There are many different ways to go about crafting with polymer clay. The bare minimum materials needed to make a clay project are only polymer clay, your hands, and an oven to bake them in.

When crafting with clay, you can really use nearly anything to craft it and etch in designs. The many varietys of dental picks available make it easy to have a compact collection of tools readily accessable to create many different designs and patterns with your clay. Dental picks and tooth picks help out etching designs into your clay, as well as smoothing out rough corners and edges in places too small for fingers to reach. Knitting and crochet needles help to pierce thinner pieces of clay and to etch in some lines and designs. Old buttons and anything with beveled or embossed textures on them work well to press in designs and patterns to your clay project. Keep an eye out for objects and tools you can use to carve and sculpt your clay with like kitchen ware, knitting needles, punch tools, beads, broken jewelery and anything else you think may help.

As well as etching and carving tools, you will need tools to cut your clay with. Again when working with clay nearly anything can become a tool, but finding ones that truely work well seriously helps out. Razors and straight edges are useful for cutting out pieces of clay that are thick or precisely measured, and rotary blades help with longer cuts and longer straight lines, as well as etching in a few types of designs or patterns, depending on the blade attached.

For a table to work on, a large to moderate sized piece of floor tiling will work well for a work space, you do not want to be working on wood. As soon as you open your bag of clay, it begins to go dry. In order to avoid ruining all of your clay, you will want to put it into small zip lock bags which you can order in quantity for a significantly cheaper price off of the internet

As you begin to collect all of the many different tools, and items you use to sculpt and etch your clay projects, you're going to need a place to store them thats organized. Something that's as simple as a fishing tacklebox or a craft box with several compartments in it. The essential material needed to make a clay project, is an oven. Although you can use your oven, it's a lot to heat up for what could be a small project, and is a waste of a higher utility bill. Alternatively what you can do is simply purchase a small home sized clay furnace, but instead of wasting the money, you can buy a simple toaster oven. But when using toaster ovens you have to be careful as to not burn the clay, by placing the clay in the toaster oven, as far away from the heating elements as you can, and looking for a toaster oven with adequate space.

So in all if you want a great enjoyable crafting experience with polymer clay, you're going to want several tools for the job. Although you can find all of these tools scattered around in stores, you are most likely not going to find all of these tools in one place, but nearly every tool mentioned in this article can be found on Hobby Tool Supply's website as well as tools for many other crafting projects you like. With tools for nearly every hobby, there's bound to be a tool or item on that site to help you out, so find your tool at http://www.hobbytoolsupply.com/