I love reading DIY tutorials online; they are inspiring, fun to read, exciting to see the finished product...and most importantly, I love when they are actually 100% feasible for anyone to do! When I came across the DIY Polymer Clay Bangle project from Delighted Momma, I fell in love! I had to try it. Lucky for me, as children we were obsessed with making dollhouse items with clay, and Grandmother Lovely still had a giant box of unopened clay for me to use! She was thrilled I was using it up. After copying Delighted Momma's instructions and making a ton of bangles, I decided to give my own spin to it, literally, and make my own twisty bangles. The beauty of this project is that you can't go wrong. Don't like what you made? Smush it up and try again! I love any project that you can take all the pieces apart and start from scratch if you don't feel like it's perfect. We'd like to call those types of DIY projects, "Able to be taken apart and put together as many times as you want" projects. Here's the tutorial for my twisty-twirly bangles!
You'll need two colors of polymer clay. I use Sculpey. Roll two pieces of clay out into semi-thin, but not-too-thin, tubes. You don't want them too thick because you'll be rolling them together. Unless, of course, you want a chunk bangle, which is cool too!
Take the two tubes together and pinch them slightly together at the top. Start twisting the tubes together, ala barber shop pole. Use your fingers to make a guide of sorts, so that the twists come out somewhat equal. Once the whole bracelet is twisted, it's up to you: I like to keep twisting so that the twists are on the smaller-tighter side, but you could keep them larger. As in the bottom picture here, measure how big you want your bracelet (Delighted Momma uses a real bangle as a guide, which is a great idea. I didn't use any guide and now have a ton of way-too-big bracelets.). Cross the tube over, pinch or cut off where you want your bracelet to end, and smooth the ends together (shown below).
Here's the other bracelet I made that day. As you can see, it's made in the same exact way, and when I decided my size, I cut off the ends, overlapped the bracelet ends and smoothed the ends into each other and the bracelet (so it doesn't totally fall apart). Honestly, I hate this part, it always looks messy to me! Do the best you can...it'll look cool no matter what. I promise.
Bake the bracelet at 275 degrees for twenty minutes. Ta-da! Done. Beautiful twisty-twirly bracelets, with texture! I love that. What colors would you twist and twirl? Thank you to Delighted Momma for the great idea!
