Indigo necklace

Hello my sweet honey bunnies and welcome to Mymandarinducky!

Today I am going to show you how to make a beautiful and very feminine statement necklace so that you can create your own jewelry by using this technique. This technique is perfect for those who has a lot of clay leftovers and is eager to play with skinner blends and scrap clay.

For this tutorial you will need: • Polymer clay in 3 colors ( 2 bright ones for a skinner bland and a basic dark tone for the base). You can use clay leftovers for the blend and mix a dark shade from scrap clay. No need for new clay blocks!

• Knife tool and a ball tool.

• Sponge for the texture • Micro beads for decoration • Wax paper or baking paper • Burnishing tool.

I will be using a metallic box lid but you can use something like a doorknob or anything else with a nice rounded flat surface.It should be sort of flat but without sharp edges. It need to be easy to burnish with without leaving marks.

Start by conditioning your base clay piece and roll it through the pasta machine on layers 1-3. Leave it on 3 and place it on a piece of baking paper or wax paper. I am working on wax paper for this tutorial.

Cover it up with another sheet of paper and start burnishing. This is necessary to make sure that the working surface has no bubbles, fingerprints or indentations. it will still have some little uneven parts, but it will be much smoother than just a rolled clay.

Take the upper layer off.

Prepare two clay sheets in bright shads. Here I selected blue and fuchsia.

Prepare them for the skinner blend mix as I show here and keep rolling it through your pasta machine on layer 1-2 up until it will turn into a perfectly smooth color gradient. Then roll it on level 3-4 and place it next to the base sheet.

As you can see here - the blend can happen to be different depending on how much clay and what proportions you will use.

As long as it is some sort of skinner blend - it will work. Maybe make a few and choose the best one.

Take the knife tool and start cutting out a lot of little leaf shapes. Make them in different sizes but keep them consistent.

You want them to slowly change the color and you want to have different type of leafs.

When that’s done, take the leftovers away, so that only leaf shapes remain.

Place the wax paper or baking paper on top of the leafs and burnish them to keep them flat.

Lift up the leafs one by one with your knife tool and start placing them into little organic leaf combinations. Keep the distance between the leaves and keep the distance between the branches. Here are some samples of how leafs can go.

Place a sheet of paper on top and burnish it.

With a knife tool start decorating the leafs by outlining the middle spines.

Next cut each leaf combination out. Leave about 2-3 mm around the edge of the leafs.

When that’s done it’s time to decorate the leafs to make them look more jewelry like.

Make the veins on the leafs, but don’t decorate them all the same way. Do some of the leafs with the vertical lines, some can have horizontal or diagonal lines.

Also go around the whole area of each composition and decorate it the way I show here.

Leave some empty parts and by using your ball tool mark the spaces for golden beads. Also go all around each little leaf next to it’s base and outline them with dots. This will give it a finished embroidery look as it we are playing with fabric. Also fill in all the empty spaces with dot texture.

Pick up the golden seed bass one by one and place them each in it’s little nest. Push them into the clay with a bigger ball tool or any other tool that you feel comfortable with.

After that cover the whole composition with a baking or wax paper sheet and burnish it all slightly again.

Then turn it upside down and take off the bottom paper sheet.

This way we use them like stickers, as now we will be sticking them to the bowl!

This is necessary so that we have curved beads in the end! So place then carefully one by one on the bowl and let’s do our first bake!

Bake it according the manufacturer’s instructions.

I baked 2 sets of leaf branches with 5 pieces in each of them. As you can see I can make two necklaces from this se or a set of earrings and a pendant or even a hair decoration. But I decided to go big and to make a massive statement necklace!

So now we need to prepare the back for each bead. Roll your clay through the pasta machine on layers 1-3 gradually.

Place it on the baking or wax paper sheet. Place the bead on top of it and cut around the contour of the bead. Take it off the paper and use the spongy texture sheet to set it in place, to even it out and to give it a nice organic earthy texture.

When that is done use some jump rings and place them directly into clay.

This is only one way to create invisible hoops for the necklace. There can be plenty more and actually for the necklace I made I used a different type of connections. You will see it later.

Finish all the beads and bake them again. I am using fiberfill matt to bake them on.

After baking take the jump rings out and glue each of them back with cyanoacrylate glue (like super glue).

As you can see, for my type of necklace this sort of hoop connection didn’t work as I was planning to place them in two layers.

Therefore I took the little jump rings out and used eye pins instead. I placed a pin on to the back of the bead and fixed it with a little clay ball. Then I evened out the texture with the sponge and baked it. When it was baked I used pliers to make a hoop on the end of the pin. And only then I assembled them all together.

I also used glue to stick them all together so that beads do not move.

It is not the most perfect way, but it looks neat and professional enough and I am quite happy with the result.

I hope you liked the tutorial and please let me know if you have any questions.

I will be waiting for your creations. Please send me some pictures of what you make after watching this tutorial on mysweethoneybunnies@gmail.com And so if you’d like to support me there is one thing you should know.

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