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 I wanted to show a picture of a bunch of Memorial Beads on my improvised drying rack. Now I want to say at the outset that I usually use a wonderful bead drying rack from my friends at Poly-Tools.com; but my pins have gotten clumped up with dried sealant, gotten lost, gotten dropped in the carpet and bent by being stepped on (ouch!!). So until I get myself over to their website and order another set of pins, this is what I’m using.
I want to give credit to my friend, Rochelle Garver, for the idea of using an upright column to dry the large-hole, Pandora-style beads. (Rochelle, you’re more brilliant than you know). She brought me this lovely Styrofoam column, pressed into a 4-inch Terracotta pot for stability. And it stayed that way for almost a year, until I dropped the silly thing on the concrete floor of my studio and broke the pot. Darn. I’ll have to get another one.
However, even without the little pot to steady the rack, this works very well and is less than $5.00 to make, including the pot. The square on top of the column was put there so I could get it all into one photo, but it isn’t connected to the column. It’s a square of florists’ Styrofoam, which I cut from a longer rectangle. I’ve used both the rectangle and smaller squares, and I find it’s more convenient to use the squares because I can put masking tape across the side of the square, and put the customer’s name on the tape with a Sharpie. That way, I’m able to dry a dozen different customers’ beads at the same time, and not get mixed up as to whose beads are whose.
I can do the same thing with the column, just putting the tape at the base and placing it vertically next to the row of toothpicks. Now it just so happens that ALL of these beads are for the same large order, so I didn’t need to mark these racks with a name.
If your beads have smaller holes than will fit in a toothpick, you could always substitute sewing needles or headless sewing pins into the foam, instead of toothpicks. Or, you could order a set of pins from Poly-Tools, which is very inexpensive. But they will get gunked up with sealant, so you would want to have some 400-grit sandpaper around, to sand the sealant off of the needles. Once you do that, though, they will be more prone to rust. So you might want to coat the needles (or PT pins) with clear nail polish before using them again, so that the rust doesn’t get onto your beads. After you sand the pins the next time, just re-coat them with clear nail polish.
 Hello everyone, I’m back from Mexico! It was a great trip, and if you’d like to read about it, you can go to my blog at wordpress: fimofanatic.wordpress.com.
Can you believe it’s already back-to-school time? The summer has gone by so fast. My youngest son graduated from high school in the spring, so it feels wierd not to be getting school supplies like everyone else. Instead of spending my time doing school shopping, I’ve been making more backgroundless fimo nail art. I’d made these canes for a wholesale customer, back in July, but I hadn’t had time to show them online until now. The customer had requested all of my roses and rosebuds in the backgroundless technique, and since I made a lot more cane than she needed, I’ve listed those new designs in my online shop.
The technique of making the fimo nail art without the translucent background hasn’t been around very long. Traditionally, a translucent (or colored clay) was packed around the design when constructing the cane, so that the design didn’t “squish” out of proportion when it was squeezed to reduce it. But recently the polymer clay community has been thrilled to learn of a different technique for reducing a cane, which doesn’t require the use of that background clay. The advantage for nail art is that the designs can be placed closer together without overlapping — a definite bonus when applying nail art to a pinkie nail!
 A secondary bonus is for people who aren’t able to slice their fimo canes very thin: when thicker slices of traditional fimo nail art are applied to a nail, the translucent clay creates a “halo effect”, where a wispy outline of the translucent can be seen surrounding the design. But with backgroundless canes, no matter how thick your cane slices are, no halo! I’ve personally been using my backgroundless fimo designs on my nails for the last couple of months, and I must say that I like it a lot better than the traditional ones. So in the future, all of my baked fimo nail art designs will be transitioning to the backgroundless technique.
I’d love to get some of these designs into your hands, even if you don’t use fimo nail art. These cane slices are great for using on scrapbooking pages, because polymer clay is acid-free. They can also be embedded in polyester resin for delightful resin jewelry, which is becoming all the rage once again. I’ve used slices of fimo nail art to create adorable stud earrings. They are encased in resin, which has a magnifying effect on the design.
  As you can see with this earring stud set and the pendant in progress next to it, these fimo nail art slices are versatile enough to be used in conjunction with resin to create some really lovely jewelry. The bumblebee cane was created by my friend Beth Ackley, of Destined2Clay.com!
 I was really nervous when I started making this cane. I’ve made a lot of rose canes, but doing it without a translucent border was freaking me out a little bit. I look back, and I shouldn’t have been worried about it. Even though it took me longer than I expected to get all the reducing done, I was pretty happy with how it came out. I like the soft contrast in the colors, giving just the barest hint of outline to the petals. I love that one-stroke look to canes, where the shading and highlight blend in together. You can buy this fimo nail art cane here: Backgroundless Red Rose Fimo Nail Art
 
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