Halloween is just around the corner and you can make your own mask this year, we show you how to get started.  Hope you have lots of fun creating some masks with polymer clay!

This week, in preparation for the American holiday of Halloween on the 31st, we decided to explore the making of masks from clay. Remember to make them light and thin if you want to wear them! You can use all clay, or embellishments like scrapbooking brads or metal parts, glitter, metal leaf, Jones Tones foils, crystals and stones, anything you want! Here's a tip- buy a simple plastic mask to use as a template, that way your eye holes will be in the right spot.

Enjoy, and come back next week for the video!

 

A great video showing you how to use a mold made from polymer clay. You can mold almost anything, using either scrap clay, or products made especially for moldmaking like Superelasticlay or silicone rubber. For a clay mold you will probably need a mold release- this gets between your clay and your mold and helps the clay to “pop‿ out of the mold, instead of getting stuck in it. You can try cornstarch, powdered pigments, water, or a silicone spray.

Enjoy the video- later this week we will release our full-length downloadable tutorial on how to make buttons and pendants, and how to make your own mold.

Don’t forget to enter our Call for Creativity- if you didn’t listent to last week’s podcast, please do to get all the details!

This week we want to encourage you to work with molds. Molds are fun, you can take them of almost anything. You can use polymer clay to make a mold, or silicone rubber, or SuperElasticlay (a sculpey product). I mix superelasticlay with premo, about half and half, to get a flexible mold, and Ilysa prefers a hard mold so she just uses clay. You must bake your polymer clay molds before using them! Be sure to return next week for our video demo.

We invite you to listen to our discussion with Lisa Clarke. She operates a Polymer Clay (mostly) bookstore, a blog, and her own radio podcast at her site, www.polkadotcreations.com. She also has an Etsy.com shop for her own polymer clay creations. Lisa is an great person with interesting experiences to share. We hope you enjoy our interview with her as much as we did.

Don't forget- the Call for Creativity starts this month. We encourage you to try out translucent clay and effects, using a fall palette of golds, reds, oranges, and turning-greens (think leaves). If you need more direction, feel free to create a votive candleholder. If you crave an open challenge, make anything you like- using translucent clay. Then load it up on the forum board or our flickr account, and later in the month I'll be making a collage out of them to display here for everyone to see.

Last but not least, the PCAGOE had our monthly Challenge, based on our Favorite Books, in September. The winner was humblebeads- check out her work. http://humblebeads.etsy.com.

 

 

For ipod subscribers- sorry it took so long to load this one up! A great quick video on how to use composition leaf with your polymer clay.