FAUX FABRICS with POLYMER CLAY
This tutorial involves making faux fabrics with minimal caning. You will need Shade-tex texture sheets or rubbing plates, plastic canvas, pasta machine, Kato flex blade and your choice of clays. One clay as a metallic has worked best for me. Clay needs to be leached if it has any gooeyness at all.
There are some advantages to these faux fabrics over caned fabrics. You do not have to make a large amount at any time and can even make a two inch piece quickly for miniatures. Once you have made a sheet of fabric, you are ready to use it and it is very easy to get it to the thickness that you need. You also will have wonderful leftover clay for beads, miniatures and embellishments for other small creations. The success of this technique will depend on your skills of shaving off layers of clays evenly. So it involves some praticing, but the remnants of fabric will make wonderful beads until you get good enough to make 'yardage'!
PIQUE or WAFFLEWEAVE
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Make a small sheet of clay on next to the thickest setting on your Atlas or Imperia pasta machine. I am using gold and pearl Premo in these examples. Dust the plastic canvas and clay with powder or use a release. Using a piece of plastic canvas cut to fit your pasta machine, lay the canvas on top of clay and run through the machine on the thickest setting. |
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Stick the clay sheet to glass, tile or marble to prevent the clay from slipping. Using a Kato Flex-blade, begin to shave off the top layer of the clay. Wipe the blade often. It is easier with the metallic clays to cut at an even depth. |
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As the tiny pieces are cut off you can make beads out of them. If using the smaller grid canvas, you can lightly mush the pieces together and get very nice beads. If using the larger grid, I take the pieces and using scrap clay, I apply the small squares one at a time upside down (This gives the mica shift that creates the design)to the base. Roll or shape as you wish. If using translucent and pearl or just pearl, the beads will look like the ones in the second picture. They look like mini capiz shells or a dried silver dollar plant (lunaria). If using two colors in the pasta machine such as black and gold, the beads will have a look similar to the third picture. Wonderful turqoise can be made with the right colors. |
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The metallic clays need
only one color for this technique to be successful. You
will need at least two colors for some more complicated
designs. By reducing the width of the pasta rollers with each pass through the machine, the waffleweave will have less definition. This is probably desirable if working in miniature. As you can see, you get more definition with the metallic clays, but with two colors, you can also get good results with this technique. With two colors, I have had more of a gingham look. If you run through the pasta machine from a corner repeatedly, you will get a diamond design. |
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Just a few other pointers... Plastic canvas comes in several size grids. You can see three different sizes in the first picture. Plastic canvas also comes in different shapes---heart, stars, diamonds, circles. When buying plastic canvas, check both sides of the canvas to be sure there are no little 'tits' which need to be cut off before running through the pasta machine. You may wish to test different thicknesses of clays when you plan on shaving off one layer if using two different colors. I have had some expected results and many unexpected results. |
| Watch this page for tutorials on making other fabrics from polymer clay. Moire, toile du jouy, brocade, netting or tulle, lace, leopard, giraffe, zebra and tiger prints and many more are in the works. |
