How it all began..

Do you remember me telling you about my parents coming down... and the fact that the kids and my Dad found a Barbie on the beach......Well...... this is what became of the Barbie. Turns out it is Mulan and not Barbie, which has made it rather hard to cast a mold of her face. Her face is squishy so when I pushed her head into the mold, her face became flat..... I thought it was funny, so I went ahead and made a cast from it.... The cast is on the left....

In between things last week, I also received this in the mail- The silver man coin:) And so I have made a mold using him, too....

You can see what happened to Mulan's body here..... the first few casts I made I did not include the neck and I really didn't like them, so I went back and made another mold including her neck...I'm using scrap polymer clay for both the molds and the casts. (Hope I'm using the right word, or I'm gonna sound like a big dummy! lol)

I used salt to create the textures.... With the mold I pushed regular salt into it before baking it... and when it came out of the toaster oven, I washed the salt out. Then after I made the cast I pushed big salt(sea salt) into the casts and baked them. When they came out of the over, I just plucked out the salt. Some times you can't get the salt out, which is fine, just run it under warm water and scrub it out with an old toothbrush. By using 2 different kinds of salt, at 2 different times, you create texture that sticks out and some that is pushed in.... You'll understand with the next set of pictures.....

Here's the man coin again.... and the mold I made, and a cast from it.
All of them got one coat of Gesso.... and then were painted with the first coats of color.

Oh.... and I just use regular water as a release agent....

Next post I'll have the finished 'Art pieces'!!

Until Next Time......

What to do with the scraps?

I just don't understand what I did to this computer to make it change like it did. I want to be able to upload pictures and look at them as I type this blog. Instead, I get the html code for it. I don't think I'm going to like blogging like this!!
Any ideas as to what I did, or how I can get it back, I'd be very grateful!

Ok, so I drug out the clay yesterday, and played.
Nothing serious....just wanted to see what I had. I did use some scrap clay to make some bowls, vases, and planters. Not very pretty, I know I can do better than this, but like I said I wasn't making anything serious. I more or less just wanted to 'play', and I also got some of those scrap piles I had taken care of.
Here's how I did one of the vases..to make the scrap ball more interesting, I put a bunch of scraps together, then sliced through the middle of it to get this:..Now that you have a neat piece of clay to work with, roll a small ball of it out.Then form it around the end of a pencil.Next, roll the pencil on a flat surface until all the sides are about even.Then you can use a blade to cut the top off so that it is even all the way around. This is just a basic idea of how to make 'vessels' with polymer clay.

Another of my favorite things to do is to put my scraps in my mini food processor. Now, these scraps must be dried and old for this to work. If you need to use fresh clay, lay it out on some paper the night before, and the paper will help suck some of that moisture out. I do believe this may be called leaching...? Ok, so cut it up into smaller pieces and throw it into the food processor. It should look like this after a minute or so.... I love this stuff.....wouldn't a 'cork' floor be neat using this stuff? Or a table top...oh my, there's lots to do with it.....I made a mini bowl with it. Just wrapped up a big marble with Saran wrap, and molded some of the clay around it. I was a little more happy with this one! Here's another bowl I made using some scraps and the pencil trick.
There's a lot you can do with scrap clay. I save all of it, and evenually it all gets used!

**Warning: You can NOT use the mini food processor for food once you've used it for clay. Polymer clay and food DO NOT mix!!!