Hello everyone, I’m back from Mexico! It was a great trip, and if you’d like to read about it, you can go to my blog at wordpress: fimofanatic.wordpress.com.

Can you believe it’s already back-to-school time? The summer has gone by so fast. My youngest son graduated from high school in the spring, so it feels wierd not to be getting school supplies like everyone else. Instead of spending my time doing school shopping, I’ve been making more backgroundless fimo nail art. I’d made these canes for a wholesale customer, back in July, but I hadn’t had time to show them online until now. The customer had requested all of my roses and rosebuds in the backgroundless technique, and since I made a lot more cane than she needed, I’ve listed those new designs in my online shop.

The technique of making the fimo nail art without the translucent background hasn’t been around very long. Traditionally, a translucent (or colored clay) was packed around the design when constructing the cane, so that the design didn’t “squish” out of proportion when it was squeezed to reduce it. But recently the polymer clay community has been thrilled to learn of a different technique for reducing a cane, which doesn’t require the use of that background clay. The advantage for nail art is that the designs can be placed closer together without overlapping — a definite bonus when applying nail art to a pinkie nail!

A secondary bonus is for people who aren’t able to slice their fimo canes very thin: when thicker slices of traditional fimo nail art are applied to a nail, the translucent clay creates a “halo effect”, where a wispy outline of the translucent can be seen surrounding the design. But with backgroundless canes, no matter how thick your cane slices are, no halo! I’ve personally been using my backgroundless fimo designs on my nails for the last couple of months, and I must say that I like it a lot better than the traditional ones. So in the future, all of my baked fimo nail art designs will be transitioning to the backgroundless technique.

I’d love to get some of these designs into your hands, even if you don’t use fimo nail art. These cane slices are great for using on scrapbooking pages, because polymer clay is acid-free. They can also be embedded in polyester resin for delightful resin jewelry, which is becoming all the rage once again.  I’ve used slices of fimo nail art to create adorable stud earrings.  They are encased in resin, which has a magnifying effect on the design.

As you can see with this earring stud set and the pendant in progress next to it, these fimo nail art slices are versatile enough to be used in conjunction with resin to create some really lovely jewelry.  The bumblebee cane was created by my friend Beth Ackley, of Destined2Clay.com!