Polymer Clay Creative Traditions by Judy Belcher – Review by Hazel Parr

From March I took over library duties for the guild and my plan is to introduce you to a book from the library every month. I'll review it and try either a tutorial from the book or make something inspired by the book.

The guild has so many books that you can borrow and let me just say don't let the publishing date put you off as it has done for me in the past as today's book is 16 years old and I loved it. It's called Polymer clay creative traditions by Judy Belcher. Published 2006.

In the book Judy looks through different mediums and see how their techniques can be used in the polymer clay world ei glass, metalwork etc. There's a good variety of tutorials and to be honest I kept changing my mind on which I was going to follow so I will definitely be heading back to this book when I need the inspiration. There's also plenty of inspiration in the form of photographs of a variety of mediums.

I love cane work so that's what I chose from the large variety of tutorials. The tutorial I chose is very basic in description and photographs but was easy enough to follow. I didn't have all the same colours on hand as in the tutorial and when I first reduced the cane I felt there was too much white so I just changed the square cane into a triangle, cut in half and formed a new square and this reduced the white enough that I was happy. You can see the cane slices before and after I manipulated the cane in the photo. I liked the tutorials idea of cutting a shape out of a bullseye cane with a cutter and filling it with a different colour and plan to use this in future canes.

Overall I love this book and think there's something in it for every level of expertise.