so in this video I want to show you how i made these pretty bookmarks, and it's a technique that you can use to make pendants and anything else that you want to make. I was at a family dinner over Easter and my Step-daughter had the most beautiful napkins, so I asked her if I could have a few.I said I think I can transfer that on to clay. so that's exactly what I've done, and it took a few tries to get the the technique right, but it worked really well and I'm quite happy with them, so i thought I'd show that to you today. I'm using Premo clay you need a good sticky clay. I haven't tried it on any other brands, but this is what I'm using - is premo claay and to demonstrate eill I'll do bookmarks, but like I said you can do pendants, - this is one that I actually went back with some prismacolor markers and bumped up the color a wee bit, because it came out a little bit faded. so I have some bookmarks that sort of came out faded also, from my first tries and I'll show you how to play with your markers afterwards. this one I coated with liquid polymer clay - Kato clay, and it's a little bit tricky because your first coating you're going to see all the little bits of a paper that didn't get removed, but- so you're probably going to want - if it's a pendant you're going to want to seal it with something. second coat seemed to seal all those little bits of paper in pretty good, so I'm pretty happy with that. you're going to see when we remove the the paper - this is a really durable finish, I just scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed with my hands to remove the paper and paper came off and ink stayed on. the other thing to be aware of like I'll show you on this one, on these napkins and these ones came from Costco, and you can buy pretty napkins almost anywhere, but all along the edge it's got little perforations, and it's really unfortunate because some of the pretty pattern is there, but this is what happens when you use the area with the perforations so I will probably take my markers and just go in and sort of clean that up a little bit. but mostly I think what I'll do is just avoid the perforated area because it's problematic. but anyway so let's get started. so all you're going to need is your Premo clay and for the bookmarks I've rolled it out on the third thickest setting of my pasta maker and I've cut cut it already into - like four inches long, but your length is really up to you. four and a half inches is what these are, so I thought that was pretty close to ideal. these are a bit bigger but I mean, it's really up to you. so I have my clay here prepared, and I'll just straighten that out. It's a little bit crooked. but ok and then the width of them is again up to you. I'm going- I didn't even measure it but I'd say probably an inch, slightly more than an inch. so I'm just going to divide this into as many sections as I get out of this piece of clay so I think these would make wonderful gifts and wouldn't these be beautiful as a wedding shower or wedding favors at a wedding table, they'd be just awesome. so I've got four pieces here, and I'm going to use one of these bootlace ferrules to put a hole in there already - the hole you put in is going to be determined by whatever cording you want to use. you could use rat tail or you could use a t-shirt yarn that you've made, or this is all done with Sari ribbon, and I just had these metal big holed beads, but certainly you could do a nice polymer clay bead right there.so either use something like this, or a good sturdy straw will do the job also. so I'm going to leave at least an eighth of an inch for strength and I bake these for at least an hour - my usual hour and six minutes that I set my oven at. because you want them to come out very flexible so if you can see it's quite bendy, so it's it's not going to break. so then I'll take my napkin and cut a section and I find these napkins have at least three plies to them, so I remove two of the plies and the best way to do that is is on your cut edge and I'm going to have to bring that a little closer to me so I can see, but sometimes you can just sort of work that edge a little bit with your fingers and get it started. and let's see here let's get a tool in there and help you find that edge so you just want the top edge you can do it with two two layers too but one layer you'll be able to burnish it better. so I'm going to separate some of these bookmarks take them from this side here, and give myself just a little bit of spacing and I can probably do two at the same time. so I'm going to lay this pattern down and you see right through it, so you'll be able to tell exactly where you want it. just cut off the excess and then I'm going to take a piece of patty paper or use a piece of parchment paper or some type of paper that's thin that you can see through. and I'm just going to burnish that on with my fingers, and I want to make sure I don't get any wrinkles in it and get good contact with the clay. and you could do these one at a time but it's just as easy to do two, if your pattern will allow it. burnish that on good, and then flip it over and I'm working on a piece of wax paper, so you really want to work on some type of paper that helps you pull it off, so you don't have to get a blade underneath and distort it. so now I'm going to cut another piece - sorry I keep hitting my lamp. and let's see I'll try to avoid that perforated area and again I'm going to find that edge and then I'll put the ink side down okay let's see here, I want to get as much of this pattern in there as I can okay then when you're happy with it and I could have cut that apart and put it in a little bit you know if I'd wanted this whole flower a little bit more prominent I could have cut it apart and done them one at a time so I'll take that piece of paper again and burnish that. the burnishing is really what makes this work I'll cut off the excess and that can be baked just like that. so that's basically all all I'm doing. so that's the bookmarks.I won't do the other two because it's kind of redundant to do it, but maybe we'll do