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.