Many of you have seen this hatband on my Zoom demos or I’ve even demoed this quick 5 minute Mokume Gane live for you on Zoom. I came up with this technique for a Sculpey project, so I’m going to use the step by step photos from that tutorial.
Of course, you can change to any three clay colors you wish, just make sure that you have ONE contrast color (light or dark) to stack in the middle!
This particular project uses 4 colors of a Premo/Soufflé combination, but I prefer to work with 3 colors usually. Of course you can use all Soufflé colors or all Premo colors as well!
Clays: Sculpey Premo™ – Peacock Pearl, Galaxy – 1 bar each
Sculpey Soufflé™- Robins Egg and Canary – 1 bar each
Sculpey Tools: Pasta Machine, Clay Blade, Acrylic Roller (a wooden dowel will work as well – especially for Premo), Square cutter set
Sheet about 1/3 of the conditioned clays out on the #4 (0 is my thickest setting) on the clay conditioning machine. Use the 1 inch square cutter to cut a square of each color. (If you are like me, you will cut 3 squares each and make 3 sets of mokume gane!)
Stack the colors as shown – Galaxy, Robins Egg, Peacock Pearl and Canary. Stack the squares on top of each other like a block. You want to alternate your light and darker colors, but make sure that you have your most favorite color on top or bottom so it can be a dominate color.
Run that stack through the pasta machine still on your first setting. (Again, for my Atlas 180, it is #4) Cut the stack in half as shown.
Restack the two pieces together, making sure that you are stacking them so that they match. Roll through the machine again and cut the stack in half.
Run the stack through one more time and place the stack on your acrylic roller or wooden dowel. Put a sheet of clean paper under your work area to catch the small pieces that you are going to carve off.
Now just start to make short, shallow slices across the top of the clay, letting the slices fall onto your piece of paper. IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY SLICE ALL THE WAY THROUGH, STOP PRESS THE PIECE BACK DOWN GENTLY AND TURN YOUR ROD AROUND AND START SLICING FROM THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION – PROBLEM SOLVED!
Just continue to slice and drop the pieces onto the paper. You may want to stop and separate the pieces if you have them stacked a lot. We can use those pieces later to collage together on a plain sheet of clay (or a scrap piece) to create more working pieces!
I personally like the slight texture that is created. If you wish, you can use your roller to GENTLY smooth them.
You can add a backing layer to your sheet if you wish to cut out shapes for earrings and such. This particular project I’ve used one of my favorite brass medallion shapes from Amazon, so the original layer was perfect.
By the way, I have a paper pattern that I created to cut these out for the pendants and earrings.
These are 3 colors of Soufflé – Cornflower, Robins Egg and Igloo. The lighter and dark variations are created by whichever color was on top. The lighter ones had the Robins Egg on top while the darker ones had the Cornflower on top. Some of these are collaged pieces from the scrap as well. I’ve used my favorite 1-1/2 inch “puffy rectangle” cutter from https://www.etsy.com/shop/MDS3DMakersStudio.
Here is another example of the inverse colors- this is Soufflé Cinnamon, Sea Glass and Premo Gold. I’ve left the one on the left a little rough so you can see how I collaged the cut scraps together – remember to gently roll them before cutting though! (And YES, you can make a pretty good faux wood look with this technique!)
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