Tutorial Floraphine's Circle Cutters

Hello friends :)

As promised I want to teach you how you can make some really cool and cheap circle cutters from very few materials.

I'm really proud that I came up with this idea after a lot of thinking of what you could use as very small circle cutters.

I think (and hope) no one has done this before but correct me if I'm wrong. I call them 'Floraphine's Circle Cutters' :)

So my secret is: I use the metal parts of paint brushes!

Materials:

old/ cheap paint brushes of graduated sizes

pliers

(hair dryer)

clay

Instructions:

Floraphine's Circle Cutters

You can use some of your of brushes for this (I'm sure many of you have ruined brushes you didn't clean soon enough ;). Or you can buy those really cheap brushes, maybe you already have them and then you noticed that they shed hair... like me :D. Those on the picture were 1€.

Remove the metal parts with two sets of pliers (one in each hand). If it doesn't work right away, use a hair dryer and heat up the metal (use pliers, it gets really hot!) for 1min. This way the glue inside is loosened.

Here all of my removed metal parts. I used paint brushes in different sizes to get graduated cutters.

To be honest, they don't really look nice :D I tried removing the hair, too but the glue was too strong on some of them. Don't worry if this happens, just cut off the hair. You can keep it for later projects, for adding hair to sculptures for example. Also don't toss the handles! You can make clay shaping tools from them :) (I'll show you soon how).

To hide the horrible end part (where the hair was) you can cover it with clay. I used air-dry clay here but polymer clay works also of course.

You can make it pretty by adding cane slices or by blending together several colours or just use one colour. Of course you can paint them later.

Take a ball of clay and push it into the end of the cutter.

Smooth it out and push it to the front part, making it thinner there and thicker at the end.

Let dry/ bake and you're finished.

If you get any cracks through baking or drying (the metal might expand) you can apply super glue into the cracks. 

You can also cover the finished circle cutters with colurful clay after baking.

I have painted mine white and then added numbers and polka dots. The smallest one has the number 1, the biggest is number 6. To recreate this, dip a tooth pick in acrylics and paint on the number. For the polka dots, I used the end of a bigger skewer.

Floraphine's Circle Cutters

So that's all! Easy right? 

And what can you do with them? 

Floraphine's Circle Cutters

You can cut the circles and use them in several ways, like layering colours, using them for scales on dragons, putting polka dots on anything, make rings by using two cutters.

One little thing: You'll need to stick the clay sheet from which you want to cut circles onto your work surface 8by pressing it down; I work on tiles or glass), so that the circle doesn't get stuck in the cutter, as it's no plunger cutter and the hole doesn't go through to the other side. 

You can also use the cutters to texture your clay by not pushing them in all the way.

I really hope this helps you and you can understand my instructions. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

If you want to know how to make cutters of another shape, see this blog post.

See you soon