Working with Clay- Basics

Hello everyone ^__^

I haven´t told you yet but sometimes I enjoy working with clay. I use it for jewellery making and decorationg. I remember that when I started with using Fimo I hardly knew how to work with it and it didn´t really turn out well.
But now that I´m better at working with clay than back then, I tought it would be nice to make a post about some basics. I hope this will be useful for you ~

Types of Clay

First thing you should know is that there are different kinds of clay. Some are air drying, like the famous "Fuwa Fuwa" clay and some need to be backed in the oven to get hard.

picture found on www.modes4u.com

Such oven hardening types of clay are called "polymer clay".
I´m using Fimo which is a type of polymer clay. Fimo is available in many diffrent colours. If you are not sure which colours you will need buy your favourite colours at the beginning and then buy another colour everytime you have the money.

picture found on: http://www.farben-dell.de/site.php?nav=farben&sub=sonstige

Your possibilities with clay are endless. You can turn it into jewellery, miniatures, decoration, little toys, decoration for a dollhouse and more. Just be creative.

Basic Material

Some things you will need when working with clay:

• A cutter or a knife
• Needles
• Tweezers
• Transparent varnish

The transparent varnish is used to create a nice, shiny surface after the clay is backed. Some people use nail polish for that.

Additional Material

• Silicone- Many people use silicone to create "whipped cream" on cakes and such. You can put it into a pastery bag and than put it on the backed clay. When using clay I recomend to use newspaper or something as drawsheet so that nothing get´s dirty.
• Rhinstones, Pearls, Micro Beads, Glitter- these can be used to decorate your work
• Molds- if you think that  you are not good at working with clay freely you could buy some molds. You can find many good molds on etsy.

Creating Surfaces

With clay it´s possible to create different surfaces.
For a cake surface, for example, you use a needle and pick into the clay.

http://papercottonblossomarchiv.blogspot.co.at/2010/09/inspirational-pictures-fimo-kram.html

Just be creative and try new things to create nice surfaces.

Canes

A last thing I wanted to mention are canes. Canes are this long, thin things looking like this:

pictur found on: http://elrania.blogspot.co.at/2010/06/fimo-canes.html

Many people use them for making fruits like lemons and strawberrys. Making canes isn´t that easy. You could look up some tutorials on youtube if you want to try to make some.


That´s all that comes to my mind right now. If there is still anything you want to now about working with clay, please ask me.
Anyway, the most important thing when working with clay is having fun and trying out diffrent things!

See you,
Yaya ~