My First Polymer Clay Project

Posted by Alex T. on Dec 29, 2010 in Creative | 1 comment

Crafting with polymer clay is different from of paper clay. The surface felt more like the feel of plastesine and you don’t need water to ply it. I was hesitating in using polymer clay at first because, I need to buy myself an oven.

Finally, after couple of month of hesitation, finally “what the heck, let’s just go get the oven first”.

Polymer clay comes with variety of color, although is “possible” to paint on top the polymer clay – nothing beats the quality of colors when you mix them separately.

Before each project, some planning on resources is needed, such as colors available, size of the project and additional materials needed (such wires for armatures, tiny beads  for eyes and etc). Once, baked polymer clay cannot return to plyable form.

An important word of advise is that try not to overbake your clay because, not only you get a blacked charred surface of the clay, you will get an unpleasant fumes coming out from the oven.  :)

There’s a few distinct features about polymer clay you ought to know  :-

• Doesn’t need water to ply. They don’t mix with water too.
• You need a clay machine or some kind of pin-roller object to ply them into thin surface. Is easier to ply this way. Especially, when you want to make clothes, or to apply color a surface.
• Try to avoid touching the clay too much (use glove, mini turning wheel or plying stencils) especially, when you finalize the shape. Lot’s of fingerprints will appear and it’s not neat if you have other color clay sticking at your hands.
• You cannot sandpaper or patch additional polymer clay with same color to it (after baking). It will look weird. Unless, you are joining parts, keep the clay within the joins and not wrapping around it.
• Sometimes, the color that you pick might not be the same, once baked, always make a small tiny sample and bake to test.
• Polymer clay will bake around ~5 minutes around 98 – 100 degree celcius.
• You might wanna use cotton or paper to protect your clay from touching the baking tray surface, part of the clay will baked faster thus, flattening the surface.

Again, for every project comes a Zen moment – where I will learn something. For this :-

I overcome my fear of unknown and face it.

I was facing a problem : I wasn’t actually sure, whether I can bake paper and cotton without setting them on fire.  Thanks to my colleague of mine, Michelle for sharing her “baking experience” with me. That was the last push I needed to move forward.

For that, I actually gave her my first polymer clay creation on her last day of work. – yeah that cute little Mr.Mushy.