Pivot Beads (p.36)

This pivot bead strand is up on tricksy_gnome’s Flickr site.  A beautiful combination of colors!

TIPS

1.  Be sure to check your pasta machine settings to find the thinnest manageable setting. Run some scrap through from thick to thin until the clay starts tearing as it comes out of the pasta machine. Go back one setting and that is the thinnest manageable setting.

2.  If your colors are getting too grayed out – sheet the color that is going to be washed at a slightly thicker setting on the pasta machine.

The idea for the pivot beads came when I started using canes as the underlayer for my watercolor technique.

The original watercolor beads were made for the silent auction at the second Ravensdale conference in 1998. Lindly and I were teaching a three day color workshop together and the first evening I showed her some of my early color washing experiments. At the time I was using a pre-mixed palette of Fimo colors that had foil leaf mixed in. We didn’t have any Fimo white clay so we grabbed some Sculpey II and ran very thin sheets of the Fimo over thick sheets of Sculpey. The resulting sheets looked very much like watercolor on paper so we tore them into bits to cover balls of scrap clay.

Since I needed something to donate to the silent auction, we very quickly made a collection of beads and sent them off to the auction coordinators. They were a big hit! The next night a few friends came down to our studio to help make more beads. The crew included Pier Volkous, Elise Winters, and Cynthia Toops, plus Lindly and I.  As you can imagine – the beads were gorgeous!