Polymer Clay - Mokume Gane

Last Saturday, Elizabeth and her son, Thomas, took a polymer clay class at Artistic Artifacts taught by Susan Gantz.  The class was about Mukume Gane, a method of manipulation where you stack varying values of clay, impress it with many different textured items, then shave the layers and collect the shaving to create a project.  Elizabeth started with maroon, a metallic beige and white clays to create a three color stack which reminded her of red onions.

She created some buttons and also some flat pieces that she could make into pins.

After a lunch break class moved on to four layer stacks with two darks and two lights layered many times.  Elizabeth's stack:

Thomas's stack after shaving and stretching:

After shaving them down class members made buttons, pendants, pins, and pieces for mosaic work. The last hour we learned some other fun techniques like rolling our layers into lizard tails and creating canes that look like brains. 

 Lizard tails, above.

 Brain cane, above, and buttons, below.

This class was a great opportunity to work in a medium other than fiber yet still use the basic principles of color and come out with a few cool items that could either be turned into jewelry or added to a surface design project, journal or other mixed media work.