Week 4 Finally a Success!

This week I went to Michaels crafts and bought two new tools that would help me with my by hand project. The new tools I bought are a pasta maker and a clay extruder that comes with 17 different plates that help you extrude different shaped rods. Over the week I thought about what kinds of designs I would want to make for my next bead. I thought about the different colors I could use and thought about what I could make by using at least one of my new tools. I decided that I wanted to make something black and white because these beads someday will be turned into jewelry and black and white can go with everything.

The book I bought still had not arrived so I went back to the website http://www.sculpey.com/how-tos/techniques/simple-canes and found the perfect project for me to work on that would let me utilize one of my new tools and also use black and white for my colors. The project that I made was a checkerboard cane that I sliced to make my beads. This project was perfect because I was able to use my new clay extruder with the square plate to extrude square rods for the checkerboard.

This was a fairly easy projects because all I had to do was use my clay extruder and make a very long black square rod and cut it into 8 pieces and then do the same thing with white clay. After both the black and the white clay was extruded and cut into 8 pieces that were the same length I then put a white and a black piece and stuck them together so they were side by side. Then I did it to another black and white piece and then put them on top of each other so the colors were alternating. I did that three more times with the rest of the square rods and then put all four pieces together so it created one big checker board rod.

At first the rod was very thick because it was not stretched out, but then I gently stretched it out so that it was longer and thinner. After I sliced the pieces of the cane off I rolled them gently on a small clay ball and then made a hole so I could make it into some kind of jewelry. I tried something new this week. I made a bead that was square. All I did was slice a much thicker piece from the checker cane and poked a hole in it so it was a square bead.  Just like last week I baked them in the oven for 20 minutes so they hardened and were ready to use.

This weeks project I would say was the most successful project I have made so far. My project turned out just like it showed on the website. I think one of the reasons why my project came out so well is because I had the clay extruder. Some people might not understand why I need the clay extruder. Having the clay extruder makes making clay canes so much easier and makes the project come out much better. When making clay canes you have to be very precise and make sure you are doing it the exact way the directions show, because if you make your rods for the cane a little bit different from what is shown your project could turn out totally different.  

For next week I plan on using my other tool the pasta maker, and hopefully I will have the book I ordered and having been waiting for to browse new designs. I hope next weeks project will go just as smoothly as this weeks went.

This picture is from the website on how to make the checker cane

This is my new clay extruder I used, with all of its different plates

This is how my checker cane came out

These are some of the beads I made!