hi guys, its cindy lietz, your polymer claytutor, and today’s studio tip we’re talking about polymer clay tools, but specifically,the acrylic roller for polymer clay. now, beginners ask me all the time, ‘whatshould i start with?’ i mean there’s tons of polymer clay toolsout there…and you know how much i love polymer clay tools, but, they ask what i should startwith, and this is what i would consider a
essential tools for woodworking, must have polymer clay tool, it is an acrylicrod that… actually several of the polymer clay companies make them, they’re… amaco makes one, sculpey makes one, fimo makesone, basically they’re just an acrylic rod about 8 inches long and they’re perfectlysmooth.
now, you know, when we’re working with polymerclay, we need to roll out sheets on a regular basis…sometimes we use a pasta machine,but if we need to roll them out by hand, an acrylic rod is really the perfect thing touse, there are people that will use the side of a glass bottle, and i’ve even seen peopleuse the side of a pen, and it works, but the nice thing about these rods is… first ofall, the size of them are great, they’re highly polished, so when you roll on the clayyou’re not gonna get any marks left behind, and that would be especially true if you weregonna use like a wooden rolling pin. wooden rolling pins are really not a goodchoice to use, because a couple of reasons, first you leave the grains of the wood behindon the surface of your clay, next, the wood
can absorb the oils from the clay, and sothey’ll soak into the wood, swell up the grains, make the clay stick to it, it’snot the best choice to use at all, so the acrylic is perfect for that. and some other plastics will eat away at theclay, so the acrylic doesn’t do that, and you can easily wipe it down just with a babywipe or a paper towel with rubbing alcohol on it. now another option… and i got this yearslater, so it’s not as important but it is really handy, is to get it in a brayer form,now, this is only 4 inches wide so it’s a little smaller, but the neat thing abouta brayer is that you can use it one handed.
here’s a cane from my faux abalone tutorial,and what you can do is just use the brayer and use your other hand to move the clay around,so that’s a very handy tool. now, it’s a good investment to have a roller,you’ll use it forever, i bought it years ago, and i think it was around $8 or somethinglike that, i don’t know what they cost now, but you’ll have it forever, absolutely everand you’ll use it on a regular basis. now, i just wanted to quickly show you somethingkinda cool. you may remember a while back, i had donea video on how to store your jewelry tools, and i’ve got like these tin buckets thati put my polymer clay tools in, and my… i use these more oval ones for putting pliersin and hammers in.
well, actually, a writer from the magazine,step by step jewelry...and this is their latest edition, one of the writers, ronna sarvasweltmann, who’s actually a mixed media artist…she does polymer clay jewelry as well as wireand that kinda thing, she saw this bucket for storing the jewelry and she was doinga tool storage article, so she asked us if she could feature our idea. and it was really fun, doug took a great shotof this copper pot here…i actually upgraded since the one i had in the other video, ihad a purple tin bucket but i found this antique copper one that’s just gorgeous and i likedit even better. so she wrote about it and showed some of theother things…other ideas that people have,
there’s another woman here that uses thesame storage units that i use for polymer clay and stuff she was using hers for seedbeads and all that kind of stuff. so i just thought i’d share that with youso you could see that we got published…that the idea got published in the magazine, alright? so i hope you enjoyed this, i’m gonna bedoing more videos on the different essential tools, and then also the ones that are justnice to have, so i’ll be doing those in the future. if you have any suggestions or favorite toolsof your own that you’d like to add to the comment section below, that would be great.
or if you have other ideas that you thinkyou’d like to see me do a video on, that would be great as well, make sure to leavethose in the comment section below, so make sure to let us know you liked this video. and we’ll see you next time, bye for now.
