One of the reasons I love making and giving handmade gifts is that they are
so meaningful. They're meaningful to the recipients because it's something I
made especially for them, but you can also incorporate other kinds of meaning
such as adding words or phrases that are meaningful or you can use objects that
have meaning. In today's video I'm going to show you how you can use buttons to
make jewelry that everyone will be able to relate to. Hi there, Sandy here.
Welcome to another polymer clay jewelry video at keepsakecrafts.net. So I'm
guessing that many of us have button boxes from relatives. I know I have my
grandmother's. I have my mother-in-law's. I just received a bunch of buttons from
a neighbor. I have quite a collection of buttons. Not everybody in the family sews
or crafts or has any use for them but I thought of this way of creating
jewelry that I could give to the relatives and the family and tell them
that the patterns were from their mother-in-law's or mum's button box. So
we're going to form beads using imprints from buttons, and I've shown you how to
use this molding putty before. If you want more detail I'll link to a video
that I did a while back that shows you all the details. All you do with the
molding putty is you take an equal part of each color and just mix them together.
Some of them you have to work a little bit more quickly than others, some of
them start to set up pretty quick on you so you have to be fast. So you just keep
smushing until there are no more streaks and it's all one uniform color. Once you
have your molding putty all molded just roll it into a smooth ball so that you
don't have any creases or wrinkles, set it on your surface and then go ahead and
press in your piece that you want to mold. Now you can see when you press...
I'll lift this up so you can see how this kind of comes up over the edge of
the button, just to make life easier on yourself go ahead and flatten that down,
because remember we're going to be trying to put two pieces to get
to make a lentil shaped button and this will just make it easier. So then you
just have to wait for these to cure. It depends on the brand how long it's going
to take you can tell it's cured, though, when you poke a fingernail in and it
doesn't leave an impression. If I poke now you can see that that's still in
there. Once your molds are set then you can mix together some clay and I went
ahead and mixed together about two parts Pardo translucent and one part pearl, you
could also use white but I liked a little bit of shimmer that the pearl
gives, and you could of course experiment with other colors but we're trying to
make a faux porcelain look. I think this is a nice mix. So then you're just gonna
grab yourself bits of clay, and it's kind of trial and error finding how much
works in each button mold. Now if you want your buttons to be the same front
and back you'll need to make two molds of each button, but I think it's kind of
cool to have something different on each side. So roll your ball so that it's nice
and smooth and it doesn't have any creases. Pop it into the mold... I can tell already
that's going to be too much... I'm going to take another one and press it on the
back and when I peel that out you can see that that was too much because I
have this whole edge around here. So I'm just gonna pull off some of the clay and
try again, and this is what you'll need to do for each of your beads, is just
kind of experiment and often it's really better to err on the side of making it a
little small rather than a little large because if it's a little small you won't
end up with this lip like I've got on this. So if I take out like a third of
that I'll show you what I get. Remember to always roll your clay back to nice
and smooth because any creases that are in the ball are not going to get pressed
out, they will be in your finished bead.
And now by making that smaller I don't have that lip. This is a little thin so
you'll have to just try experiment with different shapes and sizes until you
like what you get. Now I don't mind that this is a little off-center, I kind of
like that look, but you might want to be a little bit, take a little bit more care
and have beads that are perfectly centered. So if you have a nice deep one,
like say, this one here, you can use a bit more clay and then you have a really
cool two-sided bead. It's a nice flat bead which hangs nicely. Once you have
your beads all done you really need to let them sit overnight, at least a couple
hours to firm up before you try to put in the hole. Here's a bead that I made
yesterday and I'll use this one to show you how to make the hole. My favorite
tool for piercing holes and beads is a doll needle because it's hard, it's sharp,
it's thin, it's nice and long, and you can pierce all kinds of things. So you
want to start at one side where you want the hole and just twist the needle and
be looking- focus your eyes right where you want that needle to come out, it's a
hand-eye coordination thing, and most of the time it will come out right where
you want it. Now that's coming out a little close to this side that I'm
looking at, a little too close for me, and that's fine. I'm going to back that
out and then put the needle in right where that hole is but more centered on
the bead, and you can just kind of take your finger and stroke that and make
that hole you made go away, and now I'm going to look right at this hole, twirl
and press lightly, and just hold very lightly with your left hand or your
non-dominant hand, and it will pop right out that hole. That's pretty cool. Now let
me show you what happens, here's that the I just made, and it's probably gonna be...
