Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Fimo Fireworks! A candle holder jar.

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After seeing something on Pinterest the other day that I loved, I thought I would try making a Fimo fireworks display. I’ve needed to have a go with the new Stardust Fimo Effect Clay for a while and I’ve never played very much with Translucent Fimo Clay either. Since I’m still hoarding jars in an effort to create the biggest ever pile of glass that turns into craft projects, I thought a candle holder couldn’t go far wrong 😉

(I’m going to have to do better photos tonight, it was SO vibrant).

First of all, using a family sizes pasta sauce jar, I rolled up two bars of Stardust clay and stretched it until it was a big rectangle. Then I used a polymer clay blade to make it straight edged so it would look neat and applied it to the jar.

Wash your hands thoroughly (although Stardust leaves behind less colour than black or blue) and use some light coloured waste clay to roll around your fingers and remove traces of clay).

I had one of each colour of the translucent clay and rolled out small flat pieces of each. Next I cut out a star, flexed star and flower in several different colours using Fimo Shape Cutters and some small stars in various colours. Finally I rolled tiny sausages and made myself a pile of tiny balls of clay in lots of colours.

The tricky bit is cutting matching shapes in the Fimo applied to the jar; press the cutters in firmly and wiggle them a little, then peel back the clay shapes. Use a tool to prize them out if needed.

Finally pop the translucent pieces into the holes and use a fine ended tool to make holes in and around them. Decorate those with the little ball, pressing them all firmly into place. With the bigger shapes, it is helpful to push the Stardust clay gently around them to make it all hold together with no gaps.

My jar just has a tealight in it. I think dropping a slightly taller potted white candle inside might defuse the light better and give a richer glow. It looks lovely though.

A quick note about stardust clay; it starts as an odd greenish colour and only goes black when baked. It is filled with mica bits so glitters but these bits can (apparently) be made to look different if you manipulate the clay so they end up all lying in one direction. However, it doesn’t have much to say for itself until you add varnish, at which point it develops a real beauty.

Autumnal Fimo Candle Votive

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Sometimes when I’m trying out a new idea in Fimo, what I like to do is have a go at a very simple version first and then see what I like and don’t like about it before I go on to try a more complex version. Family life does tend to mean that I never get to the complicated version, or I don’t ever blog what I do make because I’m not happy with the finished product! In fact this blog is partly for exactly those projects; things I know someone else will probably do a better job of than I will but might not have had the particular idea in the first place 😉 This particular project started off as a quick try out of an idea though and when I test ran it, I liked it far more than I thought. So I give you a simple Fimo Autumn themed votive, which looks LOVELY when lit and pretty good when it isn’t too!

The original plan for these autumn jars was for them to be complex, similar to the flower jars we made on recycled jars early on in the summer. I wasn’t feeling terribly creative on the day though and just made some simple oak leaf shapes using an icing sugar cutter and some branches that looped around the jar so it would all hold together. Then I decorated it with some very simple acorn halves and baked it, feeling rather disgruntled with my efforts.

These were the things I wanted to do better.

1) Texture the branches.

2) Use texture plates to make more realistic leaves and make them thinner and less chunky.

3) Look more closely at acorns and learn how to make them in polymer clay.

4) Build up the base with more detail  to hide the tealight.

I’ve created several Pinterest boards to develop the theme a little more including a Hedgerow theme and Autumn Crafts and Nature Crafts and I think I’ll be back to working on this, because autumn colours and shapes really please me. However, in the end, the way it looked in the dark pleased me enough to think it deserved a little outing even in its first incarnation.

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Rainbow Storage Jars.

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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.