Plain, white Sculpey Polymer Clay (the inexpensive kind in a box - available everywhere)
A Pasta Machine or something to use as a rolling pin (we use a pasta machine)
High Desert PolyGlazes in all four colors (available online from Cre8it)
A mop type Round Brush, and a Pointed Round in a small size (#1 is good)
A tray, some cornstarch baby powder, and a fingernail brush
A clay blade (you can use a straight razor blade if you don’t have a blade)
Rubber stamps of your choice
Texture Pack (Cre8it) or some household items with texture.
Duco brand household cement (Walmart paint department for about 99¢)
Please Note:
Rather than repeat information that was in last month’s Clay article, here are links to that information:
Polymer Clay Baking Information
Using the Pasta machine to prepare the clay
Use an ordinary fingernail brush to spread cornstarch baby powder evenly over your working surface. We use a plastic serving tray which can be easily rinsed off afterward.
After rolling through the pasta machine and doubling over, your clay should be about 1/8" thick.
By the way, we can already anticipate your question: “What’s with that weird looking stamp”? That’s an Angi-B purple rubber unmounted stamp mounted on our steel plate Magnetic Mounting System.
Scrape your blade through the powder a couple of times and trim around the image - creating a tile shape with your image in the center. Hold the blade perpendicular to the tray surface and push straight down. This gives a much better cut than dragging the blade through the clay, and is the reason for using a straight, long blade like this.
You may want to leave the clean cut edges as they are. This works well with some images. We often prefer to give the edges some visual interest.
You can use lots of household things to do this (forks, lace, scrubbie pads, etc). We use textured papers. By popular demand, and because they are very hard to find, we have packaged 20 of the textures we use the most in a single package called our Texture Pack.
Texturing the edges is a simple procedure. Tap the textured paper into the powder and then line it up with the tile - its edge slightly overlapping the edge of the tile. Press along the paper with your fingers to make an inpression in the tile edge. Do this on all four sides.
We used a leaf patterned sheet on the dragonfly tile and and a moonrock sheet to give the rocky texture to the Fire Trigram tile below it.
Bake your tiles at 265º for 20 minutes. If you are new to polymer clay, please read the baking information in the last issue. See the link above in the materials list.
Turn the page for glazing instructions.
Stamps:
Set of Eight Trigrams of the I-Ching (Unmounted from Cre8it)
Dragonflies(Unmounted from Angi-B)
