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The Process

Process 12



It’s difficult to explain the process of how you make patterns or a picture out of polymer clay. The best way to explain it is to do it visually with captions, as I have done here.


I’ve chosen this particular Loggerhead turtle design to illustrate how making a picture or a pattern can work using Polymer clay.


The process shown here is just so you can get a general idea of the process involved in creating an image or pattern from clay.


All of the jewellery available on this website has been created from patterns of clay put together using a similar process as you see here.


I do prefer to keep my jewellery patterns much smaller than this turtle pattern, so that I have the time to do a larger selection of designs.


This turtle pattern came together over a few days.

 

 

 

 Process 1 Process 2
The dots that appear at the end of this cane are created using various coloured spaghetti shaped clay, pushed together into a log shape called a cane, then wrapped using slices of clay from my ol’ faithful pasta machine a tool I wouldn’t be without.
Process 3 Process 4
If the initial cane is created large enough, it can be rolled and stretched smaller to be used for all the parts of the turtle shell. The edge of the shell are just flattened versions of the canes.
Process 5 Process 6
Each part of the turtles face and her flippers is created with a cane wrapped in a sheet made from a lighter shade of clay that has been put through the pasta machine.
Process 7 Process 9
Each part of the turtles face and her flippers are created using canes wrapped in a lighter shade of clay that has been put through the pasta machine to flatten it into a sheet. All the blue water surrounding the turtle is created using sheets of various tones of blues and turquoise clay - again, from the pasta machine.
Process 9 Process 10
When the turtle cane is complete, it is rolled and pulled out to reduce it’s size in diameter, until it is small enough to create a keyring. By this time the cane is very long and has to be cut into shorter pieces. There is also a lot of excess clay to cut off as you reduce the size of the cane, this is due to puckering.