I want to show the necklace I just made for myself. It has design on both sides – one of those
ideas that make you wonder why you have not thought of it before. It makes perfect sense, right? Shaping and stringing each component takes a
lot of time and effort, so why not double the return by making both sides of
the necklace work.
For this particular piece, I made one side with crackle
technique and another with my Fantastic Filigree technique.
To make the crackled surface, I rolled a very thin layer of
polymer clay on a ceramic tile and briefly heated it with a heat gun. As a result, the very top layer of the clay
was cured, leaving the rest of it still in its raw form. When the raw clay was expended by rolling my
heat-treated polymer sheet through a pasta machine, the crackles appeared. I cut out the parts for my two-sided necklace
elements, baked them, and treated the crackled surface with some white acrylic
paint to make the texture more visible.
These necklace elements were finished with hand-made antique
bronze frames and covered with two-part epoxy resin to give them nice and
smooth finish. The frames were made in
the same way as described in my tutorial “Polymer Clay Pendants with Sterling Silver Frames”. The tips and tricks for
using epoxy resin for polymer clay jewelry are explained in my other tutorial,
“How to Work with Two-Part Epoxy Resin”.
Fantastic Filigree technique (used for the other side of the
necklace) is described in a tutorial with the same name. Al three of these tutorials can be found on
my website, polymerclaytutorials.etsy.com.