Dragonfly Pendant Jewelry Necklace – Fimo Rubber Stamping Techniques

Polymer clay instructions: How to transform an embarrassing Fimo pendant mistake, into a beautiful piece of dragonfly jewelry, inked with a rubber stamp design:

Sometimes mistakes can be a beautiful thing! Let me explain… Underneath this pretty dragonfly necklace lies a polymer clay pendant that turned out terrible! But since it’s possible to re-bake Premo and Fimo clay, I was able to salvage the ugly pendant and give it a new life!

Creativity is a process of discovery – learning how to do things right, and sometimes, how to do them wrong. So it only makes sense that not everything you make is going to turn out.

The great thing about polymer clay is that you don’t have to throw these ‘mistakes’ away. This is very freeing for the beginner as well as for experienced clayers. Because you don’t have to feel like you are wasting your valuable clay when your beads don’t turn out as expected.

This was the case with the dragonfly jewellery pendant in the picture above. Underneath is a slightly smaller circle pendant in a color combination that turned out horrible. I originally thought the colors would go well together, but boy was I wrong.

So I covered the ugly clay with a marbled piece of copper and gold Fimo. This looked much better, but was still missing something.

Some red variegated gold leaf was then added to half of the bead, split down the middle 50:50. I liked that and decided to accent further with small dots of gold paint before baking. By the way, if you want more info about how to use gold leaf on polymer clay, here’s a couple of reference articles for you: Gold Leaf versus Gold Foil  +  Foil Paper and Metal Leaf

When my newly covered clay pendant finished baking, the half-and-half gold leaf design looked kind of harsh. So I completely wrapped the piece in a very thin sheet of translucent clay and used a rubber stamping technique to add the inked  dragon fly image.

With one more round of baking, it ended up looking real cool! Even the spots where the semi-clear clay didn’t stick that well to the baked clay, were fine… giving the pendant a wonderful, mottled and distressed look. The back looked neat too. All layered and iridescent like a polished slab of stone.

To finish off this jewelry pendant, a hole was drilled and a black grommet added to tie in the color of the black ink on the dragonfly. Finally, burnt orange silk cording was strung through the pendant hole along with a glass bead and gold findings.

A piece of original art jewelry was born! All this from a bead that many people would have thrown out in disgust!

So next time you make a polymer clay bead that doesn’t turn out so great, just set it aside for later. Because with a little fresh clay and some Fimo rubber stamping techniques… you too can create a professional looking dragonfly pendant jewelry necklace that might just end up becoming your favorite piece!