This tabbed necklace was made almost entirely from one slice.
You may have heard that a designer friend and I have developed a new slicer for polymer clay. The slicer (which will soon be on the market) cuts paper-thin slices as large as 4″ x 4.5″ from a block of clay.
I introduced the slicer in my presentation “One Cane: Many Possibilities” at the IPCA Synergy Conference last February. Since then, Julie Eakes has purchased a slicer and has written about it in her blog.
The slicer is not just for canes, though. The ability to slice a full sheet of clay as as thin and as large as this has created all sorts of new possibilities for mokume gane as well. Lately, I’ve been creating my own impression plates the full size of the billet and using them to impress a set of connected patterns on a single sheet of clay. This tabbed necklace (above) was made almost entirely from one such slice.
I will be showing other pieces made from full sheets soon; meanwhile, here are some pieces I’ve made from parts of these very thin slices.
Mokume pendant, ribbon bead, wheel beads, oval pendant
I’ll be teaching the impression plate technique in a new class I am developing.
