Have you ever wished that you could have the ease of using pre-made molds, but still have
the flexibility to make a piece that's uniquely your own?
In today's video I'm going to show you how you can make polymer clay cabochons and bezels
using purchased molds, but customize them so they are completely unique.
Hi there, Sandy here.
Welcome to another polymer clay video at KeepsakeCrafts.net.
So here are a few of the cabochons I have shown you how to make.
Most of these were done in this, the Sculpey cabochon mold.
A couple of them I went free form with.
This one you can see started as a triangle and then shaped it and this one, but all the
rest are just shaped by the mold.
Sculpey also has a mold for making bezels for all of these pieces.
And as convenient as that is, when I look at that, I think, "boring".
Just a plain straight square, squared off edge, no decoration and they're all going
to look like anybody else's who is using this mold.
So today I'm going to show you several ways that you can use this mold with these cabochons,
not these, but all the rest of them and have a very unique look.
So the first thing you need to do is make some cabochons.
Now this may seem obvious, but it's actually a tool to help you get your bezels shaped
nicely that you need to have your cabochons baked in the shapes you want.
So for myself, I just grabbed some scraps of clay and actually made cabochons from each
of the sizes and shapes in the mold.
So there are three each: round, teardrop and triangle.
The round and the donuts are actually the same size and shape.
They share the round bezels.
Now if you know exactly what you want to make, you know you want to make this exact pendant
with that finish and such, you can just make one, but for me, I'm usually experimenting.
I'm playing.
So I just made one of each and I ended up making at least one of each of the bezels.
Then it's time to get out your bezel mold and some scrap clay.
Here's the bezel mold and I just got a little bit of scrap clay.
You don't have to use scrap clay.
You can use clay in the colors that you want.
I just decided I wanted to paint mine to get the finishes I wanted.
So the easiest way to fill these narrow channels is to roll your clay into a snake that will
fit in the channel and then you can pack it down.
So I've got quite a few inches here, maybe 5-6" of the clay and you can see it just fits
in there and I'm going to make my way around once, tucking it in and then I'm actually
gonna work around again.
I can pull that so it's thinner, but twice is good and then start filling in the center.
Try not to incorporate air bubbles.
So just keep spiraling around, obviously that's way too much clay, until you have that filled.
And to make sure that it's packed in there well take an acrylic roller and just roll
over it in a couple different directions so that you know it's packed into those channels
evenly.
Now when I first started doing this I was using a flexible blade because it was thin
and it cut a bit easier, but I found since that the back of my bezel, because this base
between the top and this right here is so thin and the flexible blade was bending and
making it even thinner, so I decided to use a stiffer blade and just do a sawing motion,
resting the edges of the blade on the edge of the mold.
And I kind of use a finger to lightly hold the clay in place.
And now you have that nice and clean.
If it got a little deformed you can put it back in shape.
Now if your clay is very soft, you might want to let it sit in the mold for awhile, but
that came right out.
I just flexed the mold and it came out.
This is the reason why I wanted you to have the baked cabochons in all the sizes because
you can see after being pulled out of the mold, it is no longer round.
So I'm going to take the corresponding cabochon and pop it in there and once you put it in
there you can see how much that got distorted.
It got stretched out of shape so I'm just going to gently pat it back into round and
also into the size of the cabochon.
Now if you just plop that in there gently the way I just showed you, you can bake it
like this and still pop the cabochon out after baking.
It will just come out.
The bezels are flexible.
Here's one that's baked.
You can see it's flexible so you can pop the cabochon right out.
So really what these are, the baked pieces I just showed you, they're shaping tools.
The teardrop is especially difficult to keep in the right shape once you pop it out of
the mold.
Now you could just leave it like this.
You could take your clay blade and make it all perfectly square.
I mean, if you want it perfectly square then don't even take it out.
Just leave it in the mold and it will be absolutely perfect and boring.
I just don't love the look.
I prefer a more organic textured look.
So now the next thing to do is just grab a tool and start making marks.
The very first tool I grabbed this.
This is the Christie Friesen Wow It's Awesome tool and there's one edge that's smooth and
there's one end that's got a point, kind of a sharp edge on the bottom.
And I just started making marks and you can just keep filling in until you
like the look and probably do it a little more carefully and a little more evenly.
So start grabbing tools.
Anything you've got.
Let's see.
So that's the mark that this edge makes, but what about this edge?
