Last minute recycled Christmas tree decoration

As we are in the holiday season I thought you might like an idea for creative and inexpensive Christmas tree decoration. Apart from polymer clay stuff (that you already have if you are a clayer) you probably have all you need at home to complete this project.

For a part of this project, a tree stand, I used almost all of my FIMO stuff but you can use the clay of your choice. It would not change a thing.

Firstly, make a cone out of the cardboard. It doesn't have to be precise, just fixed well. As you can see I used a stapler and a bit of glue to keep it in place.

Secondly, you need to decorate it. Choose a piece of fabric like old silk scarf you're not wearing, lace, denim from old jeans, a leftover from a skirt you shortened etc. Pick some larger plastic beads or a piece of your existing holiday decoration such as small ornaments, snowflakes, smaller lights... you get the point. You can use a glue gun to attach all to a cardboard cone. But don't do it just yet. You will have plenty of time while the stand will be in the oven.

Thirdly, make a stand or a foot (this makes me laugh all the time) for your tree.

I used:
- Black FIMO professional polymer clay
- Cardboard tube
- Plastic FIMO texture plate
- Liquid FIMO clay (deco gel)
- Round cookie cutters 5 and 6.5 cm/ 2 and 2.55 inches
- Brush for liquid clay
- PearlEx #658 Aztec gold
- Tissue blade
- Coarse sanding paper

I also used other polymer things that imply: pasta machine, work surface, baking paper, cleaning stuff.

Cardboard tube can be found in a lot of household product such as aluminum foil. Cut the length you would like for your tree stand.

Condition the polymer clay and roll it through the third largest setting on your pasta machine. Put it on the work surface over the baking paper so it doesn't stick to it. Use the plastic texture plate to make a texture. It doesn't have to be too deep just to be lovely and raised a bit. Of course, you can use any texture you like or if you don't own texture plates use some kind of fabric or plastic to make a motif.

Cut the textured sheet of clay to fit the cardboard tube. Spread liquid clay over the cardboard tube with a brush. Put a textured sheet over the liquid clay on the cardboard tube and make sure it fits to it completely. Check for trapped air between the cardboard and clay. If left there it might cause your clay to crack during baking. Take some time to make a seam tight, nice and blended with a texture.

Roll out two small sheets of clay through largest setting on you pasta machine. Put it one over the other tightly. Texture both sides with a coarse sanding paper. Cut a circle with a 5 cm/ 2 inch cookie cutter.
Use PearEx Aztec gold powder to add a festive look to your stand. Pick just small amounts of powder with your finger and smear it over the raised parts of clay. Cover the 5 cm/ 2 inch circle with the PearlEx powder too.

Use good amount of liquid clay on the inside of the cardboard tube near the edge on one side. Put that side in the center of the 5 cm/ 2 inch circle and press for 1.5 minutes. Goal is for liquid clay, cardboard and clay circle to stick to each other.

Bake in the preheated oven for at least 20 minutes. Always follow the manufacturers recommendations for the baking temperature and bake in the well ventilated area.

In the meantime roll the sheet of clay on the largest setting on your pasta machine, texture it, highlight raised parts with PearlEx powder and cut with a larger cookie cutter.

Start decorating a cardboard cone with chosen materials in order to make your tree.

After 20 minutes, take the stand out of oven and let it cool a bit. It would take another 5 - 10 minutes. Again, add a good amount of liquid clay inside of the cardboard tube, near the edge. Put that side in the center of the 6.5 cm/2.55 inch circle on the textured and powdered side.

Press it for a while and then return it to the oven and bake for another 30 - 45 minutes.
Now you have enough time to finish decorating your tree.

I recommend glazing the tree stand with at least two layers of glaze when it cools down after baking. It will prevent a metallic powder to come off and leave marks on your hands or furniture.

Use soft brush to add a thin layer of glaze. If you wish to speed the process you can bake it for 5 minutes in the oven set on the baking temperature for clay. Take it out, cool the stand, and then add another thin layer of glaze and bake for another 5 minutes. Quick and easy!

But even if you are not a clayer you can make this project by making a tree stand using a cardboard tube which can be painted or decorated with fabric.

Use a glue gun to attach your handmade stand to your recycled tree top.

Voila! You have a gorgeous, unique and inexpensive decoration for holiday diner table, kid’s room or any other part of your home.

Happy holidays to you and yours. :)

Cactus mania

I just finished an interesting project. It all started with a sweet email from a cactus lover wondering if I am willing to do a custom order for her. She admires my work and was willing to give me full freedom to make fridge magnets with cactus theme. Naturally, I was intrigued.

