Fimo nail art canes are made from a man made, non-toxic modeling material called polymer clay. Fimo is one of the brands of polymer clay available worldwide. The clay is sold in a variety of colors that can be custom-mixed to create unique shades and blends. Polymer clay that is formed into a cane does not look like a walking cane. It looks more like a log of cookie dough that has a picture built into the log of dough. Polymer clay canes are made the same way the log of cookie dough is made.
The process of making a cane can be simple or it can be complex, but either way they all start out the same for us: we use a drawing for reference, with each area of the drawing (including outlines) to be made up entirely of sections of polymer clay. Large sections and small sections, all put together and assembled like a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. The finished cane usually weighs between 1 and 5 pounds and has taken anywhere from an hour to 12 hours to complete. And that’s before the reducing process begins!
Once the pieces are assembled into the image, the cane is squeezed and stretched to reduce it’s overall diameter. Reducing is done by stretching the cane, causing the diameter to get smaller while the cane elongates. Our smaller canes can be reduced by one person, but the larger ones take two people. Even big canes like this one can get to stretching pretty fast, though. It takes an average of 15 minutes to get a cane this big from 6 inches in diameter to about 1 inch in diameter. It’s cut into workable sections to allow us to reduce the cane the rest of the way, each person taking a section to reduce.
Once the cane is at the desired diameter, it is cut into pieces of a workable length and either wrapped in plastic to keep it from sticking to other canes, or heat-cured for slicing.
Here is a video we made in 2009 showing Margo making a flower cane.
Hi there, I was wondering…can I used the fimo canes (in the form used for the nail art) to mix with polymer clay projects?
Thanks for your help ;o)
Julie