When The Lightbulb Goes Off
When you hear the phrase "the lightbulb went off",
most people think of having an idea...or of having a burnt out light source.
Sometimes, BOTH are true!
Burnt out glass bulbs (of any former wattage) can be used to form shaped
elements used in making hollow lentil beads or pendants.
Glass bulbs withstand baking at 300 degrees F quite nicely, and the
smooth tops allow for placing circles of polymer clay--or other shapes--and
then easily removing the baked piece after it is taken from the oven.
An easy way to keep bulbs from rolling around is to recycle a cardboard
egg carton. Remove the top, and turn the egg carton upside down.
Place the screw end of bulbs into the holder in the indented areas between
the egg-holders. If you bake in this holder, make sure to move the oven
rack down a bit so that the entire thing will fir into the oven without
being near the heating elements. Often I will bake in a pan instead of
the holder in order to fit into a smaller oven, and then a bit of care
and a bit of Poly-fil quilt batting can be used to keep the polymer clay
portions from touching each other.
Having the holder allows me to keep them in place while working on them,
and thats a help too! Some of the bulb formed pieces are flat sheets of
clay, but others are more dimensional. Many include faces formed using
polymer clay pulls from my handmade molds, and
some of these use crystals or beads for eyes.
All dimensional beads with faces are stained
to make the details stand out after baking and sanding. Once the rounded
half circles are baked, they are sanded down around the outside edges.
Many people use two of these shapes affixed together with glue or liquid
polymer clay and then rebaked and drilled. The large Japanese
Girl Bead shown in a previous Bead Bugle article
was made in this manner, using two circular domes of polymer clay that
were baked again with TLS (liquid Sculpey) sealing the edges to create
a bead. TLS is now available in white/trans, black, gold, and silver.
The resulting lentil bead is hollow, and very light weight. Smaller
circles can also be shaped on metal paint palettes and baked directly on
them in order to make coordinating smaller discs or lentil beads. They
can be decorated in any number of ways, with millefiore
canes, imprints from stamps of texture tools, hand carved details and
more.
These can be drilled very easily with a hand drill or Dremel tool. Circles
can be cut quickly and evenly by using circle cutters meant for cookies.
Some come in sets of graduated sizes. Other shapes, such as stars, can
also be used. Off The Beaten Path
has some wonderful sets of cutters that are very useful to polymer
clay artisans. The rounded half circles also make good pendants with the
addition of some clay to form a bail at the top. Or, pierce at the top
using a hand drill and add a jump ring, then thread a cord or chain through
that.
