Hi guys, its Cindy Lietz, your Polymer Clay
Tutor, and today's Studio Tip, we are conditioning hard Polymer Clay, tip number 1; using a hammer. Now there's lots of different ways that you
can deal with old, crumbly Polymer Clay and recondition it back to something soft and
workable again, and I'm gonna be doing a few different videos in the future on different
methods, but the first one I'm gonna show you is how to use a hammer to condition your
clay. Now I dug around and found an old block of
Fimo Soft…I should call it Fimo Not So Soft in this case, and I'm just gonna cut it…a
piece off, now I didn't have any old Premo! ‘cause I go through mine quite quickly,
but as I cut through this, I can see that it's…well I can tell just by looking at
it that it's gonna be all crumbly and hard to deal with, now if I try to condition this
by hand, it's gonna be really hard on my hands, and if I try to run it through the pasta machine,
it's just going to fall right apart, and I'll show you what I mean, it just turns into powder
or crumbles.
Now, one thing you can do that's super easy
is you can take this clay, and you can put it under a sheet of plastic, and you can grab
a hammer…now I have a nylon hammer, so this is actually nice to use in this kinda situation,
a rubber mallet will work but any kind of hammer will work, then what you do is you
just start pounding it, you start pounding your clay, and what this will do is it will
wake up the plasticizers and things in the clay, and get it moving again…now I think
you'd wake up too if you were getting hit by a hammer, but what will happen is… now
I can kinda fold it in half and start hammering it again, and it'll all start pulling together.
Now this is a really great way to get rid
of stress…you know, the kids won't put away their clothes, the boss is driving me crazy,
or the cat just puked on my bed, you get the idea. So now it's starting to pull together, and
it'll be…with a few more hits with a hammer, you'll have it right back to being soft and
pliable just like this one, then you can run it through the pasta machine again and work
with it like you normally would. So I hope that was helpful for you, if it
was make sure to click that like button that would be great. And my question for you today is do you have
any neat little tricks for dealing with old Polymer Clay? Make sure to leave those in the comment section
below, I'll be doing new ones… new videos but you never know, you might know something
that I don’t…haven't tried yet and I can add that to a future video. And don't forget to subscribe, we have new
videos that come out every week, and you're not gonna wanna miss them.
We'll see you next time, and bye for now..