June 2012

The June meeting of the Central Mississippi Polymer Clay Guild will be on Saturday, June 16, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. at the Pearl Library, Pearl, Mississippi.  Our focus this month will be on making handmade tools to use in working with our polymer clay.  We will have demos by several of our members and I can assure you, this is a meeting you will NOT want to miss!!! 

Please condition lots of scrap clay ahead of time. We have been asked to share the room for the morning part of our meeting with the scrap booking group so we’ll need to keep the motors to a minimum.  For those of us who do use motors, be sure to bring your handles, just in case.

Now for our supply list:

CLAY:

Scrap clay, lots and lots of scrap clay!  Everything we will be making will use scrap clay so be sure to bring plenty.  You can use new clay but this is a great opportunity to use some of those colors you don’t like as well. 

OPTIONAL:  If you have a 40% coupon and nothing to use it on, invest in a package of Sculpey Bake & Bend clay.  You can use scrap clay for texture sheets and molds but the Bake & Bend has some flex to it which I really like.

TOOLS:

Be sure to bring your normal travel kit with a minimum of your pasta machine, clear roller, clay blade, ceramic tile or other work surface, baby wipes.

Extruder, green Makins brand is recommended. If you don't have one you can take turns with the ones we do have. 

Rod or knitting needle.  If you were at the meeting last month, bring the rod that we used to make Annette’s beads. 

Corn starch and a brush

Joyce included this in her list of stuff to bring for her demos:

Bring anything you are interested in using for embedding into clay to make tools, such as: round beads, square beads, different size and shape beads, piece of metal, bead caps, rubber stamps, trim from material store, golf Ts, metal tubes, fabric, embossers, screening, leather stamps, macaroni, back of a tile, buttons, snaps, eyelets, chains, brads in different shapes. Nothing we put into the clay will remain in it. Scraps of anything really might surprise you how well it works. I will have a good selection of these and other things people can borrow and take turns with. I imagine they will be similar to other textures we will be using. So look thru all your stash of art supplies and house tools and whatever you happen upon...you'll be delighted with how little it takes to make some awesome, one of a kind tools.