Much of my work is in polymer clay. This is a wonderful medium for hobbies, including miniatures and jewellery making.  It is widely available, comes in a great range of colours, and best of all, needs no specialist equipment. The hints and tips below come from my own experience, and I hope that they will help you to get more out of this material.

Hints and tips

 Equipment  

 Embellishing your clay 

 My favourite tips

Safety

 Equipment

All you need is a surface to work on, some simple tools and a kitchen oven.

Many clays are available. The ones that are usually easiest to find are FIMO and FIMO SOFT. Most clays now are excessively soft - please see my notes below on a way of dealing with this.

Surface. The best surface to work on is a ceramic tile, as you can put this straight into the oven.

Tools. My favourite tools are a small craft blade and a hat pin. You really don't need much specialist equipment! Having said that, I find my pasta machine invaluable for conditioning clay, blending colours and rolling things to a uniform thickness very easily, and I wouldn't be without a tissue blade, which is a wide sharp tool for slicing. Tweezers are also handy, as is a tool with a small ball-shaped end. Cake craft shops are a good source of tools, as are rubber stamp shops.

Oven. You need an oven with a working thermostat - it really is essential to be able to bake your clay at the recommended temperature. You can bake your clay over and over again, to add pieces, provided you don't exceed the necessary temperatures. I doubt it's possible to get really good results from an Aga oven. I have read that it is possible to fire polymer clay by boiling it, but haven't tried this myself. I suspect that the temperature may not be high enough to obtain reasonable results, and clay would remain terribly brittle.

 Embellishing your clay

Before you fire your clay, you can add sorts of extras - the clay will take them well. Try:

Eye shadow - the cheap sort from markets is very soft and comes in a wide range of colours - use a paintbrush to apply it to the surface of your clay;

Glitter - both the craft sort and the cosmetic sort work well;

Artists' pastels - rub onto paper, then apply to your clay with a brush;

Metallic powders - FIMO powders are available in limited colours, but my favourites are PEARL-EX powders, from the USA - the colours and textures are wonderful.

After you have fired, and cooled your clay, you can apply:

Paint - use acrylics, and clean the surface of the clay first with methylated spirits, or even nail polish remover

Varnish - various specialist products are available

Nail polish - usually works brilliantly, but note that in extremely hot temperatures, it can melt.

 My favourite tips

Soft clay - if your clay is too soft to work with, try leaving it sandwiched between sheets of absorbent paper for a little while - experiment with small pieces to see how long it takes to reach a texture you can work with. New formulae for polymer clay mean that many, if not all, of them are now extremely soft, which makes detailed work very difficult, so this technique is invaluable. Sadly, it won't solve the problem completely, but it does ease the problem a bit.

Quenching - this is a marvellous technique for making your finished pieces much stronger. Before you take your clay out of the oven, put some ice water (really cold) into the sink. As soon as you take your finished items out of the oven, plunge them straight into the cold water. They will be considerably stronger. (Watch tiny pieces carefully to make sure they don't float away.)

Sandpaper - use this for texturing - and I also always keep a large piece on my lap while I am working - it helps to catch dropped pieces of clay.

 Safety

Some important points to remember are:

Never use anything you have used for polymer clay for food preparation;

Make sure your oven temperature is correct - if it is too hot, not only will your work be spoiled, the clay will also release poisonous fumes (if this happens, open windows and doors to let the fumes disperse);

Be careful with sharp tools - especially with tissue blades - this may sound obvious, but tissue blades can cut very deeply and both long edges look very similar - I mark the safer edge of mine with bright piece of baked clay;

Children should always be supervised while using polymer clay.