Lisa Pavelka

The written instructions below are transcribed from the video above.

Let’s take a look at how we can use Lisa's border molds with polymer clay to make beautiful accents, edges, frames and borders. We’re going to take the simple elegance border right here and use a release agent. I like to use Armor All or STP Son-of-a-Gun which is simply an automotive tire dressing that’s made from silicon. It won’t hurt your hands or harm the clay. Rather than spraying it into the cavity of our choosing we will spray it directly on the clay. That way we don’t have a hit or miss situation with the release agent only reaching a few of the cavity areas. Press from the center outward toward the ends creating tails. Now take a nice sharp clay blade and with extreme care start slicing from the middle holding the blade flat against the top edge of your border mold. Use slow precise movements so that you control the blade and again exercise extreme caution as you do this technique.

Now that the excess clay is removed we’re going to lift it gently from the tails; but rather than pulling we’re going to ease the clay out of the cavity slowly. You can also turn it and do it from both ends. This helps to avoid stretching and tearing of your border mold. Now if you have a little excess edges you can just very simply run your fingers along the sides to smooth them under. You don’t have to trim those away.

Now we have this lovely string of hearts. We can bake it and use it just like that. We can put Swarovski flat-back crystals in each center to accent them. You can also antique it after baking by rubbing in Rub-and-Buff or croate paint and wiping off the excess. Or you can take interference and metallic mica powders and before baking dab a little on your finger tapping off any excess and gently stroking over the raised area of your textured border mold to highlight both the recessed areas and the raised areas.

You can even use these border molds with art clay silver and PMC, the metal glaze. You would want to use a cosmetic sponge with olive oil to lubricate the center of the cavities as a release agent when you use those materials.

Let’s take at the old natural stamp right here for a border mold. And we foiled a thin piece of polymer clay with the rainbow foil. You can place that face down in the cavity of your choice using a very thin piece. And you can even use scrap clay for this technique because we’re not going to see the back of it. Taking a snake of clay, rolling it out. It doesn’t have to be very uniform. It just has to be big enough to fill the cavities. Pressing them from the center outward this snake of clay is going to stretch as I roll it out or press it out with my fingers. Again take a nice sharp blade, cutting from the center outward very slowly and carefully removing the excess. Turning it and at the halfway point going from the other direction to remove the excess clay from the surface. Now you notice that I didn’t use release agent in this case and the reason for that is the foil acts as the release agent making it easy to remove your patterned texture from your border mold. Alright?

And here are just a couple of finished examples that show you using the border mold. This was from the utilitarian set using the zipper cavity. And on this folia de croate piece we went ahead and also used the utilitarian mold to get this almost tire-track type texture.