Polymer Clay - Basics and Techniques

hi I'm Christy Friesen and thank you for joining me here at Fire Mountain Gems and beads jewelry making studio and guess what we're going to do today we are going to learn everything there is to know about polymer clay and as short a time as it takes me to tell you and then you are going to have a new addiction so just warning you after I tell you how amazing polymer clay is you're probably are going to want to spend the next six or seven years playing with it so just warning you if you don't have that kind of time I'll give you the shortened version you can have maybe two or three years worth of fun forever okay polymer clay what we have is all kinds of brands of polymer clay including primo which is my favorite all polymer clay is amazing any one you use is going to be terrific each brand has its own different little quirks and things that it does best I'm a primo gal because I do a lot of sculpting and a lot of mini canes and primo works beautifully for that other clays are good for more extended and complicating canes and if you don't know what a cane is I'll tell you that in just a second and other clays are good for working with your children because they're soft and they're easy to use etc but we're going to talk about primo a bit today because I love it so primo comes a little easy to use packages and you can get those right here at Fire Mountain Gems and beads of course and I've opened one up so you can see how soft and flexible it is that's how clay is supposed to be if it's hard as a rock because you left it in the dashboard of your car and it baked all you can do is build a little fort with it so you want to keep your clay nice and soft by storing it properly which is our basic tip number one storage this clay is an oven curing clay which means that it's not going to dry out just by laying around in your house unless your house is a thousand degrees so if you do have a hot spot in your house try to keep the clay in a cold spot something cool it doesn't get up to a hundred degrees is the best you can store it just as it is some people like to put it back in its original wrapper which seems like a lot of work to me I like ripping it all up and cut it in little chunks and throw it in a glass jar and then I can pull it back out when I'm ready to use it also if you're into being neat you can keep all the colors nice and separate I'm not neat so I like to make a big jumble because as we will discuss scraps are your friend so the first thing I want to show you is just a little bit of how to condition your clay generally speaking you're going to use a clay conditioning machine which is also called a pasta machine but we like to call it clay conditioning machine because that sounds way more artsy and that makes short work of this but you see how quick and easy this is to roll I'm going to show you this now and we'll get to that clay conditioning machine shortly but look see how mushy isn't that terrific which means that you can then blend colors and mix things very easily because this clay is so soft and flexible conditioning just refers to making your clay that's coming straight out of the package be soft and bendy like this that means it's conditioned if you can roll your clay and fold it and it doesn't have cracks on the edge it's conditioned properly a lot of people want to say well once I conditioned it you know how how long can that last for years when they're basically you want to try to condition your clay each time you're going to use it it just means it's getting all molecules all worked up and it's soft and is flexible so you're going to do that when you get started to play all right so now we've talked about our clay brands and storage of the clay now what is the basics of playing with it and why would you want to do that the basics of that are basically get your clay start smashing around have a good time so that's we're going to do I've got a couple of different colors in here and I wanted to show you a little trick I like in blending clay colors together so let me grab for my magic clay stash and what you see here is lots of bits and pieces remember I talked to you about scraps scraps are your friend when you have a lot of bits and pieces of clay like that they blend together really nicely to create new colors when you take one color of polymer and a second color of polymer and jam them together what happens is that they stay two separate colors right up until they're not and you can use that to your advantage because what that means is you can get fun things like stripes I'm going to take a little blade here cut it right down the middle and we'll talk about tools in a second so I'll come back to that but you see when I cut this open see those fun little stripes right there those stripes are showing that the clay are still separate but if I keep mashing this whether I use my hand or clay conditioning machine and I'm mashing mashing mashing mashing now I'm getting a whole nother color and if cut that in half just so you can see what's inside we have very little stripes left there's just a bit but it's becoming a different color so polymer is beautiful in that you can do both things you can have new colors or you can have stripy bits and stripy bits or what canes are all about and we'll talk about that in just a second but let me just discuss tools like any wonderful jewelry or craft product there are certain things that you need to have in order to make that product work well and that's the tools you do not have to spend a lot of money on polymer clay tools i of course encourage it because that's fun and there's all kinds of nifty things out there but you don't have to you can use a toothpick and a roller let you have at home for making pies if you bake pies and if you do would you call me over because I love them huckleberries my favorite anyway the tools that you want to use are very simple things and it's things like needle tools brushes any kind of sculpting tool that you can find and there's a number of sculpting tools you can ask your dentist