As you may have noticed, I like making striped jewellery. But in today's tutorial I wanted to show how easy it is to make a striped log. 

Any series of articles about complex caning would be incomplete if it did not show you how to incorporate multiple patterned logs into your cane. This article shows you how to make a cane with 5 flowers in the pattern. In this example I show how to use the slices on a bead, but you could obviously use it for whatever type of jewellery you’d like. 

This tutorial forms part of the complex cane or millifiori technique series. One of the common ways to use a complex cane is by adding slices from the millifiori cane onto another cane. This tutorial shows how to do it. 

I’ve always been enthralled with millifiori beads and when I looked at them I considered it some sort of crafty magic. When I started making polymer clay jewellery I immediately jumped onto the complex cane tutorials and tried to do something similar. To say the least, my first attempt was a dismal failure. Actually, come to think of it, so was the second, third... hmmm...

When I think about the scoring technique I always think of making a sheet and then wrapping it around beads or making something flat like a pendant. As I like using stringing-beads as an experimentation zone, I thought it would be a good time to think using this technique in a different context. So here’s one, using combing on an oval bead.

Combing is a simple but pretty technique to create interesting patterns for your pieces. This tutorial shows the basic steps for combing polymer clay. The result can be used for pendants and other jewellery pieces or you can wrap the clay sheet around beads.

 In this tutorial I played around with hard-in-soft inlay.  I wanted to make an interesting bead with gaps around the bull’s eye cane. I've been trying to be more disciplined with my work in the past few months, so I look for any excuse to experiment when I write tutorials. This is not a technique that you’d use for everything.

For one of my Christmas presents I got a book on the history of beads. I really liked one of the beads on the cover.

After baking a piece I get flustered on how much I should do to finish it. I ask myself, 'Will it make a significant difference to wet-sand each piece from 400 grit to 1200 grit, polish and varnish it compared to just varnishing it?' I've spent many hours agonising over this and figured the best way to resolve my indecision is by approaching it in a (reasonably) scientific manner. Experiment.

I like using leather cord and sterling silver to assemble my polymer clay necklaces. So I want to quickly show you how to make loop wrap bead attached to a jump ring.  You’ll need wire cutters, round nose pliers, flat nose pliers, some beads, sterling silver (or any other) wire and some jump rings. (Made or bought.)