Once in childhood I actually had a window full of potted cactuses (or is it cacti, I am never sure) and I even sat in one, which was an unfortunate experience, as you can imagine. Once in my teen and young adult years I had a house full of pot flowers of all kinds. I loved and took care of them and they loved me back.
Suddenly, about 15 years ago it all stopped. I don't know exactly why but I lost interest in house plants. Fast forward to my recent project I realized as much as interesting this assignment might be it will be challenging. I had to familiarize with the house plants once again and with those with thorns!

So this project quite unexpectedly turned into a study. My customer wanted bright magnets to stand out so I decided to use my Nambi technique.

I found a book of flowers and actually made detailed sketches. Since I am not familiar with the material I had to see how it will turn out in clay within Nambi technique. Surprisingly, I had so much fun in the process of sketching. Most of the time, for my polymer clay projects I just use very primitive drawings. This time I took time to color the sketches too.
Since both customer and I were pretty happy with sketches, I used my template paper to copy the shape that will become a magnet.

I use this template paper for years, it is sturdy and somewhat transparent, allows making original templates made based on your drawings which can be used many times. You can find this template paper in my Etsy shop.

After that the whole project has gone awry. Right about Halloween my oven decided to play a trick on me and burnt me two batches of these magnets and a batch of beads for another customer. It was crazy! I was mad and cried and tried to eat my misery away.

By the time this third batch got to the oven, they were made quickly and looked great! It is proven that practice makes it perfect after all. I put two thermometers in the oven and sat in front of it the whole baking time. Tell me about being dedicated to the project! They were baked perfectly and were ready for finishing.

Cactus magnets are colorful and vibrant, I like them very much. My customer is happy, apart from purple color on the pot. But since she forgot to mention it in advance, she says she can live with it. Once they were finished I attached magnets to their back.

It is always fun to revisit a technique once developed and make something different with it then jewelry. Nambi tutorial is available in my Etsy shop if you are interested.

I hope you will find these magnets interesting as I do. Leave a comment or a question if you wish to.

Frame your beads - Free polymer clay tutorial

I recently made few beads featuring colorful circles. At this point they were half way finished.

They needed a thin frame for a proper finish. While working on these beads I made a short free tutorial to show how I make these frames.
It might be useful for a beginner or might give you an idea.
Follow this link and have fun!

This tutorial is free but if its valuable to you and you want to support independent artist with some coffee or chocolate use paypal.me/NenaBArts to donate.
Thank you.

New tutorial: Tangled earrings

I am writing this post to announce my new tutorial: Tangled earrings.

I know what you must think: She made another earring tutorial? Why?

Oh, but darlings why not? 

Earrings are jewelry and they make you pretty or feel good or preferably both. Earrings come in every color, shape and size and for every occasion. They are happy to accompany you wherever you go and they will never get mad if you choose different pair every day. Earrings can tell a story, make a statement or simply match your outfit. Earrings can be gift for yourself or someone special to you. They can keep secrets or be reminders, just like best friends.

What's not to love about earrings?

I'll tell you a secret: First thing in the morning after I brush my teeth and wash my face I pick and put on a pair of earrings for the day before I even brush my hair.

Now you know why most of the time when I am in studio playing with clay, I think of making earrings.

So if you don’t like earrings you should probably skip it. Or if you like neat, precise and project based tutorial with a particular style you should skip it.

This tutorial is sharing a wonderful idea on how to make earrings in a certain way but it is actually wild with a touch of order, somewhat organic but it doesn’t have to be, great to make identical earrings as well as totally different within a pair. You can make them plain colored or colorful, you could sand but you don’t have to, you can mix and match them with many other techniques and the best of all you can always make them your own.

I dare you to make two exactly the same pairs. I simply cannot see how that is possible.

The earrings you see can be big and long but lightweight and fun. They are somewhat flexible and if you take care of them reasonably they will last. I was asked by the customers non-clayers will they break. Yeah eventually! They are made of polymer clay not steel. But as we tested them by wearing and torturing them (dropping, throwing them, stepping on etc. - I am not proud of this you know) they are fairly good as any other pair of earrings.

Also they are so addictive. You can finish one pair and have an idea for another. I have spent many hours with them. I hope you will have as much fun as I did.

When you do, please share what you made, I am so curious to find out about your creations.

