Following on from the success of the flower Fimo jars last week, I had an urge to try out rainbows on jars too. I had an idea in my head of a candle votive decorated in coloured spirals and thoughts it would be fun to experiment with a few designs on some small jars. I quickly found that Fimo Classic or Sculpey Premo was the best type of polymer clay for this; while Soft clings well to the jars, it is too hard to get a neat rope from it. I’ve not done a lot with Premo in the past but I suspect I’ll be coming back to it as I really enjoyed working with the purple colour I used.

Fimo is ideally suited to quick rainbow making as it comes in the perfect colours, so no mixing required. The only blending I did was to make the slightly more muted leaf colour on one of the jars, otherwise these are straight out of the packet.

My first attempt was the one second from the left, which is fine but I rushed and wasn’t too pleased with. After that I remembered seeing Starless Clay on Etsy once, so I had a look at her for inspiration. I adore her work and am hopelessly jealous of her talents but I used her for inspiration (I hope she will be flattered not annoyed!) I didn’t attempt any of her fancy filigree or marking of the spirals but did cut chunks out of my spirals with a circular cutter and fitted them together that way. It was surprisingly easy to do that, I can’t work out if I’m naturally talented with circles ( ;)), lucky or there is some circular mathematical magic going on I don’t understand.

After that I used some other small sized cutters to make a random jar covered in geometric shapes to see how far you can stretch the requirement for the Fimo to loop around the jar to hold it all in place. It did work but one of my girls broke it before I varnished it to make it stronger. Fun though and a design I will probably come back to.

Last up was the flowered one; I just loved the rainbow palette of colours for this, it really seemed to work in a perfect, natural balance. The flowers and leaves could easily be made by hand but I stuck to cutters for speed and a uniform look to it all. It’s given me an urge to try some crewel style designs in polymer clay.

Lastly, Maddy stuck much more firmly to the rainbow brief in her version, which is a change jar decoded with a rainbow (and blue bird) and a photo of her when she was little. She’s going to do a step by step blog post on how to do this soon.