100 Days of Polymer Clay Necklaces: “87”

87 days to go until the polymer clay cruise…

Although barrel-shaped beads are great for hiding some scrap clay inside, if you look at their edges then the scrap clay is very obvious. Therefore I have recently started putting round metallic washer-type beads either side of the barrel beads to help hide the scrap clay (click into the photo for a closer look):

The pillow bead has a different design on each side:

I tried to search for pillow bead tutorials on the Internet, couldn’t find any showing exactly how to make them – so I  just had to guess how to do them. And of course, once I had spent all of that time working it out, I finally found Barbara Fajardo’s fabulous pillow bead tutorial on Polymer Clay Central. Typical!

There are a few differences in the way I created mine (mostly because I start with layers of small canes on a sheet of scrap clay rather than using a lovely big square cane to begin with) but on the whole the results are so similar that there isn’t much point in creating my own pillow bead tutorial – just enjoy Barbara’s :)

Overall, as far as I can tell there is no special secret way of creating the shape of pillow beads – you just have to practise with the shape until you are satisfied with it. As Barbara says: “These take a little practice to get the shape just right, so have fun!”