Letter Y Alphabet Cane Tutorial
Only one more to go! This Letter Y alphabet cane is the penultimate part of a series showing how to create polymer clay letter canes (click here for all of the other alphabet canes so far.)
…and it’s another fairly easy one to create – yay! Again there are just two cuts that need to be made, then insert sheets of black clay.
(These alphabet cane tutorials were published first on my other website (KayVincent.com) so you might have seen it before but now I’m moving all of my polymer clay-related posts over to this PolymerKay site instead.)
You will need:
- About 30g white clay (i.e. approx. half a standard-sized block of clay)
- Approx. 8g black clay (about an eighth of a standard block)
- Pasta machine (5 things to look for when buying pasta machines for polymer clay)
- Tissue blade or clay slicer
Step-by-step instructions: Letter “Y” cane
Step 0) Condition the clay (e.g. by rolling each colour through the pasta machine at least ten times, until they are soft enough to work with). (Here is an article about how and why clay should be conditioned.)
1) Roll the black clay into a sheet about 1.5mm thick (usually the middle setting of a pasta machine):
2) Slice off about a quarter of the white block of clay, and save it for using later:
3) Roll the larger piece of white clay into a cylinder about 25mm (1 inch) in diameter:
4) Cut down the cylinder about a third of the way in from the right-hand edge (as shown below):
5) Starting from the middle of the straight side, cut a wedge shape from the larger piece of clay. The wedge should be about a third of the larger piece of clay (as shown below):
6) Using the black sheet of clay from Step 1, cover the straight side of the right-hand piece of clay with one layer of black (as shown below). Then trim off any excess black clay :
7) Sandwich another piece of the black clay between the straight sides of the remaining two white pieces, and then reassemble the cylinder pieces to make the basic “Y” cane. After that, trim off any excess black clay:
8) Using the white piece of clay that was cut off in Step 2, roll it through the pasta machine on the thinnest setting and then wrap these thin layers of white around the sides of the cane:
9) Reduce the cane (e.g. by carefully rolling it on a flat surface until it becomes longer and thinner).
Finished Letter Y polymer clay alphabet cane:
I hope you found this letter “Y” tutorial useful. Now that one is finished, there is just one more letter to go until we’ve finished the whole alphabet 🙂
If you’ve tried making any of these canes I’d love to hear from you – please share any successes (or problems) via the comments section or contact us page.
…and finally, here is a handy graphic which shows the main steps all on one page.
