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. 

Materials

The amount of clay that you need depends on how many beads you want to make. For this tutorial I used about quarter of a block (56g/ 2oz) for each of the stripe colours, in this case dark red, bright red,  yellow, army green and turquoise. 

Then I also used half a block of black and white clay for the log and the sheet that covered it. 

Equipment

• Tissue blade
• Work surface, I used a glass sheet
• An additional glass sheet to roll the log
• Oven for baking the clay
• Pasta machine
• Polishing tool – I used my dremel

Method

Condition your clay. Then roll out all the colours (except for black) on the thinnest setting of your pasta machine. 

Roll the black piece of clay in your hands to form a round shape and then start rolling it into a log. When you have the basic log roll it between two glass sheets to lengthen it. Image 1 shows the rolled out clay and log.  

The first step is to cover your black log with the white sheet. Trim the clay. Roll the log between two glass sheets to smooth the join. You may end up rolling multiple logs to make beads. I had three. White will be the background colour for the beads. Image 2 shows the covered log. 

Cut the log to be the same size as the length of your coloured sheets. Then cut each coloured sheet into thin strips as shown on image 3. 

Place the strips onto the covered log as shown in image 4. Make sure the strips are straight and stick to the log. 

Roll the log between two glass sheets to join the clay together. Image 5 shows a close-up of the log. Image 6 shows the three logs I rolled for this tutorial. 

To make the beads you have to cut the logs [image 7]. 

Even though my beads are flattened spheres, I did not roll them. If you roll a cane like this one, you get distortion, which is generally contrary to the affect you’re looking for. Rather use a thick, sharp piece of metal or wood. I used a wooden kebab stick but an orange stick (used for nails) would also work.  Use the stick to make a hole from the top. Turn them around and make the hole from the other side. Because the hole is quite large it makes your bead a nice spherical shape. 

Image 8 shows the finished bead.