Recycle and Reuse

My new favorite way for turning scrap clay into beautiful veneers.

Scrap polymer clay from previous projects can be recycled for reuse in a number of ways. Barbara McGuire teaches one technique in her Creative Canes book. However the first time I was introduced to this technique was in a class taught by Kathleen Dustin.

Of course I've tweaked it a bit because after repeating a technique for a while I get bored and come up with variations. Converting scrap clay into these veneers has become an obsession and is a great use for those bags of clay I've been saving under my worktable. Here are the results and my variations; tell me what you think.

Here is the first variation. This is inspired from two great polymer clay artists, Susan Hyde's Faux Fabric and Sarah Shriver's Complex Canes, where the lights and darks are flipped to give contrast. So of course I couldn't stop there. After making this veneer (top), it was too busy. To alleviate this problem I added a striped portion (bottom) to break up the design. I liked the stripes so much that I did several in this manner, here are a couple of my favorites.