Fall Jewelry Pumpkin Beads | Polymer Clay Colors | Autumn Flowers

The fun connection between halloween earrings, Fimo clay and the Zinnia flower:

Since the pumpkins around here don't ripen up until sometime in October, I ended up looking to the Zinnias in my garden for some earring color inspiration.

Nature is so accommodating isn't it?!

After a little time in the studio, I came up with a combination of the right yellow and perfect red to make a recipe for the pumpkin earrings I showed you the other day. You can click on the following link to see a larger picture of these halloween earrings if you like: Fall Jewelry

I know for many of you, color mixing polymer clay can be quite a challenge. All polymer clays are not created equal. The shades are different and the pigment saturations vary greatly.

When mixing two colors you should know that a color like Cadmium Red Hue is a much more saturated color than a Cadmium Yellow is and will quickly dominate it. This means you will need a lot more yellow than red to make a nice orange.

One trick to finding out which color is more dominant, is to mix equal bits of both clays. If the color looks obviously more of one than the other, you'll know which one is more dominant.

When mixing polymer clay colors together, always start with the weaker color (Yellow) and add tiny amounts of the stronger color (Red). That way you don't run out of the weaker colored clay before you get to the shade you want.

If you are making sculptural fall jewelry with these colors, consider adding translucent polymer clay to the mix to give the colors more depth.

Also make sure to write down the amounts of clay used in your recipes so you can reproduce them again when needed.

All in all, I'm very pleased with my Zinnia inspired, Fall jewelry pumpkin beads. There's still some more of the orange color left over that you'll soon be seeing in a polymer clay cane project I'm working on… so stay tuned!