These beautiful paper adorned clay pendants are simple to make, and easily customizable for special keepsakes. Whip up several in an afternoon and use up your paper scraps and stray beads in the process. Follow my step by step tutorial, adding you own twists!
Supplies:
- Black Polymer Clay
- Pasta machine or acrylic roller
- Clay blade
- Scrap decorative paper
- Wire (I used 22 gauge silver)
- Needle nose pliers
- Mod Podge (I used glossy)
- Size 6 seed beads for wire wrapping over surface of pendant
- Larger crystal or bead for bottom of pendant
Instructions:
- Condition your clay and roll at a thickness of 2 (1 being thickest) in your pasta machine. Cut sheet in half and place one half on top of the other. This creates a thicker sheet, which I like for the pendant beads. It makes a pretty pendant at this thickness, and is easy to pierce with a needle to create hole for looped wire hanging mechanism later on.
- Cut rectangles out of your double stacked clay sheet.
Pierce each pendant from top to bottom along the length of the pendant. I use these long needles that came with my bead baking tray. I have seen them sold separate in the clay section at Michael’s and other craft stores. Be careful piercing the raw clay. You can get fingerprints and other nicks in the clay, but imperfections are not to big of an issue with this project since the majority of the piece will be paper covered.
Bake per package; usually 275° for 25 min.
- After baking and letting cool, you can wrap with paper strips. I paint the back of the paper surface with mod podge using a foam brush. Wrap the adhesive coated paper around pendant, smoothing out any wrinkles with fingers.
- Print out a sheet of typed words to run along the length of the pendant. Rip the word from the page if you like the torn edge look, or cut for a clean edge. Adhere with Mod Podge. Let dry.
- To finish decorating your pendant, wrap a piece of small gauge silver wire around, adding a seed bead every other wrap. I added three to mine. Put wire through where your needle hole was made and loop the top end. Place a bead or crystal at the bottom end, bending the leftover wire to keep the bead in place. You could also solder the end or use and eye pin to hold the bead in place.
. This will serve 2 purposes: 1. It will adhere the image to the clay. 2. It will seal the image, which is important when you are adding the resin later. After baking, you can buff and use the pendant as is, or you can dome resin on the top. I used 
for this. I learned a couple of things about resin this time around: our basement flooded with all of this rain, so I was running a dehumidifier in my studio. That, combined with turning on a space heater, really got rid of the air bubble problem I so often have with resin. It really is as temperature sensitive as the instructions claim. Who knew?! My resin has never looked so great. 
