Polymer Clay Workshop

These blends aren’t aren’t as involved as most of the blends on my color blend pinboard.

Just the mixed Premo color and white.

These are all mixes of cadmium red and ultramarine blue. Red and blue are supposed to make purple right?  And isn’t there already a purple premo clay color?  Yes and yes. I specifically chose these two colors because the red has a lot of orange in it. This makes a neutralized purple.  That means it’s a muddy, or less intense purple. Or if you add more red, it’s like a brick red. I don’t always like ALL my colors to be super bright.

If you DO want to see some bright color recipes, check out this month’s canes!

This one is 4 parts cadmium red : 1 part ultramarine

This one is half and half

This one is 4 parts ultramarine : 1 part cadmium red

Here are two more blend recipes for the pinboard!

Yellow blend. Premo colors 3 parts raw sienna and 1part orange / yellow/white

Here is the printable recipe pattern.yellow and rose

Rose blend 1 part red and 1 part purple / fuchsia / white

I used these two and the turquoise blend for this cane from the Quilt Kaleidoscope Tutorial.

This afternoon I’ve been experimenting with more color blends to add to my pin board of color recipes.  I’ve been trying to find good turquoise or aqua color blends.

This one is 5 parts ultramarine and 1 part green/ the middle is 5 parts turquoise to 1 part green/ sunshine.  I think the sunshine made it too green to be a good Turquoise so I just call it Cool Green.  Next time I’ll try just the two greenish colors in a straight Skinner blend. Here is the printable template for both blends. aqua blend

This next one is a beautiful aqua blend!

The upper left corner is 5 parts ultramarine to 1 part green. The middle is turquoise and the lower corner is white.

Since I wanted to modify the cool green blend a little, I just ran it through the pasta machine with the aqua blend to make a mixed blend!

I had fun modifying blends. Instead of starting over with a blend, sometimes you can make what you want by mixing in a new color. This was a dark turquoise made from the 5:1 ratio in the top blends blended with white. I wanted it to look a little more green so I mixed in a small strip of sunshine. Doing this also gives it less of a dark to light contrast. If I wanted to maintain the strong contrast I would have had to modify it with another dark to light blend. However, sometimes you definitely want to even it out a bit and this is a good way to do it.

Polymer clay millefiori canework is a unique and amazing art form. There are a few special properties that make it unlike any other medium. The patterns stay in tact no matter how small you reduce them. You can make multiple sizes of the same pattern. This allows you to multiply, fold, and further reduce your designs.

One special property of this medium is the ease with which it can be squished and bent into beautiful curves and swirls. Complex patterns can be designed with simple impressions made in the clay. Of course there are many tools that can manipulate the clay, but I’ve always been looking for just the right sizes. Besides, since polymer clay has a strange reaction to many materials, it’s important that tools be made with something safe like these acrylic rollers be Teresa Pandora Salgado. I was very excited to my my own set. I sat down to write a review, but this great article says it all. It has a free video tutorial and information about ordering.

For my part, I was excited to use these with one of my favorite tutorials. Those of you who are subscribers should already have this bonus tutorial, and you can just imagine how useful these Canbenders will be!

Imagine the cards, envelopes and scrapbook pages you could make with polymer clay cane slices!  I baked this little frame and glued it onto an envelope with standard white craft glue.

I’m so excited! I’ve been wanting to find a way to make a blend that goes off in all directions for a long time now. I’ve been pinning all my color blend experiments to my Color Blend pinboard, but you can also find them by scrolling through this blg. This is also just a great way to modify blends or to test multiple mixes at once.

Many of you already know how to make Skinner blends.  Here is my video of a basic Skinner blend. A blend can be modified by adding another sheet and running them both through the pasta machine over and over in the exact same way the original blend was mixed.

These post are made possible by my wonderful subscribers. For the latest innovations and color schemes, please check out my Cane Builder publication.

For this four corner blend, I use 2oz each of premo brand fuchsia, cadmium yellow, white, and burnt umber.

My blends ended up about 9″ long. I cut the blend from small to big starting with 1/4″ and making each piece a quarter inch longer than the previous pieces. I matched up big and small from each blend until each section was 2″ tall.

A different, faster version of this cane be found here.

I wanted a striped blend with light rainbow color. I didn’t want to mix every color with white first, so I decided to just place dots on a whitish background.

I wanted more stripes so I added color and ran it through the pasta machine again.  Remember, you can always add color to your blends until they are the way you want.

To see my other color blend experiments so far, visit my Color Blend Pin board. https://www.pinterest.com/creatorsjoy/polymer-clay-color-blends/

Adding texture to canework makes all the difference!  Here I’ve added fabric texture.  First I reduced the canes even smaller than I wanted them to be because I knew that the pattern would spread out as I flattened it more.  I placed sliced of the canes side by side and slightly pressed them together.  Sometimes I run the sheet through the pasta machine.  Of course the pasta machine distorts the pattern, so I run it through once, switch to a thinner setting, rotate the sheet 90 degrees, and then run it through again.  I press the sheet against fabric.  Sometimes, if I’m really brave I run the clay and the fabric through the pasta machine together.  It might be good to put a little corn starch on the fabric first because the clay might stick.  You know what else works really well?  Sheets of canvas.  I use a pad of painting canvas sheets that I bought at the art store.

These buttons were made by Pat Sernyk

These hearts were made by Ron Lehocky 

This “fabric” was made with the indigo shibori canes from the July 2015 issue of Cane Builder.  These canes were features on Polymer Clay Daily!

There are lots of ways to make rainbow blend depending on what you need.  I wanted a rainbow blend that was somewhat consistent in value.  Using red, purple or ultramarine made the cools in the rainbow too dark for what I needed.  Using turquoise and magenta was a pleasant surprise!

I use these printable stencils to cut out each color.  Here is the pdf rainbow.  This rectangle fits well into most pasta machines.  I like to fill up the whole pasta machine with my blends because it guides the blend into a more even rectangular shape.  Besides, it’s so much work to make blends that it’s worth making more that you need.  In fact, you can double the clay thickness before you cut out the sections to make even more of the blend.

I added magenta on both sides because now it’s a perfectly continuous transition if I want to repeat the blend (as I often do in casework).

To see my color discoveries as I find them check out my pinterest board.  Also, I will often include exclusive color blend recipes in issues of Cane Builder.

Premo: Magenta, Cadmium Yellow, Turquoise

I’ve always been inspired by Ron Lehocky ‘s hearts.  He makes and sells these hearts to contribute to the Kid’s Center for Pediatric Therapies in Louisville, KY.

Here is a video about how he makes the hearts https://vimeo.com/110528917 , and here is information on the Kid’s Center http://kidscenterky.org/HowToHelp/

I sent him some canes, and these are some of the hearts he made.  I was very excited to see these pictures and honored and delighted to be a part of the project!!!

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