Tag: Skinner blend

Family crafting time

Posted on by Niki

The girls and I managed to get in some crafting before the girls went back to school last week, we decided had a play with polymer clay. Youngest D (8 yrs old) and myself had a go at making some swirl cane following a tutorial by TurtleSoup Beads. I absolutely love Susans tutorials as she takes a very laid back approach and shows tips and tricks along the way. I always feel like it doesn’t matter how it goes I will end up with something awesome at the end even though I am a beginner and make mistakes. You can find the swirl cane tutorial here: https://youtu.be/oUdSo_DUm5I

Our colour choices, mine on the left and Youngest Ds on the right.

Youngest D is into Marvel (Ironman mainly) and this was a factor in her colour choice while I went for a more random colour choice. We used a clay cutter to get the pieces the same size to start with and then cut them down depending on how much of each colour we wanted in the finished blend. We then shaped the piece into tear drops as we were only using small amounts of clay and stacked them together to put the pasta machine and get the colour gradient happening. If you haven’t done blends before TurtleSoup beads has a brilliant tutorial on the process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwUClASdMOY&t=88s

  • My blend
  • Youngest Ds blend

Colour blends, or skinner blends as they are called, are still new to me and I am happy with the results that we got from these pieces. I should add that we are using a cheap set of clay that I bought off the internet. I do have Fimo but for this experiment we decided to use some of the this clay.

We then followed the rest of the tutorial for how to roll the clay and Youngest D wanted to add some silver foil to the outside of the cane as she loves a bit of sparkle.

  • My final cane
  • Youngest Ds finished cane

We were both really pleased with the finished canes and I loved the different colours that we managed to create using the same technique but different colours. We ended up with 2 very different canes and now we are planning what we are going to use the canes for.

Have you tried skinner blends or canes? what are your go to colours? We would love to hear your comments on our canes or comments about the blog so far.

Thank you for reading

Niki x