Three-Striped Patchwork

I drew inspiration from a book by Kaffe Fasset borrowed from Ivča Svobodová during a polymer clay meeting. The stripes were love at first sight (however, not for the first time). This design is the first one in the series of Polymer Clay Patchwork 2016. Enjoy it! I look forward to your projects that will be presented within this article.

You need the following:
Polymer clay scraps, i.e. 1/8 -1/4 block of clay. I recommend to use at least 5 colours. In this project I am using Sculpey Soufflé clay.

If you want to have the same colour tones in the design of the patchwork, choose one colour as the basics and blend it with white, black or a piece of scrap clay to get various tones of this colour.

deli sheet for smoothing joints, a spoon, a pebble or another "smoothing tool"
standard polymer clay tools: a solid blade and a pasta machine

Procedure:

1. Condition all the clays you need at the medium setting of your pasta machine (#4 with Imperia). One side should be ca 4 cm long (or another number) but all the sheets should have the same length.

2. Trim the shorter side of each sheet. Place two sheets of different colours one next to another and cut off a ca 0.8 - 1 cm wide stripe from one of the sheets. Put the rest of the sheet aside. Repeat the procedure. To avoid sticking the blade to the clay, tilt it at 45° angle towards yourself after cutting off the stripe. The blade simply unsticks from the clay.

3.When the striped sheet is long enough (I have 12 cm), take a piece of deli and smooth out the joints through this paper. You can use your own fingers (by the way, Soufflé works great with fingers), a spoon, a pebble or another object with a rounded side or a rounded bottom. When the joints are smoothed down, trim the edges of the sheet and lift the sheep up from the mat by means of the blade.

4. Repeat the same procedure with the second sheet. However, the stripes should be thinner than at the first sheet, i.e. ca 0.3 – 0.5 mm. Change all the colours of the stripes when putting the colour sheet together.

5. Smooth out the joints through the deli. Look at the picture: the stripes at the top are perfectly smoothed down, while at the bottom where the joints are not connected yet there are white links. Trim the edges of the sheet and lift the sheep up from the mat by means of the blade.

6. Now, take the pieces of the scrap clay and join them together.

7. Roll out a roller from the scrap clay…

8. ... and twist it until vertical stripes appear on the surface of the clay.

9. When you are satisfied with the design, roll out the roller a bit and make it thinner. The length of the roller should correspond with the length of the two striped sheets.

10. Roll out the sheet with a roller and pass it through the pasta machine at the same setting as the previous two sheets.

11. Trim uneven edges. You get three striped sheets with identical length, the same colours but different width of stripes.

12. Now, you are going to cut stripes again. You have three sheets available: cut off stripes and place them perpendicularly to the present stripes. The width of the stripes may differ, or the stripes can be diagonal. You get an interesting design when you put a different stripe between two identical ones.

13. Smooth out the sheet with deli and it is done. Now, you can think about the use of the sheet.
Send us the result of your work – you can win polymer clay staff valued at CZK 3,000.
You find more information at the website of the project Polymer Clay Patchwork 2016.

I wish you good days

Petra Nemravka