Making an oven-dried clay beaded necklace
Late last year I saw a tutorial (sorry I can’t remember where) about making oven-dried clay beads. I thought it would be a fun summer holiday activity to do with my girls. Summer holidays are over, school and kinder have started, and somehow today became the day for making beads.
Materials
- Small coloured packets of oven dried clay
- Leather cord
- Electronic kitchen scales (optional)
- Skewer
- Oven, oven tray & baking paper
The Process
- I wanted my beads a uniform size and slightly different strengths of green, so I weighed out portions of green and white clay that equaled 10g
- Next was the therapeutic part of the process, kneading the white and green together until the colour became one (ie. no swirls)
- I didn’t realise how hard it was to roll near perfect round balls, so I gave up and decided balls with random flat surfaces were a design feature
- I used a sharp metal skewer to create the holes
- The beads were placed into the oven at 120 oC for 30 mins
- Once cooled, I threaded the beads on a piece of leather cord and tied the ends in a way that allows the length of the necklace to be adjusted
Speaking of beads, thornberry has made some great fabric covered bead necklaces this week. Go and check them out!
And what did my girls make? Beads, bangles, circles, stars and hearts. It was good inside activity on another very hot Melbourne day.
Really like the way these look! Thanks for the ‘how to’. Are they heavy to wear?
Now I will confess to only wearing them for the photo shoot, but I would rate these beads as having a medium weight. I do not anticipate them to be too heavy for all day wearing. Another way of looking at it is there is 8 beads x 10g = 80g of beads to wear! I have mustard necklace with three strand of beads and it’s so heavy that I can only wear for short periods of time. The mustard necklace weighs in at a whopping 274g. I hope this helps.