Shades of Turquoise Necklace by Irit Shalom

Shades of Turquoise Necklace

Designed by Irit Shalom

Hello my dear crafty friends and welcome to my Makin's Clay® first post for the new 2016 term.
I am very happy to stay on this gorgeous company team and to move towards the next step of Makin's Professional Certification I have received.  But for this I need to develop my clay skills, and this post is all about "do things without knowing the final result".  For this post we  were asked to mix Makin's Clay®. Yes, to mix colors with Makin's  Clay Mixing Ruler™ and to make the project from the mixed colored clay.  So I mixed, and mixed, and mixed and got like 10 shades of blue. (Not grey, just blues, like my mood lately). And then I made a lot of different things of all mixed clay and here is the way I worked this time.  For today's post, I am going to share just my kind of faux TURQUOISE color and made a really fancy necklace that maybe seams heavy, but as Makin's Clay® is very light, it's just an illusion and it's not heavy at all.

Product list:

Makin's Clay® products used:

Makin’s Clay® - White, Green, Concord Blue, Grape Leaf, Black

Makin's Clay Mixing Ruler ™

Makin’s Professional® Cutting Mat

Makin’s Professional®Roller and Cutters set®

Makin's® Ultimate Clay Extruder™- no disc used

Makin’s Clay® Professional Clay Tools® 

Makin’s Clay® Cutters –Circles

Other products:

Heart cutter - my own kitchen
Copper acrylic paint- Plaid®
Micro beads- Marth Stewart®
Glaze- Sweet Stamps
Glitter - crystal, turquoise blue
Elephant mold- hand made mold
Copper bead, ball chain

Instructions:

1.  Makin's® Clay Mixing Ruler™ color chart has a lot of mixing possibilities; but unfortunately Turquoise is not in the chart (and I didn't want to mix in acrylic paint this time).  So I made my own mixing recipe and I checked and double checked it and IT WORKS!

Mix H part of Concord Blue  clay form Vineyard Tones set with G part of White clay together with F part of Grape Leaf clay( Vineyard Tones colors) and E part of Green clay. This will give you the right  shade of turquoise, but if you want it lighter or darker- just add more white or use a smaller  white portion. For my project I used much more then one portion (just mixed like 10 times more of each color to get colored clay for this project).

2.  Make 2 large round beads and cover them with crystal glitter.

Make a few flat sided smaller beads using Ultimate Clay Extruder™ without any disc - the log that comes out is just in a perfect size to make those beads in no time. Make a hole with the tool from the Professional Clay tools set pushing it from both sides of the flat beads. Cover flat beads with blue glitter. Now let the beads dry for 24 hours.

3. Use Makin's Clay® roller to roll mixed clay to about 1/8" thick and cut a heart with a big heart cutter (I used a cutter I already had, but Makin's® does now offer a set of 4 large heart cutters in addition to their set of 3).  I also added 4 small circles made with Makin's® small circle cutters. For the texture, I rolled copper, light and dark blue micro beads over the wet heart shape. Just sprinkle the beads and roll over with Makin's clay roller tool. Then make holes in all the pieces and let the pieces dry overnight.

4. Arrange the necklace over the thin ball chain adding some copper beads.  Make elephant from black clay using a mold (this is my own home made mold). Paint the elephant with copper acrylic paint and a bit of turquoise acrylic hue and glue over the heart pendant. Cover all clay pieces with glaze and let it dry.

And this is a finished necklace in all its glory!