My husband and I are staunch Arizona Diamondbacks baseball fans. Last February, in honor of the opening of Major League Baseball, I had designed a baseball necklace out of polymer clay for me to wear to show my true colors, complete with fake pretend "autographed" bat, glove and dangling baseballs. The team colors for the Diamondbacks are Sedona red, sand and black. Sedona red is the color of the red rock of Sedona and alas, neither it nor sand are colors that are commonly available in beads. I was unable to locate any appropriate beads and didn't relish the labor intensive work of making my own, so I didn't make a "tribute to the Diamondbacks" necklace.
However, I kept looking online and one day I found
Trash City, a wonderful wholesale bead company in Phoenix who had limestone beads that had been commercially dyed in colors similar to the Diamondbacks' team colors....... courtesy of Trash City owners, Chris and Jim McLennan who are avid Diamondbacks fan. Eureka!
One of the technically challenging aspects of creating the bat was that I wanted to make a teeny realistic bat logo as well as making a signed pretend faux autograph on the tiny 2 3/4 inch bat.
I needed a black pen to write on the bat; something permanent on polymer clay and capable of writing tiny legible letters. I ended up using a black Microperm by Sakura (01 thinner, 03 thicker, 05 thickest sizes) from
Markers Supply. I've been using the thickest tipped version (05) of this pen to sign the back of some of my pieces for several years. It has held up well over time and I've been very pleased with the choice. I highly recommend it for signing cured polymer clay pieces. There have been a few time when I've made an oops on the signature and immediately tried to remove the ink with alcohol. It's so permanent that, though the alcohol did cause the ink to fade a little, I ended up having to sand it off and start over. That's PERMANENT!
FYI I have found that the somewhat similar Pigma Micron COLORED pens by Sakura do not hold up nearly as well unless heat cured and gently sealed.
To read a blog post on making my
neon yellow softball jewelry
