These sweet polymer clay pendants are evocative of springtime flowers and
you'll be amazed at how quickly you can make up a bunch of them.
Hi there, Sandy here, welcome to another polymer clay tutorial at
keepsakecrafts.net. Here are a few of the pendants in various stages of completion
and let me show you how easy they are to make, you'll be amazed. They all start with
a heart cutter, this is a set that I got at my local craft store in the cake
decorating section and what I love about these is that one side is crinkled, which
I don't use very often, and one side is straight.
I thought the crinkled edges were perfect for this project. The other thing you'll
need is just some polymer clay, this is some black, you could make them any color.
Black is a nice base for all the painting that we're going to do later on.
Just as a tool you'll need a bottle like one of these for our liquid clay that
has a cone shape at the top. My clay is rolled out to about a medium setting,
it's like a number 4, about one and a half millimeters thick, maybe a little
less. It's up to you whether you want to make your edges crinkled. I just think it
adds to the liveliness and interest of your pendant or earrings or charm, and
you just go ahead and cut that out.
The next thing I'm going to do is take my large ball tool and just roll from
the inside out. I'm just rolling to thin out those edges and I'm aiming for those
scallops each time. I want to make those maybe a little bit more rippled and a
little more pronounced. Just go around your whole flower and do that. If you're
ever interested in the supplies I'm using in a video tutorial don't forget
that I always write a blog post for each one and at that blog post I have links
to supplies, a complete materials list, often more information because I write
the blog post after I've made the project and shot the video so there's
often more information there and you can always find a link to the blog post in
the upper right here. You'll also find it in the description box which varies
where it is depending on what sort of device
it's that you're watching the video on. It can be sort of hidden if you're on
mobile and not on a desktop. So there, that's all I wanted to do with that. The
next thing I want to do is add some texture to this, the texture is nice
because it gives a place for our patinas to hang out. Make some lines with the
needle tool radiating out from that bend of the heart you can go all the way, some
of these edges might show so I'm going to make sure and get them all, and if
your tool wants to keep traveling in the same lines just kind of lay it down... If I
decide I want it here but it keeps skipping over just lay it there and then
drag down, there, and then we fill that in.
Nothing too complicated yet! There won't be anything complicated in this
actually at all. Use a blade to lift that up so you don't distort it, bring in your
bottle with, or your shape, whatever your form, you could use a piping tip,
whatever you have that has a cone shape. I pulled this off because it has
this little ridge that will make an indent in my clay, so then this is smooth.
Lay the point of, the inner point of your heart there, wrap one edge around and
then next wrap the other edge around that . I you need to you can sort of
twist it off. Here you are, there's that simple. Take your thumb or your
fingers and kind of push that edge up. I think that's really pretty to have that
bit of a flair, and go ahead and bake it. Because this is so thin I would bake it
for just about 20 minutes. It's not even an eighth of an inch thick. Here's one I made
earlier all baked and you can see the difference, I think this is maybe it's
one step down size in the heart, and I didn't use the scalloped side, I used the
straight side, but this will still be beautiful. The next thing you'll need
want to do is to add some paint to your piece. I'm using Swellegant today because
I just love the way they work and also I got some new dye oxides that I want to
experiment with. So here I have copper, silver and brass. You want to shake these
well before you use them and then apply very thin coats. As with anything that
you paint it really is better to have more thin coats than a thick globby coat,
otherwise you just end up filling in all your detail and it doesn't look nearly
as nice. You may notice on your first coat, this isn't doing it too badly, but
sometimes it wants to bead up, it looks like it's not covering. You're not going
to get good coverage on the first coat. Just know that you need to add at least
two if not three coats to get nice coverage, but we're going to do other
things. And give that a few minutes to dry. If you like you can use the patinas
that Swellegant also makes. You can tell my bottle is well-loved. I usually put
just a little in a cup like this that'll be plenty.
Think about it, have you ever seen silver with a patina like this? No, it doesn't
happen in nature and it's not going to happen with the patinas. On copper and
brass and bronze metals they naturally get this kind of a green patina. That's
what this patina will do, it'll give it a green gold verdigris, but on silver it
will darken it because that's what silver does over time. So whatever the
metal naturally does over time is what the patina is going to do with it, There
are other patinas, this is my favorite and the one I use the most often. So this
one I believe I painted these with brass. So I'm going to just actually add a
little copper to this one. I know that seems weird but I love getting the
effects of different layers of colors. So the trick to getting the patinas to
work on Swellegant paints is that they have to be applied to a wet layer of
paint. So once you have the coverage you want with your base colors then you can
add this and you can put it in spots, you can put it all over, it's entirely up
to you. The cool thing about these is that they go through stages.
