Audio Transcript
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Hi, this is Julie with Beadaholique.com and today I want to show you how to emboss crystal clay and while I'm at it I'm going to make an earring so here's a sample of what we're going to be making I've actually taken crystal clay which I have right here and I've used gold color but it really doesn't matter if you're going to putting this on top of the crystal clay, the base color but i did use gold and then what I did was I took a rubber stamp and I embossed them and let it dry and I painted it using three different colors of Vintaj Patinas and the glaze as well and here's what resulted. It's a really pretty earring and it's a very versatile technique I'll show you how to do before I get started I'm going to show you another example here I have also embossed crystal clay but actually I just took Vintaj Patina in copper filigree, the leaf here and I just turned upside down and stamped my crystal clay so that was a really easy way of doing it but in this video I want to show you how to use a rubber stamp so to begin we have a earring bezel which actually already has this hook attached which is great take our crystal clay which is a two part epoxy clay. It is self hardening meaning we don't need to bake it or fire it in the kiln begin by mixing up equal parts of part A and part B pinch some off what's great about this is it's not going to start to cure or harden until the two parts are mixed together so this will last quite a while and if I'm doing something like this where I want t fill a bezel I like to put my little balls right into the bezel to kind of get an idea of how much it's going to require I always roll them into a little balls to make sure that I have equal amounts It's the easiest way for me to eyeball so that looks pretty good go ahead and mix those up put on some gloves to do so because this is quite sticky and then I'm going to fit it into the bezel taking my two balls I'm going to squish them together and I'm going to keep squishing. You see there's quite a few striations, marbled effect and I want to keep blending them together until it is one uniform color when you have a nice uniform color roll it into a ball at this point place it into your bezel now because my bezel is more of a raindrop shape, I'm going to go ahead and pre shape a little bit just so it has a nice point to it and then set it down into my setting and I'm gonna take off my gloves at this point I'll just make sure that really I wash my hands after I'm done squish it until it fills the entire bezel and if you are doing something where you're making a pair of earrings or you're doing a project where you want the raised dome effect to be identical between the various pieces go ahead and pinch off equal part balls ahead of time say you're making a pair of earrings I would of pinched off two equal balls of part A two balls of part B I would of mixed one set to begin with I'm done filling up my bezel finish my rubber stamping and then come back and that on the other one you can go ahead and share some of the workload like make an assembly line but your crystal clay will start curing the moment the part A and part B are combined so you don't want to ever let anything to sit for a couple hours I'm happy with how that looks and now I'm going to let it sit for about fifteen minutes so then it's not quite as sticky when I put my river stamp on it the rubber stamp will then pull away nicely if you were to do it right now you might have an issue where the rubber stamp is going to not be able to pull away from the sticky clay let that sit and then we'll come back and emboss the crystal clay I've patiently waited and now it's been about fifteen minutes so this is not quite as sticky as it once which is what we want. Right now I'm take just the lightest tip of my finger run it over of the crystal clay this will take out any fingerprints that might have been there just smoothing it out you'll also get a little bit of a shine to it which is totally fine once you smoothed out your clay. Grab you rubber stamp. I have one here with flowing leaves pattern and I've cleaned it after my last use just with some water you wanna line up where you want the pattern to follow on your crystal clay flip it over carefully depress into the clay. You can wiggle it a little bit and then pull out now I got a good impression up at the top but I'm not too happy with the impression down at the bottom, so I'm just going to take it again press into the clay and pull it out and I like that so now we're going to let this cure overnight so it's hard we'll go back with our Vintaj Patinas and add these wonderful colors and make that impression pop it's been hard but I've been really patient and waited for this crystal clay to dry and now I'm gonna apply my paint, so all three of these patinas, I have cobalt, Opalite, and ruby they all come in a Vintaj patinas kit titled antique window. I want to use all three of them and what I'm going to do is I've got just a plastic bag here, this works really great as my little work surface and I have a soft bristle brush it's pretty important that your bristles are soft so that you can get into the detail here of the stamping so you're gonna wanna shake up your patinas to begin with and then add a little dab to my work surface of each color here's the one I've already done so I'm going to use this as a guide I'm diluting these these down, I'm not going to make a wash out of them I want to use their solid color I'm just going to start by applying the ruby to the base and I'm going to get it in all the little crevices but I don't wanna fill up those recesses, so I just want to lightly go into the depressed areas of the stamping I want to go about halfway and on this one I actually even want to go up a little bit on the side now I'm going to take my paint brush. I'm not going to clean it. I'm just going to go ahead swirl it into my lighter color, my Opalite and then go and take some of this nice bright purple and starting at the top I'm going to paint it up top I want to go back to that little bit I mixed in and that's going to my middle section, so I'm going to now blend the two together picking up a little bit more of the ruby I have a little bit more of a blend happening there we go I'm just going to let that dry for about ten or fifteen minutes and then I'm I come back with my blue cobalt and paint a nice mash over the surface so everything blends almost done with our earring, this is now dry to the touch so we're ready to apply the final layer of paints which is going to be a wash we're using cobalt, we shook it up real good now we're just going to do a little dot of cobalt and quite a bit of glaze and this is going to create a nice wash so that the underneath colors will shine through mix it up paint over the entire top surface you can see it's already filling in the stamped area quite little tip here to make it so that the underneath, the stamped area is even more apparent go ahead try to take a bit of the paint off of your paint brush so it's almost a dry brush and then swipe it over the surface of your crystal clay it's creating more contrast and there we go so now you have that lovely stamped area which shows through, we've got two earrings here and all it needs now is to just dry We'll let that right for a couple hours and it won't need to be sealed, that glaze is going to work as a sealant and then you have your brand new pair of earrings which you created by embossing crystal clay and then using Vintaj metal patinas to bring out the design. Go to www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and to get design ideas!