Gypsy Nights or how to use scrap clay

This interesting story dates back in 2010. I was working with polymer clay and foils making some simple and small size jewelry pieces. It was an attempt to follow a feedback I got from few customers. I used one color of clay, Lisa Pavelka's foil (learn how to here: http://bit.ly/20cOsLh), custom made/commercial stamps and made several jewelry sets, pendants, earrings and rings.
I finished them with Magic glos, UV resin, also Lisa Pavelka's product.
Here is just one of these sets:

While working on this project I saved the scrap. At the time, I bought foils and even FIMO clay online from abroad so it was quite an investment. Also I admit that I am very stingy when it comes to polymer clay and I try to use every bit of it. But working with foils it is a bit tricky. There are uneven ends or parts not quite covered or stamp is not deep enough.... you know how it goes.
This is a part of scrap clay I ended up with:

Even one look at this pile made me depressed. So I started cutting off those thin parts that absolutely can't be used anymore, making some "real" scrap clay. Then I had a great idea: I'll make a collage! Some of the pieces were small and uneven shape so I could cut the rest of them into similar pieces.
I decided to use black FIMO clay for the background, ran a sheet through pasta machine and started layering small pieces with foil into a collage.

Well... it was not a brilliant idea as I thought so in the beginning. It seemed fairly simple BUT some pieces of clay were resting on a baking paper for 3 days so they were brittle and not all the pieces were the same thickness. It took me a while to combine softer pieces of clay with stiffer ones, to combine colors and to make all the seams disappear.
At the end my collage looked like this:

Today, I would make sure to run all the pieces through the same thickness on pasta machine and I would probably put on some great music to help me relax through the process. LOL

My finished collage was awesome! I fell in love with it and I couldn't stop looking at it. My scrap pile was that amount in the back and I could live with that. I also had a plan how to use it later which helped my mind relax.

Next logical step was to use as much of a collage I could and not make much scrap. It took some time to think and combine too. LOL These are the pieces before baking.

I used my favorite resin Magic glos, for a finish on top of baked jewelry components and I made tiny jewelry collection. I really loved it. It was colorful, joyful and uninhibited so I named it Gypsy Nights.

Needles to say, I sold all the Gypsy Nights pieces apart from one necklace that I kept for myself. Some of the ‘simple and small size jewelry sets’ are still somewhere in the studio. Lesson learned: make jewelry that brings joy and makes you happy! Trust your instincts. Customer feedback is valuable but not always spot on correct.

I love this idea because it can be applied to almost any scrap amount of almost any technique. Metallic scrap pieces would look gorgeous in a collage or extruded scrap clay, layered canes sheets, mokume gane sheets etc. Then there is always a possibility for color combos, cutting similar shapes, laying scrap in a mosaic manner etc.

It might work even for one pendant for example if you are stingy like me or playful or want to try just for fun.
I hope you will be inspired to make something beautiful. At least that was my intention for sharing this story.

This tutorial is free but if its valuable to you and you want to support independent artist with some coffee or chocolate use paypal.me/NenaBArts to donate.
Thank you.

Casual Skinner blend

As promised, I will post some of my older free tutorials here in next few days. Let's start with a casual Skinner blend.
This was really a fun experiment and as it usually goes, I made it completely accidentally.

I consider myself to be a fairly patient person. I have a ton of 'nerves of steel' specially when it comes to polymer clay: I am ready to do things over and over if not got right at first attempt, I calmly do precise cuts, assemble small parts and I am even able to sand my beads by hand for hours without much of a drama.
One of the things I don't have patience for is Skinner blend. I simply can't make myself to measure precisely and make a meaningful Skinner blend. All of the sudden I become annoyed and restless and want to speed the process. How crazy is that?

Tutorials seen online often include Skinner blends that are planned, thought through and measured. Obviously, a lot of time and energy are invested in making such beautiful blends. I sincerely admire all the artists that make Skinner blends in that manner.
I quit trying after my third. So when making them I just go with the flow trying to use all the clay I dedicated for the blend I am making and not bother myself with cutting and measuring. To be completely honest I actually enjoy being surprised with the result each time.

Photo shows my new casual Skinner blend experiment. I mixed some scrap clay lying around and made a colorful sheet. Just before putting it in the pasta machine a thought popped into my head: this will be booooooring! I hesitated for a minute and then started cutting pieces of clay out of the sheet and then mixed and matched them.
After running it through pasta machine for about 20 times this is what I got. It's so cool, isn't it?

How do you make your Skinner blends?

This tutorial is free but if its valuable to you and you want to support independent artist with some coffee or chocolate use paypal.me/NenaBArts to donate.
Thank you.

Smatram da sam prilično strpljiva osoba, pogotovo kada je reč o mom poslu. U stanju sam da satima strpljivo sedim i radim, da budem precizna bez drame kada je to potrebno, pa čak i da šmirglam bez protesta.

Jedna od stvari za koju nemam strpljenja je Skinner blend. Naprosto nemam nijedan preostali strpljivi živac koji bi mi pomogao da ga precizno merim i složim pre provlačenja kroz pasta mašinu. To svakako nije bila namera Judith Skinner, matematičarke koja je izumela ovaj način mešanja boja u radu s polimerskom glinom. Često na internetu viđam uputstva s unapred osmišljenim i precizno sastavljenim Skinner blendovima. Umetnicima koji ih prave divim se do ludila!