Now that's a different look all together.
What about a needle tool?
You have a pretty good idea of what that will look like, it kind of almost looks like a
bottle cap.
Or what about this tool?
This is another Christie Freisen Can't Live Without It tool.
This is a sharper line.
Another different look.
How about this blunt edge?
That may be interesting.
I like that.
I don't think I tried that before.
You can use the end of a brush handle, an awl, a dotting tool.
You can make marks and then put dots in between them.
This is just a mandrel.
You can make little circles and then go in with an awl or needle tool and make holes.
These ones I had a lot of fun with.
This is a leather stamping set.
I think I got the idea to purchase this from Ginger Davis Allman at the Blue Bottle Tree
and I've gotten so much use out of these tools making impressions in polymer clay.
What about this cool little round one?
A couple of my favorites on the finished ones were this tool.
I'll show here on this.
I really love the shape and just the little fine detail on here, kind of giving a scalloped
edge.
This one was just done with the first technique I showed you.
This one I made with this tool, just going in like this and making the marks.
For this one, I took it out of the mold and then I rolled the handle over it to make that
kind of subtle one.
This is the one I showed you before.
I just used the end of the mandrel to make dots and then poked holes in the middle.
This one I made lines and then used the ball tool to make dots in between them.
This one was tricky.
I'll show you how I did that one.
This one started out as the small round bezel and I did it just the same way, packing a
snake around in clay into that channel, going around a couple times so I'm sure it's packed
in there well.
You can see once you get the hang of it, I made that really fast and like I said, you
can just make these and leave it in the bezels and bake it right here and it will be perfectly
round and perfectly shaped and not deformed at all.
You can add decoration to it afterwards too.
then you'd have a bit more of a precise shape.
But what I did to make this one is once I got it all around my cabochon, nice and round,
which I won't bother to do right now, I took a cutter.
This is a cookie cutter set.
It's double sided.
I'll have a link to it on my blog, but it's got a round on one side and a scalloped round
on the other.
I think it took me three tries to get this on here evenly enough so that it cut that
edge.
I thought this was just kind of a fun way of using the bezel, getting the center nice
and getting an interesting edge.
And while I have these out, I'll just show you these tools because I love to use them.
You can see those kind of marks and you do want to, you can see how I really squished
that down there.
You don't really want to do that.
You want to try to have even pressure with every mark.
I love that one!
I just think that looks fantastic.
This one was just done with the ball tool, making dots around it.
So you don't have to have these fancy tools.
And this one was done just by making little balls of clay and the way I made them all
even, I rolled a snake and then used an acrylic block to roll it out and that makes your snake
pretty much all the same thickness, which is nice.
And then I used a tool like this.
This is a Marxit and I used the 3mm ridges, press down.
I want to kind of cut off the taper where it's probably not even and then you can cut
on each of those marks and every single one of those balls will be the same size.
And then I popped them on here for that beaded edge.
I definitely like that one the best.
Of course it's the most time consuming.
So then the next step is once you have your bezels to this stage, you can paint them however
you like.
Of course you can start off with the color of clay you want and then go over it with
white paint for antiquing for shabby chic look or brown or black or whatever color you
want.
What I did was I painted all of mine with Swellegant paints and patinas.
I've got a little bit of everything right here.
This one's iron.
This one's silver.
I've got brass, browns, copper.
If you want to learn more about using Swellegant paints and patinas, I've done a whole video
on that and I'll link to that in the cards.
But then once you have your bezels all done, now you can start pulling out your cabochons
and seeing which you want to use with them.
This is the way I like to do it.
Rather than making one, this just gives you options to play with.
I hope you've enjoyed and benefited from these tutorials and if you have, I hope you'll consider
becoming a patron.
Not only do you get the satisfaction of knowing you're keeping these tutorials coming for
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So as you can see, I've now taken what was a basic plain kind of simple and boring cabochon
mold and turned it into something completely unique and different and interesting.
And I may go back over, once I decide which cabochons go with which, I may go back over
these and add more paint.
If you have those Swellegant Dye Oxides, which I have not yet had a chance to play with,
but those would be fun.
If you're interested in the supplies I used, click on the link in the upper right or the
bottom left at the end of the video and that will bring you to my blog post where I always
have a complete supply list with links to products.
So be sure to subscribe if you haven't already and take a look at my Patreon page for how
you can get rewards and help support these tutorials.
Happy creating!
Bye bye.