Butterfly wing beads - a how-to, not made by me

I'm very curious about polymer, have had it once, but didn't get to work out anything much. would love to beable to design beads of my own.

oooh I love to tell about Polymer Clay. I don't know all the answers but I have some good ideas of where to look for them. I could make a nice list of some of the best sources of information about polymer clay, but not tonight, I'm not alert enough right now. I can tell you that many, if not most, of the most beautiful beads to me are the most simple.

Unfortunately I have an allergy to the solvent in the clay so I stopped making things with it for a few years. But I have to be careful about using it. I need to use vinyl gloves and wash my hands a lot, but it's just so much fun that I can't stand to stay away from it.

Oh, those beads look so beautiful. But when I read the instructions, I'm not sure that I could ever make them.

I know it looks complicated but if you don't want to bother with the nice shaded sheet, called a Skinner blend after the brilliant Judith Skinner who first thought of it, you could first try it with a solid color sheet. And bullseye canes are very simple. I should make sure to say that I haven't made this one yet. But I've had no problem with bullseye canes or spirals.

You just roll up the bullseye canes in the solid color or shaded sheet and then gently stretch out what you start out with so it becomes longer and narrower. Clay people tend to use the term "reduce" for this. Reducing the diameter, I guess. It scared me to do it the first time, but it's cool once you get the feel of it. I imagine you will need to read a few of the basics of claying to learn some of these terms.

For me the hardest part is cutting with the bent blade. I would want to practice quite a few times on just solid clay until I got the feel for it. This time I might also mark the center point of each side to make it simpler to cut it right. I found it hard to see when I had the blade in the way. I wasn't trying to cut anything like this.

Now I HAVE to get clay so I can see if it's really as simple as I've been saying. LOL I just got so excited to find the instructions again, I had to share it right away.

Love DIY projects and activities. Thanks for the link!

Thank you, Katie! These are beautiful!

For anyone who would like to know, Katie is being extremely modest. She knows just about everything there is to know about polymer clay, and what she doesn't know, she generally can find. Katie ROCKS!

And I had to pay Angela to say that. :)

LOL, she did not!

These are so, SO amazing; I have to try them. But I have to do the chrysanthemum cane thing first.