After a few weeks of making colourful big textured beads, I felt it was time to clear up a few of the things I had lying around and work on something non textured
I had a stack of mokume left over from making these beads:
So I turned the left overs into a Stroppel Cane with light Premo Gold layers in between. Flattened the whole stack, rolled it through the pasta machine, and stacked it again… then sliced it.. et voila. A totally new pattern: The sheet ready to be used.
Now what to do with this? More beads? yes.. but I wanted to do something a bit different.
I thought I’d try my hand at white beads. Having 2 lovely dogs makes that a bit more difficult!
No, they do not eat the beads.. but they surely get their hair everywhere!
So I made these:
Matching earrings – matte on the left, polished on the right
Rather enjoyed sanding and buffing them – can one really miss sanding soo much??? or is it just me?
And as there was more left of the sheet, I thought.. why not make a black version as well.
Freshly out of the oven
After lots of sanding and buffing
Now, after making these two sets, I made this observation:
White is difficult to keep really white as the slightest speck of dust will look terribly amplified when it lands on white clay. But, with a bit of elbow grease and all grades of micromesh to sand, that is reasonably easily remedied.
I usually work with Fimo Classic – because I am used to it and know how it reacts in the oven and because it is easier get hold of in this country. I simply love working with it.
However, I had run out of white and black and decided to make these beads in Premo instead.
Two things: Premo white really buffs up to a high shine very rapidly which is a bonus, and it has a lovely ceramic look both in matte and polished version.
Premo black is not as black as I would like it to be – you know.. that really dark dark jet black look – so that was a bit of a disappointment and I am debating sanding them down again and leaving them matte (they did look pretty cool like that too).
I also had one of the big beads cracking and since I am not used to anything cracking when using Fimo, I have no idea what caused it. Conditioning was done properly, oven temperature was right… It puzzles and annoys me in equal measures. No amount of sanding would sort that out so I resorted to brute force and carved a design into the portions that were cracked. It has now become an “artistic” feature.
Have a great Sunday, Chris