A more classical anti-ad sign

Making a "no ads please" sign from Hama beads. This time, I'm trying out a more elegant and old-fashioned type design, with muted warms colors. This is the one I made for our own door.

The text is 20 Reddish Brown and the background is 21 Light Brown. I also put a frame with the "gold" color, not that that really showed in the final stage.

Beads with Flowing Stripes

Experimenting with striped patterns in polymer clay. I wanted a natural wavy look that would continue across the beads.

For the base, I used a somewhat translucent dark gray. The gray is mixed from 1 part translucent 'white' (unpigmented) Fimo Soft polymer clay, and 1/32th black Fimo Soft. The stripes are plain white Fimo.



I made sheets of both colors, rolled on the second-thinnest setting on my pasta machine. A layer of white is sandwiched between two layers of gray. The sheet is then cut into four equally-sized pieces. These four pieces were then stacked, with a bit of scrunching in the middle, to create the wave. The edges are kept neat and unscrunched on purpose. The squares in the background are 1 cm.



I made a cylinder of the same gray color as the base, and cut that in half. The wavy stack goes in between the halves. Put together, this approximate cylinder is ready to be reduced! After reducing, I made some of the beads by putting thin slices on a gray base, and some simply by cutting thick slices from the cane (The results were quite similar)



Above, the beads before baking, and below, after baking and polishing.

New Hama Anti-Ad Sign

Our previous 'no advertisements' sign proved so popular that it was actually stolen (or anyway, it disappeared, most likely it fell down and was cleaned away or something). So I made a new one.

The new sign is made with Hama beads, like the old one. The sign has 01 White text on a 17 Grey background. I also made a glow-in-the-dark frame, with 55 Glow-in-the-dark green and 57 Glow-in-the-dark blue. It looks quite nice, a pop of bright color in the dark hallway, but it was very difficult to photograph!

The text, "Ei mainoksia kiitos!", is Finnish for "No advertisements please".

Color mixes for pastel beads

I wanted to make colored translucent beads from Fimo polymer clay. I think the ready-made colored 'translucent' Fimo is too strongly pigmented, and not so translucent. The idea here is to reduce the amount of pigment, by mixing in unpigmented (i. e. 'white') translucent polymer clay.

Unpigmented clay is very soft, almost too soft to form into beads with any precision. The unpigmented clay in the reddish-violet beads above on the left was a bit dry, which made it much easier to control. But when baking, the dry clay produced a lot more of whitish flakes or stripes you can see in the picture above. I don't mind so much though, it looks a bit like some kind of stone.

I played around a bit with mixing different colors with varying intensity and lightness, to get the shades I wanted. The glass beads in the picture below served as inspiration and goal, to keep the colors subtle and counteract the temptation to create super-bright shades.



It's impossible to get an accurate idea of the color of these low-pigmented mixes while actually mixing them. Unbaked (in the upper half of picture above) they look almost completely white, since they get translucent only during baking. That's why a color chart comes in handy!



To read the chart: '1 blue + 1 violet + 32 white' means that I mixed 1 part translucent blue, 1 part translucent violet, and 32 parts 'translucent white' (i.e. unpigmented) Fimo polymer clay. In practice, I used one stripe (one eight of a packet) of unpigmented clay, and one 32th of a stripe each of the blue and violet clays. So one part is here just a tiny amount - unless you want to end up with piles of pastel clay.

The conical turquoise beads are made with a bead roller, the other ones I formed by hand. They were all sanded and polished after baking.

For the brownish ones, I mixed in a bit of green, as you can see, to get the saturation down. The result it a bit too reddish for my taste. My favorites are the darker turquoise and the bluish violet. Most of these semitransparent pastel colors would probably look nice layered with opaque white!

Mixed Beads

Experimenting with colors while using up some old leftover Fimo polymer clay. I formed three piles of finely chopped clay, then mixed some of each color into the others. With some of the purple and blue, I re-chopped and mixed the finished chunks.

The pink turned a bit dull in the oven (thats a risk with leftovers) but the others turned out fine. The purple-blue re-chppped ones are probably the best of them.

Beaded bowl surfaces

Hexagons side by side forms a flat surface, with zero curvature. Reading Make Magazine's Math Monday, I learned that a pentagon among the hexagons makes the surface  curvature positive, like the surface of a sphere. A heptagon does the opposite - it creates a saddle surface, which has a negative curvature.

Here, I've built the same bowl-shaped trial surface from white glass beads and from Magnetic spheres. The surface is formed from hexagons, with a pentagon in each 'corner', to make the surface curve.

In an earlier post, I used only pentagons, which shapes the surface into a sphere.

Beads from scraps

Using leftover Fimo clay from the previous two projects, the instruction beads and the red flower cane, I made some sets of mixed striped beads. Below are the basic steps: rolling out the different-colored scrap pieces and bunching them together, then rolling out the bunch, cutting up and re-bunching and so on, twisting slightly, and the stripes get thinner.



When I was happy with the stripes, I cut the roll into pieces and formed round beads. Part of the roll I made thinner, and squared it before cutting, creating small elongated square beads.



Above are also shown some darker beads made with a similar method, with scraps from the instruction beads.



This single bead is made from leftovers of the petal in the red flower - the bead actually shows the pink-and-orange stripes which were supposed to show in the red flower as well, but the pattern got way to small when reducing...

Red flower cane beads

A flower cane made from the magenta and orange Fimo polymer clay from this set. The center is made of scraps from that checkered cane. First, I made some simple flat round beads by cutting slices from the reduced cane.


I then reduced the cane further, and put thin slices on a white clay sphere, made from half a Fimo strip. Twelve 1 cm slices fit covered the sphere nicely, in a dodecahedral formation.