already it's distorting around that hole. No matter how lightly I hold it, it can
be done, maybe it depends on the brand of clay if you have a nice firm brand. Okay,
I wasn't looking where I should have been so that didn't come out where it should
have, but that's okay I'll just back it out, stroke over that spot ,see how this
is becoming a little bit more oblong and my texture is a little bit flattened? It
really is better to just let your beads sit. That's not bad but, yeah, see how it's
all flattened and smushed? That didn't happen on this bead. So let your
beads rest before you make the holes. Now another thing that you can do is
make some bigger beads for your focal and what you might want to do for the
focal is not drill the hole right down the middle, in fact you could drill them
all off-center. Here's one I thought was pretty done with the rose button mold
and I actually made my hole about a third of the way down and that will keep
the bead from spinning and flipping and keep it hanging nicely on your necklace.
You could do that with all of your beads and have them all strung that way.
if you were doing a bracelet you might want to make two holes in each one, two
parallel holes to keep them nice and flat. Once you have your beads made and
the holes pierced, then you can bake them according to the manufacturer's
instructions. So for this project once your beads are all baked it's time
to add color and in this case we are using liquid clay and alcohol inks but
the alcohol inks that I'm using, I don't know about other brands, all I own are
Ranger inks, but they require a little bit of testing and experimentation. The
first thing I did was I pulled out all of the liquid clay that I have including
Kato liquid polymer clay, Sculpey translucent liquid sculpey also known as
TLS and fimo deco gel. I mixed into each of those a single drop
of alcohol ink in Cranberry which is a beautiful bright red color, What was
amazing was how different the colors looked when being mixed into the clay
but then once they were baked I ended up with this very different kind of orangey
pale sad color. I was not impressed so I decided to see if I could get a purple
that I liked and I picked three different blues that I had, these are all
Ranger alcohol inks. Denim I added to this one with the deco gel, stream I
added to the TLS and sailboat blue I added to the Kato, and you can see how
very different they look when they're all mixed up, but that's a very little
indication of what they're going to look like when they're baked. This is what we
ended up with so although the cranberry by themselves
they look pretty similar, we got kind of different unexpected results from the
additional inks, so this is why I say you really need to do some planning. If
you're looking for a particular color it may take quite a bit of experimentation.
Now I've seen this project done also with Pinata alcohol inks and I don't
know if there's quite so much color shifting. I don't have any Pinata inks
but I hope to test them sometime soon. So I would call this a fail. I am really
truly not happy with any of these colors. I tried a few different things. I tried
adding more alcohol ink to the liquid clay to see if I could get more of a
true color. I thought perhaps it was diluted too much and that was why my
cranberry was more of a pink. And it is a little bit darker but it's still got
that kind of yellowish quality that I don't like. This, of all of them this is
probably the one I like the best, but I still don't love it, but it occurred to
me that something about this process with the Ranger inks is causing a bit of
yellowish-ness to get introduced into my colors so I
actually went ahead and made a whole new batch of beads and decided to go with a
different color. By the way this is a good warning to not have too much of the
liquid clay on your bead because it will cause drips and just make a mess. So
these aren't a total waste. I may paint them someday with something else but I'm not
going to use them for this project. So I thought about it and decided: Well, if
it's adding a little bit of yellow to my mix then what colors look good with
yellow added to them? Not the blues and purples that I usually go for but
green, which is blue and yellow, so we can make it a little bit more yellow, that'll
be okay, or orange, which I wasn't in the mood for (I'm not very often) and I'm
adding just about a drop of alcohol ink and you could put in a little bit
more liquid clay than that. Mix the two together and then paint them on your
beads and this will be a slightly stronger mix because I've got more of
the ink in proportion to the liquid clay so I thought it might make it a little
darker. And all I have here is a piece of 20 gauge wire that's a little bit wider
than my baking tray and this makes it so much easier to just do, to do first of
all to do two sides at once because now I can flip it over all at once and I
don't have my hands all in there getting all gooky, which was kind of a mess, and
you can do both sides at once. A much more efficient way of doing it, and now I'm
just gonna gently wipe with a paper towel Like I said, you don't wanna leave
too much on, but you want to take some off so that it's white on top and left
in the crevasses, and you can see here that if you choose
items that are nice and deep, like this one looks fantastic and this one is okay.
