Oh, now I see
much better! I had thought that you'd put the candies in a "mound," but now I see that they were simply joined more or less side by side (in one plane). That explains a lot about why the liquid clay didn't work.
So liquid clay
is strong, but you have only a tiny area of contact between each of the pieces and the ones they're joined to. That's just not enough for something where the joins will get a lot of stress (and your pieces are quite large and "heavy" compared to the size of the joins, so they will get stressed just from normal handling, much less wearing them, etc.).
In this case, you'd have had several choices about how to connect the pieces for a strong unit to result:
...join pieces together where they are larger and have flatter sides (iow so the 2 pieces will have more contact)
...use a raw backing clay to lay all the raw pieces on and join them like you did in the second situation... the contact created with the backing alone would be enough to hold the unit pieces together well (if nothing were really sticking out that could get caught on something and pull for example)
...... the backing clay could either have been trimmed so none of it showed from the front (using a color mostly compatible with your pieces because it could show a tiny bit from the side of the unit, or using a compatible patterned sheet of clay that would also look cool if it showed --on the back of an earring that might swivel, e.g.)
.......or you could have made a "frame" as your backing, allowing it to show all the way around and shaping it intentionally into a rectangle, circle or any shape of your choosing
...(or you could have used something else besides a sheet of clay to glue everything to as a backing, like a bit of leather or cardstock perhaps)
...use tiny armatures between each of the joins (e.g., short length of toothpick, or wire... plastic-coated wire would be good too since as I said the plastic will readily fuse to the clay when heated)... lot of work though!
Btw, I notice that your "transclucent" clay darkened quite a bit, or actually it looks more like cured
SuperSculpey-flesh than regular translucent (SS is just a
tinted translucent). If you used a regular translucent, you might want to check out your baking surface, etc., to make sure they're not getting too hot resulting in that color change.
Maybe some of TLS was pushed out of the piece; I baked it on a piece of paper, and a few parts of the cured piece was stuck to the paper a little. Kinda like what happens to really candy sometimes when you unwrap a piece. But I was able to just pull the paper off. *GASP* Could the paper have had something to do with the problem. I baked it on a piece of clean white computer paper. I know that when you need to "leech" clay, it is suggested to sandwich between to pieces of paper. Could the paper that I baked the piece on top of, have accidently leeched out some plasticizer?!
"Leaching" will happen if raw polymer clay (or insufficiently-baked clay) is in contact with a porous surface like paper (or fabric or bare wood)
over time. Just laying raw clay on paper then putting it in the oven within an hour or so won't be long enough for leaching to occur much or at all (and paper is an excellent surface to bake polymer clay on) --to
intentionally leach clay, it's first made thin in a sheet/etc, then it's put between layers of paper and it's
weighted or
pressed in some kind of way, then left overnight or at least a few hours... the pressure makes the leaching go much faster.)
Cute idea btw!
Diane B.
