Oh my! How I love the creative side of sitting down with slabs of clay and slowly seeing a beautiful pattern develop. It takes anywhere up to 6 hours for each of these completed slabs.
There is a lot of time involved simply in conditioning the clay for the base – rolling it between your palms to warm and soften it, then through a pasta machine multiple times to make it smooth and pliable, so that once it is baked it is strong and has some flexibility to avoid it breaking too easily., then cutting and shaping it to be practical for the base of the design and shapes, avoiding waste as much as possible.
After that the process is repeated for all the colours to be used for the design. There are sometimes thousands of flowers cut, placed, and then detailed. Then the little highlights, leaves, pebbles, and other dashes of colour or texture that are placed to increase the fun of the pattern, it all takes time, patience, and a lot of aching muscles from hunching over a table. *laughs* My physio does get cross with me if I don’t take regular breaks.
I’m sure you would agree though that the time is worth it, each piece of jewellery created from these is truly bespoke, unique, and lovingly crafted. Most of all, they are beautiful, if I do say so myself. Each and every piece is filled with love, without that it would be impossible to spend so much time for so few items (for example, I average cutting about 6-8 pairs from each of these slabs. Some are more, some are less, depending on the size and shape used).
I hope you enjoy seeing the beauty of an uncut polymer clay slab. You can see the end results on our Etsy store – katlovessteve.etsy.com
xo
Kat
