Monday, February 28, 2011

Flexible Clay with Monte Nikkel

The demo at the February 28th, 2011 meeting was all about flexible clay.  Monte Nikkel presented the demo using pmc3.  She used glycerin which she had purchased from Rite Aid Drug.  A number of us also had glycerin purchased from Cool Tools.  She rolled her clay out fresh from her package inside of a plain non-textured sheet protector that you can pick up at Staples (or any office supply store).  After putting around 10 drops on the clay, she spread them out using her fingers.  Then she folded the clay over onto itself until she had a small thick mound of clay.  Covering it again with the top of the sheet protector she rolled the clay out thin.  Once it was rolled out, Monte used a scraper to lift it off the transparency.  It began to get looser and stickier.  Once she mounded it up again on top of itself, she again put the cover of the protector on and rolled it out thin.  She continued to do this a number of times.  Here, you can see the difference in color of the clay.  As you can see, the darker area shows where the glycerin has penetrated.  She continued until the clay was one color and it again felt just like it did when it came out of the package.



Monte had picked up a book on knotting and here's one of the knots she made with the flexible clay.


For those that weren't able to make the meeting, here's a video on flexible clay with Hadar Jacobsen.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Boston Metal Clay Guild's new blog.  We're a young but very active group.  We have members that are beginners as well as seasoned metal clay artists.  We meet on the 4th Sunday of each month at the Crawford Memorial United Methodist Church from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.  At each meeting we have demos scheduled so we all can learn from one another.  Come join us and share with like-minded people for an afternoon of fun and learning!