for some here at Fire Mountain Gems and beads there's a number of sculpting tool kits that you can buy just about anything will work with clay metal works the best well plastic and wood are also acceptable this is your best tool not my fingers yours fingers are terrific fingers do all the blending fingerprints can make wonderful texture all that good stuff so don't underestimate the cheapness of having a good set of fingers then the last one I wanted to tell you about that is very important with polymer clay is a cutting blade and as you can see this has a really sharp edge keep that away from all your arteries and fingertips because blood on your polymer clay although pretty at first tends to darken in the oven and it doesn't look as good after that so keep the sharp edge down and away from your fingers there's often like a kind of a funky little sharper edge on the corner and there are some blades that have little handles on the edges if that's something you worry about so if you're working with kids be careful about this you may want to give them a more dull knife to cut their clay with or cut it for them okay so that's tools the only other tool I would mention is wire cutter and pliers you don't use that specifically on your clay but you do use it to add beads and things to your clay yes you can add beads to your clay this clay does not shrink in the oven which means when you Jam stuff in it it stays there there's no racking so you can put any kind of bead that will make it in the oven most polymer clays bake which is how they're fused to turn into the hardened finish product that we know and love and they're baked at about 275 degrees some have a little more a little less read the package it'll tell you right on there if you can't remember but once it's fused anything you've stuck in it will stay as a part of that so as you're designing you can stick in feathers you can stick in beads of all kinds you can stick in crystals and fossils and paper and fabric anything that can go in the oven if you're not sure if something that you've picked will be able to stick in the clay and go in the oven I suggest you take a little piece of tinfoil you put that thing on it you put it into your preheated oven if it bursts into flames don't use that anything else is good to go and as you know any kind of stone and glass and bead up the sky's the limit on what you can stick in clay so since we're talking about that why don't I show you how to do that because that seems to be something you might want I'm gonna take a bit of clay pretend that this is a marvelous pendant that's just ready for some beads to be added and I have a whole bunch of beads how convenient is that one of the tools I didn't tell you about yet but I bet you could guess is a needlenose tweezer that helps stick beads into clay if you have giant sausage fingers like I do and then the other thing we want is just some wire this is just a 28 gauge you know a craft wire it's fabulous for inserting into a bead and here I have a bead with a wire inserted let me see if you can see that right there so I've got just a little piece of coral I've got a wire in it and I am going to take that use pliers to grab it and then twist so what I'm doing is I'm twisting a little tail and you might be asking yourself well why because if I just stick in a bunch of beads in the clay I'm cutting off the end of the tail then while the clay is soft and grabby that's going to be lovely but as soon as that clay gets hardened now you have a bunch of glassy things stuck in plastic things and they're going to pop right out usually in the middle of the disco floor and then they fling it around and hit somebody in the head there's a lawsuit you don't want that so what you're going to do is make a little twisty tail Bend a little hook on the end because the hook grabs in the clay and keeps it from pulling out and you're just going to press it right in the clay so there is just a bead insert it into the clay doesn't that look lovely it looks like it the bead just went and the popped right out so that is going to stay nice and sturdy in there and if after you're done baking which we'll talk about in just a second any of those little things you put in there are Wiggly and not as strong as you wanted then you can just put a little drop of glue and help that grab any jewelry glue like e6000 will do that one other little thing here is I've got a head pin with a couple of beads on it and I've got that same little hook on the end you can press that into the clay as well and I always push it down a little bit to embed it and that is another way to make beads stick on clay now that putting beads into the clay is kind of what got me all hooked on polymer because that is one of the most fun things to be able to work immediately and have that sense of instant gratification which as we all know is the best kind of gratification so anyway now to recap we've talked about clay and conditioning we've talked a little bit about mixing and blending colors we've talked about the tools of the trade and we're going to just do one more little quickie thing for you just to kind of get you started in clay I think mixing colors is one of the things that makes polymer clay so exciting because every time it's a different thing every time you're having unexpected happening and that can kind of make the creativity part rather fun for those of you who like for things to be predictable and unpredictability is not very much fun for you then you can measure and take notes and figure out exactly what proportions you need to blend to get the same result every time but don't ask me to help you because I don't want to do that but you're welcome to now what I've got is a bunch of scraps we talked about scraps before I've smashed them all together with my clay conditioning machine when you weren't looking and I've stacked them up into a little stack and I think you can see here I've got little layers and I've started to press these layers with my hand because it makes them all Wiggly and I like Wiggly better it has a little