2015 Polymer Clay Challenge Week 2

I am continuing my experimentation with the Mokume Gane technique in this challenge but this week I have also added my first attempts to use alcohol inks in my creations.I bought some inks a few weeks ago but have been hesitant to try them. I couldn't figure out how to use them.
After perusing the net I discovered that it is possible to actually dye polymer clay using alcohol inks. Since I've run through many of my bright colours of clay I figured this was a good thing to try.

Here are the inks I bought. They come in packs of 3 and this was the closest I could find to a set of primary colours. Fuschia pink, golden yellow and peacock blue.

Here are the pieces of clay that I dyed with the inks.

What nobody told me was how long it takes to complete this process!! These 4 colours took me about 2 hours of kneading the clay as I gradually added the inks until I got the colours I wanted. Luckily I had just discovered the podcast "Serial" and had something to listen to while I played with the clay.

I added some gold leaf to the purple clay to add a little sparkle and this is the stack for the Mokume Gane.

And this is the best slice I got after adding multiple textures to the stack and slicing it.

It really is the coolest process and I never know what I'm going to find once I start slicing because each layer is different. And nothing gets wasted as I also us the stripey cutoffs from the edges to create my striped pieces which are my faves.

The following are just a few of the pieces I made with this week's technique using alcohol inks and mokume gane.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing my experiments.  This is a year long challenge hosted by Katie Oskin one of the "Queens of Polymer Clay" and challenges us to create something new every week. I won't be blogging about it every week but will try to do regular updates of my work. The challenge is on facebook and the link to it is here.