What do you do with your scraps? All the girls at my work table are scrappy girls. Reuse, recycle is certainly a theme for polymer artists. Often those recycled scraps of pattern provide buried treasure.

Laurel Swetnam keeps a record of her patterns neatly displayed in plastic pocket pages. That way she can look back over her color choices and unexpected discoveries and try them again. Here are the recycled experiments of Laurel, Laurel 2, Laurel 3, and Dayle.

Smash your leftovers into a big block, slice into pieces, recombine with a solid color between layers and see what happens. Check the tutorials of Alice Stroppel and Angela Bahrenholtz (and I know there are others) if you need more instruction.

Recycling patterns and stretching them into new combinations provides some of our most serendipitous and pleasing pieces.(Finished pieces are in the oven so you’ll have to wait to see.)