bit more natural feel what I'm doing here is I'm going to call it a tornado twist for lack of a better term but it's a nice way of making a fun little blend so that as you mix your clays you get lots of color all at once so what I've done is I've ripped and stabbed and I'm smashing these are very technical terms they will be on the quiz at the end so I'm smashy-smashy smash and then you roll it up just like you're making a little ducky though and then I'm going to roll that so that all of those layers are now swirled around and now I'm twisting a little tornado twist and as I twist I'm pushing my hands towards each other because if you twist and make a longer you have a rope and there's really not much you can do with that now I've got my little twisted blend there and I'm going to chop it right in half with my blade remember that shiny pointy slaty side is down to the bottom and can you see what's inside look at all that little tornado twist in there this by itself is just fun you can do that all day long you come home from work your little brain dead you want to play don't really know what to do make a few of those because I don't get you in a creative mood it's easy you can snack and watch TV at the same time what's not to love and then this easily we'll go from here into a blended now let me grab my pasta machine for you a little bit of a blended fun this is a fun little machine and if you'll notice there's a knob on the side you pull that knot out and spin it around there's numbers and it makes the little rollers which are right here that gets them wider or smaller depending on how squashy you want it to be I'm going to mush this by hand you can also use just a little roller of any kind and I'm going to feed it through at almost the widest setting just run it through now you see how that's just squashing the clay and one sides boring one sides interesting each time the clay goes through because it's a thick piece getting squished it's going to blend and that blend is where all of those smeary lovely colors come in if you keep doing that and what I'll do then is a look at all over and go that amuses me I like that the best so I wrapping it into a little present for myself with the fun stuff here and I'm going to run it back through the machine so you can see I've folded the part that sickens me out of my way and I'm going to run it back through each time you do that you're doing that because you need to have the clay thicker and thicker so that when it goes through the machine it can be squashed so now we see it's even more blended if I keep that up indefinitely I will get one whole blob of clay about that same green color but if I stop right here now I have an interesting swirly fund and I could create beads out or put a sculpture on or whatever amusing thing happens next and then one last little trick I'm going to talk to you about with polymer clay basics because this is something that you're probably going to want to explore and that's the use of pigments or mica powders there's a lot of pigment powders out there glitters all kinds of stuff they all go beautifully on the surface of polymer clay they can add a shine and a shimmer to things that you're doing and I go into that more detail in some of the other videos that you can find right here at Fire Mountain Gems and beads but in the meantime let me just show you a quick little mica because if you're not hooked already you will be now so I've got like a little blob of clay and I'm just going to put a second blob of clay on there for no particular reason just so I can show you mica powder any mica powder is fantastic I'm just going to use this little bit of gold that I have here and I'm going to use a brush I'm just going to get a little bit on the the bit of my brush you do tend to get a lot of powder on the brush so tap it off before you put it on your piece and you see how I'm just kind of blending that on and adding a little bit of shimmer shine isn't that kind of cool now there's a lot of tricks you can do that something that I get in to more discussion of and some of the other videos and some of my lovely books and that's another tool for polymer clay is instruction videos and books it's always nice to have somebody go before you and make all the mistakes and figure out what works and then tell you it works and that's a good launching point for you to go and explore from there so of course I highly recommend all of my books because they're amazing and you love them but there are other wonderful polymer books out there too and you can get all of that here online at Fire Mountain Gems and beads so let's just recap very quickly polymer clay is marvelously addictive you want to buy some right now and play with it you want to go online to Fire Mountain Gems and beads comm find other videos that I've presented and others have presented on how to play with clay or grab some fun books and just go nuts you don't need many tools but a few will do well for you there's a lot of other fun things like liquid clays and glues and powders that can all be used with your clay aren't you allergic and ready to get playing with polymer clay and you know what the fun thing is is everything you need is available right here books tools and clay and of course lots and lots of bees at Fire Mountain Gems calm and don't forget there's also a lovely Facebook page and some Pinterest stuff you can just get lost in all the fun

Channel: Fire Mountain Gems and Beads

Views: 919,546

Rating: 4.8509979 out of 5

Keywords: polymer clay jewelry, how to use polymer clay, polymer clay jewelry for beginners, polymer clay tutorials jewelry, polymer clay jewelry making tutorials, how to use polymer clay for beginners, polymer clay tutorial for beginners, polymer clay jewelry tutorials, how to get started with polymer clay, polymer clay jewelry tools, getting started with polymer clay, polymer clay earrings for beginners, Christi friesen free tutorials, christi friesen polymer clay tutorial, Polymer clay

Id: adSDvgTtY8Q

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2015