More on Textured Tubes

I recently purchased a few more texture plates by Helen Breil which are so much fun to play with.  I love the deep textures and flexibility of them so I can run them through my pasta machine with the clay but had discovered they are a little too flexible to use for the textured tubes.  My Textured Tubes tutorial is available in our ArtFire Studio as well as our Etsy Shop.

Solution:

Make a copy of the texture plate with regular clay and/or the Sculpey Bake & Bend.

Tip:

If I'm going to use my texture for tubes only,  I prefer to make the texture sheet a little thicker and out of regular clay as I don't need it to be flexible.  I also don't need a large texture plate -- just an area large enough to texture my beads or a pen blank.

How:

In this case I wanted my texture to be exactly like the original texture sheet so this is what I did:

I studied the texture sheets to see what areas I would want to use and would work well for the tubes.  I then made a texture plate of that area from Sculpey Bake & Bend, using my pasta machine so I could get a deep impression.

After baking, I created another texture plate from the one I just made but this time making it with regular clay and running it through my pasta machine again so I could still keep that nice deep impression.

Voila!  I now have a texture sheet that is an exact replica of my original but out of regular clay that I can use to make my textured tubes!

And here are some tube beads I created from the new texture sheet....

These were made using a turquoise color mix called Lagoon (recipe #8-3 in Carolyn's Color System Tutorial) and highlighted with antique copper mica powder pigments.  I embedded some antique copper beads into the ends before baking like I showed in a previous blog post.

I have a necklace design in mind for these beads and will show you when it is finished.