a pendant. so that's going to go on my index card, and in the oven and I'll cover it with my baking tin, and bake it for an hour and six minutes- counting the preheat time because I don't preheat. so now I have another piece of sticky white this one is done on the number one setting for the pasta machine, so that's my thickest setting and I'm going to cut out so I'll cut out a circle and you could actually even use a piece of paper and get that beveled edge - a piece of plastic I mean, so then I'm going to look at my napkin decide where I want my image to be and give me a bit of a smaller section to put on there, and again take off the extra plies so you know that one just took the back ply so I got to get one more off here so I'll put this down see where I want it and then I want some of the flower petals showing, so let's go maybe here - take my little piece of paper to burnish it on. now I'm going to peel it off of here so that I can trim it a bit leave a bit of an edge if you want to try to get that pattern to wrap around and you don't want to leave too much of this paper on here because I found that what it was doing was pulling against the pendant when it was curing and it sort of caused it to lift a little bit, and I didn't get as good an impression. okay so what I'm going to do now, is I'm going to actually put it on my domed baking baking form first. I bought these in a bead store. they're a big cabochon for - not really quite sure what you would have used them for, but it was almost like a belt buckle. but they do work great for the larger pendants. I can't get this size to fit on a soda can bottom. but so whenever you're doing a curved pendant like that, it's really important to to get the edges to to stick, otherwise you get kind of a ruffled edge look, and it just won't work for you now I might miss a little bit of color here on the edges, the edges are a little harder to get to conform to the round shape, but that should do it. so that's going to be cured also with the bookmarks and I will be back when it's all cured and I'll show you how to take the paper off. ok I'm back, so this has been cured and I let it cool down completely, and I think it's important to to let it cool down. I don't think you want to put the pieces in when the ink is hot. you don't want to put that in the water. so I'll put this one in the water and I already put the other two pieces that I did in here, and they've been sitting here, soaking for probably at least a good half hour. so you're just going to use your fingers, and just start to rub off that paper. so it's going to take quite a while, now when I was doing the previous ones from last night I sort of had the bowl of water on my lap while I was watching a movie, and I would say it takes at least 15 minutes to rub it all off. and I did try on one of them to sort of hurry it along with a little bit of a scrubby, but it took off too much -too much ink, so you don't want to do that. so I'm just going to do part of this for now and then you'll see.- let's see if we can get at least one side off so you want to rinse it off often, but it's pretty durable you can even really scrape it with your nails and not do any damage, the thing with the paper, is you're going to find -you think you've got it all off, and then it dries and you see little bits of white. so as long as it feels kind of rough, it probably has paper on it. once it starts to feel smooth, then you'll know you've got all the paper off so I also take a terry cloth ( towel ) and that's going to help quite a bit to get the paper off. so that's starting to feel pretty good. so that left lots of ink there, I'm really happy with that. I still have to do the other side, and the pendant, but that's basically all you do so while I've got a minute, I just want to show you how - if you don't get the transfer you want, or even if you do get the transfer you want, and you want to kind of bump up the color, I'm going to show you how I use markers on it.- just get this paper off of this one real fast so I don't know about you, but I'm going on the hunt for more beautiful napkins because this was lots of fun and I really enjoyed it and I hope you try it and enjoy it too! okay, so that's pretty much all gone. the terry cloth helps quite a bit. so these are pretty durable - when I do the bookmarks, I always tell my friends that I give them to, or customers or whatever, that you know if you're reading in the bathtub and it falls in the bathtub it's not going to be a problem. you don't really need to seal them at all, - for jewelry you might consider it, but that's not coming off! you know I think that's pretty good. so anyways I'll put that away, and then now I'll work on one of the older ones with the markers. so I've got my prismacolor markers out, - you can use the spectrum noir I think they're called, the chameleon ones - any alcohol based markers. you might even be able to use sharpies I'm not really sure but anyways, I have these prismacolor ones and I just love them. and to help blend the colors I'm using a water brush this is a koi water brush and it's filled with alcohol -so that'll help me just blend things out. so it's just a matter of choosing your colors and I'm using the brush section, and then I'll just kind of bump up some of these colors and then the water brush with the alcohol in it can really soften those edges, so you'll retain that sort of watercolor look. let's try blue - so I'm using the thicker brush section -caps are so hard to get off there we go I'm going to just fill in some of what didn't get transferred - put your own ink in these little water brushes are really nice, so I could play with that for hours and test it in water afterwards I guess to see how permanent it is. it should be okay though, because alcohol ink won't come off in water. so I don't think I'd even seal these. though you could I hope you can see that, how that blends that right out so you get really quite a lovely effect so anyways that's an easy transfer with napkins. hope you enjoyed that and make lots of them and I'll see you next time - bye!
