Gloria Uhler of Domestic Diva Online is a wonderfully creative and all round crafter and a lovely person, too.  I have featured many of her tutorials before.  She is an accomplished polymer clay artist.  I reviewed her book on Hinged Clay Bracelets before.

So I was delighted when she came up with her Wood Frame Clay Pendant tutorial using my larger teardrop frame . There are several shapes and sizes available. There are also my new polygon frames - "hot off the press"!

As you can see, her polymer clay pattern is on both the front and  back of the pendant.



Those of you who work with polymer clay might well ask - do you bake the wood with the clay?  You can indeed bake the clay with the frame as in Gloria's tutorial. Or you can bake the polymer pieces separately and then glue them to the wood frame.

I tried test baking my wood frames on their own at a typical oven temperature for polymer clay. Baking drives out the moisture in the wood. The amount of moisture will vary depending on where the wood has been stored.  The wood pieces can warp if it has enough moisture. So you need to place something heavy on it to keep it flat during baking. If the wood is fairly dry, it won't warp.

The neat thing about Gloria's method is that the front and back polymer clay pieces are connected to the frame and thus keep the wood flat during baking. So there is no issue of warping.

What about textured clay?  Well, I had a go using her method using Premo clay with some added glitter.  I used a KorTools texture roller - this one  (Also see my KorTools review).

The frames themselves become templates. So cutting out the focal is easy.


I didn't texture the back.  I just found a setting on the pasta machine which gave a clay thickness of approximately 3 mm - the thickness of the wood piece.

This time, I  cut around the outside of the frame. Gloria's tip of using an expired credit card to neaten the edges is a useful tip.


I followed her method and used Sculpey Bake and Bond to attach the pieces to the frame.


I didn't do such a great job with easing the focals into place.  Had to use the sharp cutter to help.


I started with the same thickness of clay as I did the back. So once I ran the texture roller over it, the resulting clay becomes thinner. This means the focal pieces lay just about flush with the wood frame.  Use Gloria's method of using a slicer to get the right height if you are not using a texture like me.

Whoops. One edge was not eased in properly :

I also decided after baking that I didn't like the pale wood with the greenish polymer clay. So I stained the frame with Saman's water based stain ("Sesame").


I also had to reapply the Rich Gold Gilder's Paste to the high points.


I could have just added a protective coat like one of the Varathane products (see this post) and call it a day.

But I also wanted to demonstrate the use of resin which gives a glass like finish.  I coated the frame too as it was easier to do so.  I used Little Window's Brilliant Resin (reader discount of 15% if you use the BG1516 code. This is an excellent product for jewelry. Low bubble producer - virtually none if you microwave Part A for 6-7 seconds before mixing.


You can't really see the resin in the final photo at the end but the layer is there! I took this photo  below at an angle to deliberately catch the light and show the resin shine.





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