Secret Polymer Clay Experiments!

I posted yesterday on Facebook that I was doing secret polymer clay experiments. I never know what will get comments. I got a lot of comments. I'll have to post these there, too.

But first I'll post them for my tiny blogger public.

My secret experiment revolved around setting jewels in polymer clay in such a way that mimics the way most jewels are set into metal--with an open back so that all of the colors can show through!

Here are three pendants I finally managed to make yesterday with the technique I finally figured out after 2 days of playing with ideas: (Thankfully I only wasted two jewels in all of these attempts.)


These were set into black clay and I added PearlEx after. Notice how the clear jewels still look clear and the green and red ones still look green and red! YEEEEEEEE!!!!!! Here's the back:


I'm seriously trying to decide what I'm doing about this. I might make it my next article submission for PolymerCafe magazine. Or I can hoard my secrets until I die which is morbid and not very fun.

Probably the actual course of events will unfold like this: I'll show everyone in the Arizona Polymer Clay Guild how to do this and then if enough people seem to think it's awesome, I'll try submitting an article. You know, I'm not good at hoarding ideas. It started 9 years ago or so when I first started my jewelry making journey. I was tempted to hide the things I came up with, but the stress was so much. I prayed about it and reached the inevitable conclusion: Either I can be generous and God will bless me for it (with NEW ideas!), or I can be stingy and He'll decide to stop blessing me with more ideas. An unstopped pipe allows a greater flow, right? He's never let me down yet.