I’ve just uploaded my first-ever polymer clay TikTok tutorial. Angie Scarr made me do it! I went to the fantastic “20Books Spain” conference in March 2024, and we both made a drunken promise commitment that we would post 2x TikTok videos per week for three months, starting at the beginning of April.

My first attempt was so awful that I deleted it from TikTok – but at least I did actually manage to do it. I used the Framelapse app on my phone to record myself making a pair of polymer clay flower buttons. (The full (free) instructions for making the buttons are here, by the way.)

Can you spot what was wrong with my first-ever TT video?:

…yep, I recorded it in landscape orientation, rather than portrait. Duh.

So that’s my first TikTok lesson learned.

***UPDATE: (April 2024) Apparently TikTok is now positively encouraging landscape-orientation videos, so that’s great news!***

So I had another go at making a video. This time I recorded the mini tutorial on my phone at normal speed, and edited it inside the TikTok app. I REALLY hope I get better/faster at editing TT videos, because the five-ish minute video took about four hours to edit, and even then bits of it went wrong. Ugh. Oh well, only about 30 more videos to go, now 🙁

Today’s lessons learned:

  • From within the TikTok editor it’s possible to: condense videos to 10x speed, and add captions & sound.
  • For some reason, parts of some of my on-screen instructions got automatically cropped, so I need to try to check that in future before I upload the videos, because…
  • You can’t edit videos once they’ve been uploaded.

Aaaargh!

So I’ve ended up with a second sub-standard TikTok video. However, I’m still pleased that I’ve actually managed to do my first polymer clay tutorial on TikTok. Here it is in all its (flawed) glory:

@polymerkay

Polymer clay mini tutorial: Blue flower buttons. Speeded up to fit into one minute for your convenience 😀 #polymerClay #buttons #polymerClayButtons #polymerClayTutorial #polymerClayEarrings

♬ Aesthetic – Tollan Kim

Now I need to start making more mini tutorials. In the meantime, here’s the link again for the full instructions for making polymer clay buttons.

Let me know if you try it out, and how you get on!