The Limited Palette
Any room in the house can benefit from liberal applications
of color--and beads.
The bathroom is no exception! Care must be taken to ensure beads are
water resistant, and polymer clay fits the bill along with glass and ceramic
beads of all kinds.
When picking a color for decorating purposes, sometimes
its best to take inspiration from some of your favorite things. Look around,
see what colors you already collect around you. Inspiration pieces can
be taken to the store where paints are mixed to find your own personal
favorites, and paint strips with their graduated color range are available
to take home to help find the colors, shades, and tones that are just right
for you.
Sometimes the choices can seem overwhelming, but once you successfully
narrow it down, you can begin collecting all the bits and pieces that make
for successful decorating. In the bathroom renovation that we are doing
at my house, we picked a blue and white color scheme.
With tile and paint, fabric and accessories all coming together, one
of the final steps is to add some beads.
The shower curtain and the window are two excellent places to add these
little extra touches. Always make sure that beads in a humid area are strung
on something that will resist water damage--stings and cords will rot over
time, but tigertail or other coated wires work well.
Uncoated metal wires may tarnish or change color depending on the kind
of metal. Commercially available shower curtains have twelve rings from
which they are hung, and each one offers the opportunity to add what I
call a " hangy-down" or beady bauble.
I'm making mine out of twelve polymer clay beads covered with canes
and formed into lentil shapes.
After baking they are drilled and then strung with other collected porcelain
and glass beads to create a visual focal point in the bathroom.
A backdrop of a rich blue fabric curtain really gives them a showcase.
Other shapes could be used, but the flattened lentil is appealing and gives
a lot of surface area to showcase the millefiore canes.
Here's a container full of my blue canes--the container
originally held mushrooms, and I do like to recycle!
However, plastic containers will react with raw polymer clays, so I
wrap all my raw canes in Saran With Cling Wrap and they keep fresh and
soft for years.
Keeping them arranged by color makes it easier to find them----I make
a lot of canes, and use them as needed. I use Premo and Kato Clays because
of their excellent range of intermixable colors and the "hand"
or feeling of the clay itself.
It is firm enough for delicate sculptural use and detailed caning, and
also softens quite a bit with conditioning and warmth. Because of this
"thermally reactive" quality, an artist has a great deal of control
over the range of plasticity.
One way to keep track of what you have (or used to have!) is to make
a cane sampler. Put a slice or two of each on a backing of raw clay rolled
out into a flat sheet of clay. The one shown here is white clay on a white
ceramic tile, and cane slices are being built up in a pattern as I use
them to make beads---an extra slice or two is all it takes!
To make the lentil beads I wanted for my bathroom beadery, I rolled
out twelve equal sized balls of leftover clay.
We call it "schmutz", some call it "mud" and consists
of all the leftover bits of clay that get collected. Cut off ends of canes,
excess from cut-outs, all gets reused when ground up together.
Millefiore canes are cut into slices. It takes anywhere from three to
eight slices of a cane to go around a ball of core clay the size of a walnut,
though this varies a lot, depending on the size of the canes and the size
of the clay core.
You can also put slices around wooden beads, such as the ones shown
here. An excellent source of these bamboo beads is from beaded car seats--ones
that have begun to unravel are often thrown away, but they contain over
a gallon baggy full of beads!
However, when using wooden cores instead of raw clay cores,
you can not make the lentil shape.
Many of my canes are squared, but round canes can also be used with
a little extra filling in of spaces.
Make sure all edges are well fitted, and then roll the balls in the
palms of your hands to meld all the seams.
If you want round beads, they can be pierced with a needle tool at this
time, and then baked.
To make lentil shaped beads, each round ball of clay is pressed between
two pieces of tile or plexiglass.
I have a rectangular piece of acrylic that I use for a work surface.
and a smaller square that I use to make lentils.The ball is pressed and
flattened by pressure applied to the smaller handheld square of acrylic
as it is rotated.
This spins the ball into a bicone shape which is carefully pressed flat.
I use about four or five rotations to get the desired shape without distorting
the design of the canes too much. Continued circling would result in a
swirl effect. There are several tutorials available on the internet about
how to do lentil shaped beads. Two excellent places to start looking are
the Tutorials Section at http://www.polymerclaycentral.com and http://www.glassattic.com
These beads are baked on a layer of Fiberfill batting placed on top
of a sheet of card stock in my baking pan. I have several of these "dedicated"
pans, and because polymer clay is baked at 300 degrees F., the paper and
the batting are not harmed by the heat. I monitor temps carefully with
a freestanding oven thermometer placed in each pan as it goes into the
oven. Bake all clays according to the manufacturers directions. However---in
high altitude baking such as I do here in Colorado, I bake a few degrees
higher on the advise of the Polyform chemists. 300 degrees F for thirty
minutes per quarter inch of thickness means I bake a pan of beads like
this for about 45 minutes to achieve complete polymerization---and that
means long term strength.
to be continued in the next column by Sarajane----
Stringing Together A Bauble Bath
