This is the part where I wonder what the heck I got into. There’s a post on my blog from years ago titled 10 lbs of scrap clay. And it’s got stuff all neatly rolled into thick sheets and tucked into a shoe box. I have to laugh at Younger Me a bit… this tub was between 30 and 40 pounds of crumbs, packed tightly so that it stayed tub shaped when I upended it. My mission is to turn at least some of this back into usable material again. I did the same last year. I try to every year. And this may be the year I put 5 smaller buckets there instead and separate the crumbs by colour way right off.
First part was to break that up and set out wax paper for chunks to get organized by rough colour ways. Some of the most mixed bits went right into the clay patty pile to get rolled into sheets for usage as bulk fill. The piles that are organized by colour ways are ready to turn into projects. pics of things you can make with scraps
I don’t use scrap clay in enough things – you might have guessed that because I have piles of it – but I do use the colour crumbs here and there. I make swirl beads and pendants, mirror image beads, scrap clay mokume gane and Stroppel cane things. I use the mud layers to build up forms and fill pillow beads. The canes and MG cover stuff like Easter eggs and rocks. I’ve made things straight out of scrap clay and then painted them but they’re not pretty yet so no showing those off.
All this to say, you’re going to make scrap clay. No matter how awesome you are with polymer clay. So it’s definitely worthwhile to pick a method to store and deal with this stuff. If we’re keeping score, I got through 23lbs of clay with this sort. There’s a little over 30 left in the tub so my initial estimates were way off. Sigh.