Advice on: starting with polymer clay (on a budget!)

Hi! Have you looked for a while into polymer clay and wished you could create your own charms but never actually started to do it? Stop procrastinating and just jump into it! :) 
What do you need to do next? If you do not want to invest a lot of money for a complete kit, here is what you should get straight away in order to work with polymer clay.

1) Obviously... Polymer Clay! :) There are several brands for sale: Fimo, Sculpey, Premo, Kato Polyclay, Cernit, YouClay. What matters is that it can be baked in the oven. You don't need to buy all colours straight away; if you get white, black, yellow, blue and red you will be able to recreate all other shades too like with paints.

2) Toothpicks! I find them extremely useful for lots of different uses, they are cheap and can always come in handy. 

3) An X-Acto knife or any type of blade: your creations might require you to cut and a blade of this type is absolutely needed.

4) Eyepins and pliers to cut them - they are essential if you want your creations to become charms.

5) An oven: obviously you need one to bake your polymer clay creations. You can buy a small oven at a reasonable price, but if you do not want to spend for it at the start you can also use the normal oven of your kitchen. Many people fear that polymer clay produces toxic fumes and therefore using the oven of your kitchen is dangerous, but if your creations do not burn they won't be dangerous for you. Just wait some hours before you cook your food where you have just baked polymer clay.

6) Hairspray! If you want to give your creations a glossy finish but do not want to spend money straight away for Fimo branded glaze use hair spray. Some people worry the hair spray might peel off or never dry thoroughly, but I never had this problem. The hair spray I used worked perfectly, dried quickly and made my creations look really pretty in the end.

7) Acrylic paints - necessary if you want to paint faces or other details on your creations. If you don't want to buy a full set of colours, just buy black and white for the eyes and pink for the cheeks. Also, you don't need to buy big bottles of paints, polymer clay creations are very small and therefore require very small quantities of colour, small bottles will go a long way and you won't risk that they dry out before you use them all.

I think these are the absolutely necessary items to start working with polymer clay, to see how you like it and if you want to do it "more seriously" then there are lots of other useful tools that you can buy later on. I'll write another post soon on "more advanced" tools to work polymer clay! 

Stay tuned for the upcoming tutorials! ( • ◡ • )