I’m a big fan of polymer clay. It can be colourful, it’s relatively easy to work with, and they’re small enough that I can hoard dozens, nay hundreds of little coloured blocks and imagine a time in the future when I’ll get to working with them. 

I enjoy playing with polymer clay, and have been for about a decade now. I’ve learned a thing or two about what’s good to stick in to polymer clay, on it, or around it, and what are horrible, horrible, bad things to avoid. 

Good things: 

Tinfoil! I tend to use this stuff as a “core” for most polymer clay sculptures. Polymer clay is expensive. Tinfoil? Not so much.  It can’t melt while in the oven at the low temperature polymer clay requires, and it’s a sturdy, inexpensive, handy thing to have around.  

Glass! Glass beads, marbles, glass cabochons – Glass is great because like tinfoil, it’s not going to melt, it doesn’t react to whatever chemicals that reside in a standard batch of polymer clay, and adding a bit of glass can liven things up. I like to use the little black glass eye-pins that folks tend to normally use for things like needle-felted animals. 

Metal! Do you want to make an ornament, or a keychain? Take one of those little metal eyelets that folks use normally for hanging pictures, wind some tinfoil around it, and then put your clay on top. BAM! You’ve got a relatively sturdy little creation that can be hung, with little chance that the metal loopy-bit will come loose. Not just findings and bits, you can also find interesting bits like metal accessories that you can cram into or around critters, and make them look even more interesting!

So this ends this first blog about things that go well with Polymer clay, or at least doesn’t have some sort of weird interaction. Yes, this was low-hanging fruit, and things that are pretty obvious, but everyone has to start somewhere.  There’ll be a few more batches of blogs after this one, going towards things that might react weirdly, going to things that should be avoided. 

There we go. First blog is DONE!