Quarter-strip spheres were covered by six slices (cubic formation) and half-strip cylinders carried two rows of four slices. Leftover flower canes I stacked and rolled until they were tiny, wrapped them in white and cut into small flat beads.

Checkered instruction beads

A friend of mine bought a Fimo set, containing magenta, orange, black and white clay. We made some square checkered beads, following the instructions in the box - except for tweaking the colors a tiny bit: we mixed 1:5 white into the orange and magenta, to create a larger contrast for the black.

Glass Beads

Got some new glass beads, in three sizes - small, tiny, and ridiculous.

Striped Blue Beads

An experiment with making 'length-wise' striped beads of Fimo polymer clay. The transparent greenish stripe is 1 part transparent white, blue, and green, correspondingly.

Another set of beads - dark sparkly green-blue with some pink mixed in.

Bonus - wave patterns forming in the sink when sanding these blue beads.

Dot grid beads

Attempting to make Fimo clay beads with a simple repeating pattern. They turned out to serve as illustration of how reduction distorts a pattern. I thought I was using a lot of dark brown buffer clay around the gray dot, but in the first step (4 dots) we already see the dots beginning to square up. When reducing the 4-dot cane, and forming the 16-dot cane, the corners have escaped further into the corners... Possible remedies: more buffer, and perhaps making the canes on a larger scale in the first place.


The ends of the dot grid cane contained patterns which are perhaps more interesting than the actual dot grid. Made some round beads with slices on the surface.

Twirly flower beads and bracelet

I used the square flower cane from a previous post to make large square beads. I cut slices from the cane, and put some matching turquoise clay in between two slices. Pierced them twice with the needle tool. Also made some matching spacer beads, and some small flat flower beads from leftovers from the square cane.


Thick chunky beads form a huge bracelet. The double holes need a double loop of string (or rubber band), but by crossing the string at one point, I only needed to make one knot.

Neon beads and necklace

I recently bought some fluorescent pink pigment, and thought I'd try making fluorescent polymer clay beads. I mixed the pigment with translucent white Fimo clay, by chopping up the clay, forming chunks, and chopping again. The neon pigment behaves very oddly in photographs...


The beads looked lamely pink before curing, but regained the bright fluorescence in the oven. The beads are one-sixths of a Fimo stripe, and I needed 44 of them for a necklace.

Gray flower cane and beads

A flower cane from black and translucent gray Fimo polymer clay. I experimented with some liquid polymer clay mixed with silver oil paint on a sheet on polymer clay, rolled the sheet up, made cuts into the roll and inserted wedges of black clay, to form a petal. The liquid stuff was a MESS - and it didn't even show in the final cane...



The beads. I realize that translucent clay isn't the best for showing tiny sharp features, since the black shows through the surrounding material, and gets a sort of halo... Made a bracelet, with small gray wooden beads for spacers.

Leaf cane and beads

Trying out an idea for a Fimo polymer clay cane with a leaf pattern. Above left: the cane before reducing. Above right: Slices from the leaf cane on beads, before going into the oven. The squares are 1 cm.

 

The beads after curing (baking in oven). Above, the bead surface before sanding. The colors changed quite a lot - the background, which was pale violet, probably contained some translucent clay, since it darkened so much.

The round beads look like blueberries, with a painted-on blueberry leaf pattern, silly... For the flat beads, I added a pale clay layer before slicing. It was supposed to be a pale gold frame, but it mostly looks like someone's finger was cut to pieces, and happened to have a blueberry pattern inside :) 

Wooden beads

The things my home-made 'jewelry' has mostly consisted of, so far. Wooden beads, small 4mm ones above, and larger 6mm beads below. In the pictures are the contents of three bags of beads (165/125 pieces per color for the smaller/larger ones).

Spectral Hair Accessory

r

Another Hama bead project! I was attempting something larger than one peg board, 2 by 2 square boards. Since I own only one of these boards, I had to iron the beads of one square when they filled the board, and then iron the four of them together afterwards. I drew the motive first as vector graphics, and then pixellated it to match one bead - one pixel. The letter is a Garamond lower case 'r', which I cut in the middle to make it shorter. Colors 04 Orange, 60 Teddybear brown (more like yellow), 27 Beige, 21 Light brown, 17 Grey, and 31 Turquoise.

Ironing them together was not as easy as I thought, so for larger projects, maybe I should just get some more peg boards... Color & shapes in hindsight: more orange, less beige, more structure, less random curves.

White and yellow flower beads

I made some yellow flower beads from Fimo polymer clay. First, I created a flower cane in the Millefiori technique. These are some of the basic steps: on the left, I assembled the petals and the white spacing slabs around the center. The petals are made of a stripy mixture of yellows and bronze. Some bead slices made from just the center cane are visible in the background in the two uppermost pictures. I then filled out the remaining outer space with the same white clay, to create a round white clay cylinder with the flower inside.

The flower pattern is then made smaller by rolling out the cylinder. On the upper right, I'm rolling out the cane with the tools I had available at the time - a plastic protractor and a flat-bottomed glass oven dish. Rolling the cylinder created a sort of interesting pentagonal shape at the ends, shown in the center photo. Lower right: when it was small enough, I cut the some thick slices from the cane.

Here are those slices, made into beads. First baked in the oven, then sanded and polished. That striped pattern didn't really survive the shrinking process, and the outer layer of white could have been more opaque or just thicker (the petals show through the sides). Also show are some irregularities due to clumsy cutting and primitive tools - there are special super-thin polymer clay knives which are much more suitable.

Then a necklace from the five finished beads. Using two sizes of white wooden bead and thick fabric-coated rubber cord. Left: planning a 42 cm necklace, which fits snugly but not tightly around the neck.