It'll look nice when it's done but it doesn't show up the color nearly as
well. This is my bead baking tray, it's just a disposable aluminum foil baking pan
and like I said I cut my wire a little bit wider and used an awl and poked a hole
on each side, bend it up and bake away. By the way, a quick tip for you. I've seen so
many different tutorials saying to use binder clips to hold these together but
they're metal and they stay hot. What I love about using wooden clothespins, I'll
show you what I mean. Here's another pan that I'm putting upside-down on top then
I use wooden clothespins on all, one on each side, even coming out of a
275-degree oven I can touch this, take it off and take a look.
Don't touch the metal part! So then go ahead and bake your beads. I bake them
for probably 15-20 minutes. So here are the beads out of the oven,
this is what I ended up with and I'm satisfied with it. I kind of wanted a
little bit more color. but these will be pretty especially once I choose some
nice accenting beads. I'm going to string them I think with two strands of bead
stringing wire having double strands of smaller beads in between them. Here are
several of the beads that I pulled out as possibilities to go with my button
stamped beads, and the very first thing I did was, of course, I went into my greens.
I pictured maybe something with some crackle and sparkle like these beads and
this is definitely a yellow-green so I pulled out some yellow greens. I really
like this, it's got a matte finish so it's kind of a different texture and
these are nice, these are from the dollar bead box, they're Czech glass rondelles
in opaque olive green travertine, these are agates which I
don't think I'm going to use. I was thinking of maybe doing something a
little different than I usually do. I'm very comfortable with choosing a whole
variety of one color and then a metallic. So dark and light greens and antique
brass or antique gold. Awesome with that, but I wanted to kind of push myself, so I
was thinking what about if I threw in some orange, or I don't want to do red
it's too close to Christmas we're gonna have enough red and green, orange sounded
interesting, a pop of that. So I opened my orange and yellow box which are all in
one box because they're probably my least favorite colors, and I was looking
at these. It's a clear plastic box so I was looking at these and they looked
really green to me and I was thinking, "Wow, did I misfile them? Did I put
them in the wrong box?" And then I realized the bottom of the box was clear
and the yellow beads were showing through it and I had it sitting on my
lap, on top of my blue pants. So the blue through the yellow made these look much
more green than they are. So, yeah, funny story, but good to keep in mind that you've
got to consider what kind of reflections and what other things are around you
that are going to influence the appearance of your colors. I also pulled
out these crystals, these I just found Michaels, I think. And so many of you have
told me that you really enjoy watching me figure out and plan and design so
I'll just speed up that process and show you how it worked out. Here I'm trying to
decide if I'm gonna use these glass beads. So many of you have told me that you
have been inspired by and benefited and learned from my videos and that makes me
so happy because that is what I have set out to do with my blog and this YouTube
channel. If you want even more inspiration and benefits for yourself
you might consider becoming a patron, because my patrons, in addition to
getting sneak peeks and bonuses and behind-
the-scenes, my patrons can also get up to two bonus videos every month and they're
video tutorials. Patrons get other things, they'll get, like I said, maybe a sneak
peek video that everybody else doesn't get. Something to think about. Not only do
you get the satisfaction of knowing you're helping keep these tutorials
coming for everybody but you get extras for yourself. What I really pictured
here was having two rows of beads in between these. You know so many times
I've designed a piece of jewelry and and lived with it for a while, wore it a few
times even, and then went back and took it apart. So don't feel like you have to
get it exactly precisely the right way the first time. Is there a right way? If
you're not thrilled with it after wearing it for a while try again! So
there, that is what I have settled on. I think I need to find a couple little
bead cones or something to finish these ends. I'm just going to have two strands,
one strand will have some of these matte beads which I think are a really nice
enhancement to these all these other beads, and then the other strands will
alternate the dark green crystal cubes and the Czech glass beads, and then it's
just a matter of stringing. So to get started I have slid a crimp onto the end
of a piece of bead stringing wire and then slid the end back through it to
make a loop of the bead stringing wire, then slide the crimp up to leave just a
little loop, and ideally it should be small enough so that when it's inside
your bead cap it's hidden, so that's awesome.
