to the inside of these cupboards would be perfect storage for my embossing powders and colourwash sprays and would be really easy to see the colours.



I'm not sure what the best things to out in drawers are, but for the moment this is my metalworking drawer:


This one's full of napkins and glue guns:


and this one has some of my beads, brayers and non stick sheets. No, I'm not sure about the logic, either!


Because there is actually somewhere to put everything, I am pulling boxes out, using the things I need, then putting them back into the box and putting the box away as I work, so hopefully this room won't degenerate into the dreadful mess the dining room was. Things just piled up on the table there until they reached avalanche point, and slid off the table, at which point I had to try and clear and sort everything. And I could never find anything!

Apart from finding places for the last few piles of stuff, and adding more labels to the boxes, the only things that need to sort out are curtains, the lighting, and the power supply. This room is much lighter than the dining room was, but when I am working on the worktop am standing between the light and my work. The desk lamp helps, but is not enough. We have got some spare lights that fit under the wall units. All I have to do is persuade the man in my life to install them... As for the power supply, I have a double socket next to the sofa, and another in the corner of the room above the worktop. I am right handed, so I either have to use the tools which need an electric supply on the small section of worktop near the window, or use them on the longer piece with the wires getting in my way. I think I'll run an extension lead under the units to somewhere near the door. Makes sense to have another couple of sockets anyway!

It's lovely to work in here, and what's nicer, it's a quiet room at the back of the house away form the traffic noise, and the window looks out over my lovely garden! Oh, and there's a bathroom next door, so carrying water is never going to be an issue!