Odustala sam od toga nakon svog trećeg Skinner blenda. Pravim ih kako mi dodje i više ih prilagođavam količini materijala koju sam odredila za izradu Skinner blenda. Nekad ih sečem ovako, drugi put onako i da budem potpuno iskrena, uživam u tome da se svaki put iznenadim rezultatom.

Na slici vidite moj novi eksperiment s "opuštenim" Skinner blendom. Poslagala sam boje, umešane od raznorazne otpadne gline, preostale od prethodnih projekata, a onda mi se učinilo da će ispasti dosadan. Tada sam počela da isecam komade gline i menjam im mesta. Nakon provlačenja kroz pasta mašinu dobila sam rezultat koji vidite na slici.

Kako vi radite pravite Skinner blend?

A return to blogging

I am going to try to blog again this year.

I started blogging in 2008 and was an active blogger for 6 years. My blog was about polymer clay in my native language, Serbian. In 2009 I enthusiastically started this blog in English but life kicked in. My father got ill and died in 2010, during the grieving time my marriage came to an end, my Mom moved in and a lot more of small things added up together.... you know how it goes. Eventually I stopped blogging, letting my old blog and website float quietly and peacefully into the history.

Just few days ago I discovered that this blog still existed and I got excited. Most of the reasons for starting a blog back in 2008 remain relevant to me today. I want a cozy place to express my thoughts and feelings, I want to describe my artistic doubts and fears, I want to share my excitement and experiments about polymer clay, I want more ways to connect with fellow artists, customers, friends and also I honestly miss writing. 

My primary focus is still polymer clay but I might just write about anything that excites me now. 

I hope that blog bug bit me hard enough to persevere. I don't have a plan or a strict schedule. Lack of a plan gives a 'go with the flow' feeling of freedom and openness I missed with previous blog. Let us all see if I ‘grew up’ at all and what I've learned in past few years.

All that being said, follow if you dare or proceed at your own risk. LOL

My first post will be to add a free tutorial or more of them that were available on the old website.

Blogging journey begins, thank you for coming on it with me!

Mini Stud Earrings

I have to share my newest obsession with you: mini stud earrings.

It all started few days ago when I realized that I have a considerable amount of polymer clay flower canes with transparent background. I randomly picked thicker and thinner ones trying to find if they are still usable. You know how they tent to dry when laying in a box for a while. And then I just got an idea!

Within minutes I made some cane slices and put them into oven to cure. Half and hour later I attached them to earring metal parts and covered the front side with Lisa Pavelka’s Magic-glos. Few more minutes later, when UV lamp performed it’s magic, I had in front of me several pairs of finished cute mini stud earrings.

Then I realized that it is too simple and started a new bunch adding glitter and Perlex powders in Magic-glos on front side. Pure fun!
I have several ideas that I will try soon.

Few more photos just to show how mini they are:










These mini stud earrings are not something that I usually make of polymer clay. I prefer larger and unique pieces of jewelry. But I am really happy that I followed that sudden idea.

At the end I am satisfied how they turned out. I think I will experiment with them a bit more.

So what do you think?

Polymer Clay Illustration Art

Browsing through photos on Flickr I’ve stumbled upon these incredible pictures. Tammy Durham, the author, calls them polymer clay illustrations.

I’ve noticed colorful circles at first and decided to take a closer look. These polymer clay illustrations are amazing! I have never seen anything like them.

Tammy’s illustrations show diversity of techniques and themes in rich colors. How she presents people is great. I love expressions on their faces and incredible details in every picture.

These polymer clay illustrations seem to be simple. But their pure lines and common shapes also contain depth which is achieved by using textures and bold color combos. Those colorful circles I mentioned before just add a liveliness and complete pictures.

I think that Tammy’s illustrations are warm, live and they invite you to think them over, so they just provide a full pleasure to spectator.

Tammy Durham’s work can be fond on her website and Flickr gallery.

Adorable creatures

These lovely earrings were born few days ago while having fun with mokume gane technique.

I was shaving a sheet of mokume gane and spotted two cute shapes. It crossed my mind how gorgeous faces they are.

I’ve cut them out of the sheet and placed on a sheet of black polymer clay to give them thickness. I added blue and rose Swarovski flat back crystals for eyes and rushed them into oven.

A half an hour later adorable little boy and cutest little girl were smiling on me. I am completely in loved with them.

I’ve used few grits of dry/wet sandpaper for sanding by hand. I’ve also buffed them and covered with two protective layers of gloss glaze.


Beautiful sterling silver ear wires, a gift from a friend, made them look even better and really special to me.

I am keeping these adorable creatures for sure.