Sand Your Polymer Clay Beads - Or Else

Or Else…. Your Beads Won't Look Nearly As Brilliant and Stunning As They Should:

Sanding your polymer clay beads is one of the most important steps when it comes to making your bead jewelry look professional.

I follow a lot of blogs, websites and forums and am amazed how many polymer clay artists and crafters skip this step. They  often can't-be-bothered to sand their beads. I'm talking about smooth beads and pendants here more than anything.

Come on people! Not sanding is like a cabinet maker going to all the trouble of getting a raw timber, cutting it into boards, building a beautiful piece of furniture, attaching expensive hardware to it, and then leaving the wood all splintery, rough and full of blemish marks or glue stains. It just doesn't happen.

Why then would a polymer clay bead maker do this? Go to the effort of buying the clay, conditioning it, carefully mixing the colors, doing a bunch of techniques with it, making it into a bead or pendant, piercing it, baking it and then just leaving it unfinished! It would have only taken a little more effort to do the sanding and have your project go from just OK looking to becoming brilliant and stunning.

In some ways I think this final finishing step is THE most important step. I have taken pretty amateurish lookin' beads, sanded and polished the heck out of them, and ended up with something pretty special.

So stop being so lazy! Sand your beads (or find yourself a bead slave) and get ready for the compliments to start rolling in.

The sanding techniques photo I used in this post is from a free polymer clay image transfer tutorial that I recently published.

And if you're interested, here's a link to a full video where I discuss several of the frustrating mistakes I made while learning how to transfer images onto polymer clay beads.