Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Playing with the extruder - square sticks

I have been playing a lot with  polymer clay recently, trying out new things.
I thought I would share some of them with you, here's the first...

Square sticks

I didn't quite take the right pictures so you will have to piece it together a bit yourself.

I put some sticks of polymer clay in the extruder barrel instead of the usual discs to see what would happen. As you can see I was just playing around and not taking my time to be neat. I would cut them into neater square cross section sticks of even size in future. On the right are 2 bits of the extrusion you get with a triangle pattern.

Here is a shot I took for my reference. I used square sticks in the barrel and the square extruder die and I got out the square diamond patterns. Here you can see what they looked like put together. There are 16 of the extrusions in that pattern piece. I put 4 together to make a larger square and reduce it, then cut and restacked into the slice shown.



I guess if you rotated the square extruder die in relation to the square sticks you would get a quarters pattern.

(just playing about with the e-pen I am trying out hence the sketch - I drew it on paper with the e-pen which also captures it as a jpeg)



You could of course just cut square or triangular  pieces of polymer clay and put them together to make this but it might just start you of on an experimentation with the extruder of your own.

8 comments:

  1. Cara, this is great. I love the extruder thing you did. I can't wait to try that out. Loved your spliced flower canes too.

    How long are you going to be on crutches?

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  2. Thanks for posting this. I just bought an extruder and haven't taken the time to play with it yet. I love how you put the "triangled" strips together - looks like a quilt.

    Kate

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  3. This is very interesting. I love my extruder but I haven't gotten near this creative in using it.

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  4. Thanks everyone!

    I hadn't really played with my extruder either a couple of months ago. I had done all usual stuff - spagheti, bits for packing canes, mod canes, extruder flower canes. Recently I have entered a new 'what happens if...' phase and am playing. Trying new things, trying to work out a better way to do things I had done before, experimenting. I am really enjoying it and am learning loads.

    Bonnie I had surgery on my foot and am just about free of the crutches now but still can't stand or walk for any length of time. It was my recovery period that has enabled me to find time to start this blog and has been a good focus. I hope to be able to keep it up when 'normal' life resumes.

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  5. This is SO cool. I've never seen anybody do this before. The possibilities are mind boggling. Thanks so much for sharing your creative discovery.

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  6. This is so funny -- not your cane that is but how our minds seemed to be heading in the same direction. I was fooling around with my extruder the other day when I made something almost like this! Just a bit of a variation. I will have to try it again and share it after and compare.

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  7. That's great, I have to try it!Thank you very for sharing your experience!

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  8. I just posted the tutorial I mentioned earlier on my blog so you can check it out.

    http://2goodclaymates.blogspot.com/2010/03/tutorial-extruded-swirl-cane.html

    Carolyn

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