Hi there, Sandy here.
Welcome to another Friday Findings video at KeepsakeCrafts.net.
If any of you have been working with polymer clay for any time then you probably know about
making blends and perhaps you've run into a situation where your blends get out of control.
They get too wide on you.
Today I have a few tips and tricks for how you can keep your blends to any width you
want.
So just by way of example, here I have a couple of sheets of clay I'm going to make into a
blend and I'm just folding them and making sure that I don't incorporate any air as I
fold them and then I'll roll these into balls.
I've just got some green from my scrap bin and some opal.
I thought that would be interesting to see how they blended together.
And then this is my quick and dirty way of making blends, I just take my ball and flatten
it out into a triangle.
You kind of want one edge to have a right angle and then I'll just flatten it out a
bit so that it's not too thick to go through the pasta machine.
So here's my pasta machine.
I have it set on the thickest setting and I'm just going to roll it through and if you've
ever made blends using a pasta machine you know that it tends to get wider and wider
until it will fill almost the whole width of your machine depending on how much clay
you have in your blend.
Now a simple way to keep it confined is just to use your finger.
Just place your finger across the rollers and roll through, but it's kind of awkward
to do that.
You've got to use your finger and then roll it and smoosh it.
It works, but it is a little bit awkward.
One trick that I used to do was I would take blocks of clay, color doesn't matter, haha,
and then those would limit, but they weren't real precise and I had a hard time sometimes
getting exactly the width I wanted.
So I came up with a different system and this system involves cutting lengths of 7/8" dowel
into various lengths and the reason this is marked 5", although it obviously is not 5"
long, is that if I put it in my pasta machine and measure the distance from the end of the
wood to the other edge of the rollers, it's actually more like 5 1/8", but 5" is close
enough.
That will keep my blend limited to 5" wide.
This one is 4 1/4" wide and this green one is 3 1/4" long.
So the longer the dowel, the less wide your blend.
I even managed to keep this one down to 1 1/4".
It was a little tricky and I'll show you that on the one I'm going to demonstrate, but it
can be done.
You do tend to get a little bit of build up on the narrower ones, a little bit ragged
on the edges, but it worked really well for keeping this clay blend to a very narrow strip.
I thought of this idea because just recently I published a video making these canes to
make exotic botanicals, flower pins and if you remember my blend was pretty wide, about
the width of my pasta machine and as I reduced it, it tended to get squiggly.
Now I happened to like that for my pin.
I thought the look was good, but if you were trying to do something and keep everything
nice and straight and even, it would be more helpful to have your blend the exact width
you needed it to be and not have to compress it across the blend very much at all.
And then it would keep your lines nice and straight on something like this rather than
squiggly like these.
So let me show you how this works.
It's so simple.
This one is going to keep my blend about 2" wide and notice I labeled them on both ends
and the side so I can easily grab whichever one I need.
And you might have to kind of squash it down a little, especially the narrower ones, but
you just pop it in there.
If you have to squish it off to the side just a little.
If you find your blend is starting to go a little wonky, what you can do is just flip
it sideways.
Squish that over a little and that will help straighten it out a bit.
And that's it.
You just keep sending it through until it's blended as much as you need it to be.
So these are all from one 7/8" dowel and I actually marked them an inch apart, but my
sizes are a little bit off because one thing I forgot to account for was width of the saw
blade.
So they're not all exactly an inch different, but it probably doesn't matter.
Just keeping them close to where you need them to be will make your work with clay blends
ever so much easier.
So if you liked this video, I hope you'll give it a thumbs up, share, subscribe if you
haven't already and feel free to check out my Patreon page where you can learn how you
can help support these tutorials and keep them coming for free for everybody and get
great rewards for yourself in return.
Happy creating.
Bye bye.