I realised today that I’d not written a blog post for a couple of months and since it’s a wet Saturday in Barnsley I decided to write about using poppy heads as a ‘stamp’ for creating a veneer made using the Mokume Gane technique using Polymer clay.

I tried this when I’d just started out using clay and loved the result. However, when you are using poppy seed heads they will only stand up to being used on one veneer as they tend to collapse in on themselves. As I only had the one seed head that put paid to any more experiments.

This morning was a little bit more controlled as I’ve been patiently growing cultured poppies specifically for this project. You can buy dried ones online but they tend to be quite expensive.

Although wild poppies look gorgeous in the garden they tend to be too fragile to use in this technique so I bought a cultured Poppy and was given some seeds last year from a friend’s garden.

Once your flowers have bloomed and gone, the seed head is green and very firm. If you leave it a couple of weeks you can harvest the seeds before using the seed heads. This can be quite messy as they go everywhere! Pick your seed head and place it upside down in an empty jar and leave for 24 hours. This will then allow you to shake it and the seeds fall out (save in a small envelope or air tight jar until spring when you can plant them (Athough if you leave some seed heads on your plant it will self seed and flower again next year)

When you have prepared your clay and have your rolled out stack ready to stamp (see earlier posts) – give your seed head another shake – trust me there will still be seeds in there! Lightly brush your clay with corn starch and then holding the head of the seed head press into your clay. It will at some point collapse but if you are careful you can still get a few more impressions from it.

I found when shaving that by shaving quite deeply I could use the actual shavings to create a veneer as well as creating a really abstract veneer with the stamped clay.

I’ve baked these but not polished or made them into jewellery yet but it cheered me up on a wet Saturday

Jane x