You can blame Claire Wallace, it’s all her fault! Sometime ago I saw her knitted polymer featured on Polymer Clay Daily. I just loved the effect and I had a go at making my own bangle using her lovely reverse stocking stitch tutorial. I was thrilled with it, but the stocking stitch took forever and I really felt mine wasn’t as realistic as Claire’s looked to be.
I put the idea away for a while until it got towards Christmas and I started thinking of ideas for baubles. I’ve had numerous goes at covering round objects and it’s difficult. Difficult not to squash one side while you work on the other, difficult to get the curvature right. Generally difficult. Which of course meant I absolutely had to try it!
I had some plain glass baubles so I decided to try covering those. The stocking stitch wouldn’t work because I wanted to be able to see through the openings in the weave, like you can with real wool. So for my first attempt I went for the plain knitted look. The top looked excellent but the bottom really wasn’t neat enough for me to be happy with, and it did look a bit plain. So for my second attempt I added some knitted ‘edges’ and polymer clay buttons. Much better!
Then of course I started looking at knitting on Flickr, getting more ideas, I even found myself photographing a friend’s jumper! My next 2 baubles were considerably more elaborate and I gave them as gifts to my family for Christmas. They were hugely well received!
For now I’ve run out of white clay and because it’s January, money too. So I’ll work on something else until I get another clay order done. Although the idea of making patterns somehow keeps nagging at the edges of my mind…..