Actually just the same stages that things go through in nature. It takes a
long time to get this look, so we'll let that sit there for a bit and you can
kind of watch and see different things are happening.
The silver is getting dark, you can kind of see a greenish sludge happening. These
I made before I went out for an evening and so I let them sit for a long time
and they got completely bloomed. What you can do is leave it on your work table
like I'm doing with this one and when it reaches a point that you're happy with
go ahead and rinse it under running water and that will stop the reaction
and it won't go any further. Here are some fun things to play with, these are
the Swellegant dye oxides, these are very heavily pigmented. I don't know if you
can see that my thumb is blue, that was four days ago and it's still blue. Here's
one I did a while ago in silver then went over it with the darkening solution
which is this because it only darkens silver and then went over it with some
of the purple and the blue dye oxides. This one was copper you can see and maybe I
got a little too crazy with the colors. All you need is a drop these are so
strong, one drop will do. Shake them well as well. You may not be able to tell
that's the caribbean blue and violet and these are really strong. Let's play with
the blue and this one is starting to turn green. Christi Friesen, who is the
person whose name is on these bottles of materials, has actually done a really
good video on YouTube where she spends a lot of time sort of playing with
these and experimenting and showing you different combinations. You get different
effects and they can be kind of unpredictable, and whether you apply them
when the paints were wet or dry ,if you apply the different combinations, like I
might get a reaction from my silver that's under there. One final thing you
can do if you think you've gone way too far like these and you want to bring
them back to something maybe a little less crusty looking.
Just take some of your paint, your metal paint that you started with. All I have
here is a scrap of printer paper just something that printed what I didn't
want, it printed three copies when I only wanted one, you know, take my finger, dip
it in the cap and then rub it and this is a trick I saw from Christi, I thought
it was brilliant, just to get some of the moisture out you can take that finger
and rub it on here. You can see that it's not getting into the crevices, the
texture we made, with these scalloped edges I love going over them, and I got
this texture on the back here by doing the rolling with the ball tool over a
sponge. There now that looks a little bit less, yeah crusty. You can see you can
have endless fun with these just playing with the different colors and
combinations and seeing what you like and what you don't and if you're not
happy with something go back over it. I'm going to clean up and then I will show
you how I finished this up. This one by the way, I did the step I just showed
you here, is what I did on this. I went over this lightly with the silver. What
you'll want to start with to make these into pendants, earrings, whatever is an
eye pin and you probably will need a bead of some size that will go onto the eye
pin and then you can feed that up into the hole here, because the eye pin
without the bead will just slip right through and that will be something you
will have to decide for yourself for your own particular size. Notice I wasn't
at all concerned with that ragged hole because I knew all along I'd be putting a
cone on there, just like that, and of course after that you can add whatever
beads you like. But before we do that let's make some fun dangles to
dangle down inside that flower. Gives your, it will give your piece some
movement and a whole lot of interest. So what I have here are some itty bitty
ball head pins. These are pretty fine gauge, these are...
yeah 22 gauge. I have some little four millimeter Swarovski bicones and i'm
just going to pop one... pardon my messy hands you know how they got that way, you
watched it happen... Pop that on. Now we could just have this dangle straight
down, but that's kind of boring don't you think? Let's make this interesting.
We'll grasp this about 3/8 of an inch from the end, you want to leave that much
to make your loop, and these are I believe one and a half inches long, and
I'm grabbing it with my round nose pliers. Don't forget to put the bead on
first, and I'm just going to do like a corkscrew around my round nose pliers
until I get down to the bead. Isn't that cute?
Then I can grab my loop, well, the top of the wire and make it into a loop, and you
have a far more interesting dangle. Here are a couple of others I made. What's fun
about these is that you can make them different lengths just by pulling on out
a little longer and now we have different lengths and if you forget to
add your bead that's what you get, you get one without a bead on it which is
cute too with the little ball head pin.
And if you've been making jewelry at all for a while you probably know where I'm
going from here I'm just going to pop these on the eye. of the eye pin,
close that up, don't forget your bead that would be like a stopper up here. See
isn't that cute? I just love that. Add your cap, maybe another one of these,
maybe a bead for decoration, make a loop and you have a sweet pendant. I hope
you've enjoyed this tutorial and have been inspired by it and if you have and
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learn more about how that all works at Patreon.com/sandysewin. Thanks
for watching, happy creating, bye bye.