Adventures in Polymer Clay: Pool Ball Beads

Stuck at home during Melbourne's 4th lockdown and not able to go to work, I had to find other ways to amuse myself. So, having spent some time on recording songs and drawing comics pages, I now turned to other pursuits and that old chestnut – making beads out of polymer clay!

Back in March 2020 I made a beaded bracelet using polymer clay. Here's the post about it if you care to see how that went.

Long story short, it was pretty good – even more so once the beads were sprayed with gloss spray to finish. This time, I wanted beads that represented one of my favourite pastimes: playing pool. 15 beads, each resembling a numbered pool ball.

Below you can see the raw clay beads. Obviously pool balls are perfectly spherical, and this is pretty much impossible to do with clay unless you're Leonard of Vinci with the patience of a flipping saint. No dice. So, if they're a little bit squished it's okay.

In the ten-pack of multi-coloured clay you will have to mix up your own colours for orange (5 ball and 13), dark purple (4 and 12) and maroon (7 and 15). Of these, maroon is the most difficult. I found that red and light purple gets closest to it, if colour accuracy is important to you.

(Some sets of pool balls have the number 4 [and 12] with a bright pink colour, and the 6 [and 14] with a lime green. What's up with that?)

 

 

Anyway, make 'em, bake 'em, paint the numbers on and glaze 'em. I used acrylic white paint to paint the white circles, and a permanent fineliner marker to write the numbers, before they were sprayed with gloss spray. Shiny, so shiny. 

 

A nice side effect of this is that once baked, the white clay goes slightly off-white, just like real pool balls.

 

But I done screwed up and didn't make the holes wide enough, and my elastic thread wouldn't fit through. I had to make do with wire instead, with a metal clasp and ring attached.

 

 

 

I find this tiny metal clasp thing very fiddly to use and impossible to put on one-handed, so in the end I put them on some cheap elastic instead, which is just until I find something better. This was just a trial run though, if I get any more clay I'll have another bash at it. For now, I'm fairly happy with the results.