Alternative Polymer Clay Tools!

Hey guys, so I went to buy my first clay tools today and noticed. They weren't that different from a few household items, and that acrylic? Nail polish will do the job.

So first are the ball tools, honestly I didn't find any alternative that produced the exact same results, so I think that's one of the tools you'll need to get at the store. I did find something pretty useful though.

I actually have many of these at home, they come in different sizes so chose carefully. The real purpose of these rods is actually quite... strange if you don't already know, it's an ear picker. Gross, yeah. But they're actually really cheap and you can get them at any Asian market for like 99 cents. It works as a carving tool and the end can be used to paint dots and things for eyes or blush and polkadots. It could also be used for sculpting.

 This as you can see is a sharpie marker. It can be used to draw things on already baked polymer clay. And it also suffices as a rolling pin, a crayola marker also works. Another thing is, when I went to buy pastels I noticed how expensive they were, honestly all you need to shade clay is chalk, it produces about the same results and is like ten times cheaper.

Acrylic, This really isn't that expensive, but Nail polish is just about the same (except you can not bake it, NEVER BAKE) and I have a bunch of it.

So when I found the earpicker thing it actually came in a set with a few other things, but I did find another useful shaping tools.I really don't know what it is but it looks as if it could be useful, next time I go to china i''l be sure to bring back more of these tools to put on my Etsy, China also has really cheap blades for like 10 cents (USD) for like 5 and comes with a handle thing so i'll bring plenty of those ,too.

Here's a few other tools that I found, that you probably already know about

Toothbrush; Texturing much easier then using a texture tool thing.
Toothpick; Paint dots or carve small details.
Cookiecutters; Cut cool shapes.
Comb; for texturing.