Today I got inspired on Granville Island and decided to play with polymer clay using millefiori technique to make beads. In the next post I am going to combine these beads with felt beads which are mimicking poly once. Below are some interesting info about Polymer Clay.

cyt: Wikipedia
Millefiori is a glasswork technique which produces distinctive decorative patterns on glassware. The term millefiori is a combination of the Italian words “mille” (thousand) and “fiori” (flowers). A. Pellatt (in his book “Curiosities of Glass Making”) was the first to use the term “millefiori”, which appeared in the Oxford Dictionary in 1849. The beads were called mosaic beads before that time. While the use of this technique long precedes the term millefiori, it is now frequently associated with Venetian glassware.

Bakelite, an early plasticused in both practical and decorative applications, was extremely popular with designers and had an early form of polymer clay available in kits, but the phenol base of uncured Bakelite was flammable and these were discontinued. Modern polymer clays are based on a plastic modeling compound brought to the attention of German doll maker Kathe Kruse in the late 1930s as a possible replacement for plastics that had become difficult to obtain during the early days of World War II. It was not suitable for use in her doll factory, so Kruse turned it over to her daughter Maureen, who was known in the family as “Fifi”. The formulation was later sold to Eberhardt Faber and marketed under the name FIMO (FIfi’s MOdeling Compound) in honor of Maureen.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:31 am and is filed under JEWELRY BY SOIGNE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.