Crafted By Colette

I’ve been wanting to make polymer clay things for ages.  There are so many beautiful examples online.  Watching YouTube tutorials is a little addictive, and there are a hundred different ideas for things you can make and sell with the stuff.

For those who don’t know, polymer clay comes in a range of colours and you can sculpt whatever you desire.  Charms, figurines, or beads.  Then you bake it in the oven to harden it.  Popular brands are Fimo, Sculpey and Premo.

When I was very young, my grandparents had Fimo at their house and I remember playing with it.  I can’t recall anything that I made though.  It’s been on my list of things to try for a long time, and finally a YouTube tutorial sucked me in.  This one…

I figured it was simple enough to get started and I only needed to buy two colours to begin with.  I passed on the white because I am an extremely mucky person, and ordered black and a lovely grey from eBay.  Once they arrived, I set to playing.

For some reason I didn’t take any progress pictures, which is annoying now that I come to write about it.  But it turns out that sculpting is something I’m not very good at.  There are a few crafts that I enjoy, but that I’m not at all talented at.  Much much more practice is needed.

The cat in the video proved completely beyond me.  I ended up making a very simple rabbit, and then a flat cat image I found online.

The next step was to bake them.  The YouTube videos all say to follow the directions on the packet but these are a little complicated.  It gives a temperature and time per a certain thickness, which took me some time to figure out.  Apparently I got it wrong.  Wrong temperature, wrong time.

The paper is supposed to remain untouched.  And as for the pieces.  Remember I told you I bought a nice grey colour?  It’s this lovely blue-grey here…

(The colour is called Tranquility if you’re interested).

I show you this because my completed pieces bear absolutely no resemblance to that.

I’ve done plenty of research since, and have found out what I did wrong.  I think.  My temperature was way too high and I have bought, as suggested by a few people, an internal oven thermometer.  The surface I baked it on wasn’t ideal so I’ve bought a ceramic tile and some foil trays.

I will be having another go at making polymer clay pieces soon.  Hopefully I’ll do a bit of a better job at the baking.  As for the actual sculpting, well that can only improve with practice.  I hope.