Baked Beads

[ellarien]

This afternoon I went back to the polymer clay. The general aim of the exercise was to make sets of beads that shaded gradually from one colour to another, by mixing graduated amounts of two colours; in the first set I stopped before the colours completely smeared together, and in the second I didn't. The process was a lot less precise than I imagined, and my plan of cutting everything into triangles was somewhat stymied by the nature of the clay (the red being particularly stubborn even after a quarter-hour of hand conditioning) and the fact that the red was a much stronger pigment than the yellow; there's actually twice as much yellow as red in the second set, and I considered making it three times, but that would have meant smooshing everything into a line and chopping and re-rolling yet again, and it was getting close to dinner time.

I'm not displeased with the end product, for a first serious attempt. (The zeroth attempt is visible in the background of the second picture.) Any irregularities are a natural feature of the process, as they say. But I need to find a better work surface than an old plastic chopping board, and probably a better baking surface than aluminium foil on an old cookie sheet.

	Red/Blue Hand-made beads in graduated amounts of partly blended red and blue polymer clay.
	Red/Orange/Yellow Handmade beads in graduated proportions of blended red and yellow polymer clay.