And then you can use regular crimping pliers, I'm gonna use my One-Step Crimper
and flatten that crimp and to make sure it's secure just tuck your pliers in
there to the loop you can give it a pull and
make sure it's not going anywhere. Once you're sure of that you can trim off the
excess wire and repeat this step for a second wire. Now I've just taken an eye
pin and attached both those loops to the eye pin and then I can slide on my cover.
That will cover up those ends, if I had had a gold bead stringing wire I would have
used that. I just, I didn't, so this is all I have so I'm going to use this and make
it work. The tricky thing with doing two strands
is that sometimes at the ends a bit of the wire can show. So here you can see
that dilemma, where in this case it looks like all I really need to do is add
another one of these frosted beads. Let's see how that works out, and so that looks
pretty good. Now you can still see a little bit of the wire here and if that
bugs you what you need to do is find some very, very small beads. One thing
that stands in great for small beads is crimps. You can use those as filler. I've
used them in place of, they're basically teeny tiny beads, and they were great to
fill in spaces that need to be filled in. So that looks pretty cool I'm happy with
that. Now if I had gold wire I might not have bothered adding that extra little
bead in but I think that'll be nice because I'm going to have gold caps on
the sides and then gold chain going around the sides in the back of the
necklace, so those little tiny beads will not only fill in the spaces but they'll
also help tie it all in together. Another thing you might find helpful in filling
in these gaps when you're stringing multiple strands this way is, well this
all really depends on the kind of beads you have, but I'm using these frosted
matte glass beads and you'll notice that they vary quite a bit in thickness.
Here's one, here's the other, quite a bit thinner. And so if
you find these skinnier ones, reserve those for putting on the ends closer to
the beads and that will actually help things nestled together more easily. And
here's another tip for you. Sometimes your holes will be just barely
big enough to string through, especially with the two strands. Here some of them
are just a little tight, so what you do is you take your pliers, flat nose pliers
are great because they're nice and wide and give you a good grip, and you grip
your wire real close to but not right next to your bead and so you maybe leave
a millimeter of wire showing and then you push. Now if you grab it out here, too
far, it's just going to bend as you push. So the secret is to be patient and just
grab it a little tiny bit each time. See that, even that, what was that? Two
millimeters, that's too much, it starts bending. So just a little tiny bit, and
you can do this with other things, too, with head pins and things that just
barely don't want to go through. Just grab it real close, be very patient, don't
get greedy and leave too much space, and eventually you'll be able to work it
through so that you can pull it through the other end. Now I've done all my
stringing. I'm just going to go ahead and add my caps on the end and just finish
everything off, and you could do this with a simple loop or wrapped loop. I'm
going to do a wrapped loop so it's just, it just has a decorative element and
it's nice and secure. If you want to know more details about how to make wrapped
loops, I've done an entire video just showing all the little step by steps and
the finer points of how to do that. Straighten up that loop and this is
where you'll attach some necklace chain in whatever length you want. Now when you
get to this stage it may be hanging a little bit funny because it's we've got
two strands, they're a little bit stiff and it just,
yeah, it's funny how much less nice if a piece of jewelry can feel when the beads
are strung just a little bit too tightly. It doesn't make a huge difference over
the length of a piece of necklace, maybe an eighth of an inch, and now suddenly
can you see how much nicer that's draping? So just give it a little bit of
room, even if you have a tiny bit of the wire showing that won't be nearly as
noticeable as a necklace that hangs awkwardly. Take your time and adjust it.
Once you're happy with the way it's hanging go ahead and string a crimp bead
on the wire end, send the wire right back through that bead, if you're attaching
this to something with a closed loop this is the point where you would put
this wire through it but since I'm attaching it to an eye pin that I can
twist open it's just so much easier to manage without having to deal with the
eye pin right now, and again I'm going to use my one-step crimper and if you want
to learn more about using the crimpers I've also done an entire video on them.
These are just a great tool for making your jewelry making a little bit easier
and more efficient, but no matter how wonderful the tool always check, you
don't want your necklace coming apart on you. Repeat for the other wire, attach
them to your eye pin, slide them into your cone, add a bit of,
add a clasp and a bit of chain at a length it suits you, and your necklace is
done. Thanks for watching, be sure to subscribe if you haven't already, take a
look at my Patreon page for how you can get bonus tutorials and great rewards
and help support these videos. Happy creating!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét