From'The Polymer Chef - uses of blu tack!
For Housekeeping
For Sculpting
For Caning
For Jewelry-Making
For Housekeeping
- Roll blu-tack between your hands often to pick up lint, junk, especially when working on white or light-colored clay.
- Roll a lump of blu-tack to a point to pick up bits of lint, stray glitter, pet hair, etc., that have landed on the clay (as long as they're not embedded).
- To replace lost container caps. I’ve had a blob of blu-tack on a tube of white acrylic paint for several years, and the paint is still good
- To prevent messy spills when transporting your supplies, put a bit of blu-tack inside the cap of your liquid-clay bottle or stretch a rope of it around the spray opening of your Armor-All bottle.
- Use blu-tack to pick up spilled beads.
For Sculpting
- When baking in stages, adhere the piece to the tile with blu-tack to hold it immobile while you continue to work on it.
- Hold 2 (or more) small tiles together with blu-tack when a sculpted piece needs to hang off the edge—for example, the legs of a figure in a sitting position.
- When using Kemper cutters, sometimes using the plunger to push the clay out will leave a depression in the clay. To avoid that, touch the cutter to a piece blu-tack (or even push it into the blu-tack slightly); the blu-tack will grab the clay piece, and you can retrieve it from there.
For Caning
- Use blu-tack on cane ends for less waste in reduction.
- Put blu-tack under a cane to keep it from getting a flat side when you slice.
- Use blu-tack to hold skewers or wires in place when curing beads on a baking tray.
- Use your old, dirty blu-tack to hold toothpicks upright when freshly varnished beads are drying.
For Jewelry-Making
- Use blu-tack as a stopper on the end of a bead wire as you’re stringingTo open a split ring, stick a small lump of blu-tack on your table and embed the split ring in it with the opening on top. Stab a sewing needle between the coils of the split ring into the blu-tack. This will open the ring and hold it open while you insert a finding, etc., between the coils. Then you can grasp the opening of the ring with a round-nose pliers, remove the needle, and rotate the finding until it moves freely in the ring.
- To attach a crimp cover over a crimp bead on a bead strand, stick a small lump of blu-tack on your table and embed the crimp cover in it with the opening facing up. Grasping the bead strand on each side of the crimp bead, place the crimp bead in the open cover. With the blue tack still holding the crimp cover in place, hold your crimp pliers perpendicular to the table and squeeze the crimp cover gently to close it.
- When sanding a flat object (or a flat side of a contoured object), you can spare your fingernails by using a lump of blu-tack to hold the item. This works well for sanding lentil-bead halves.