Fimo
Photo credit: Photo: Perennis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The oven-bake polymer clay that was the star of '90s arts-and-crafts: bright blocks you kneaded, sculpted, and baked hard into beads, charms, and tiny food. Master the millefiori "cane" and you could slice off a dozen identical little pictures — the craft-table flex of the decade.
Fimo's origins are older and stranger than its '90s craft-fair fame suggests. The modeling compound was first presented to the German dollmaker Käthe Kruse in 1939; she found it unsuitable for her doll factory and passed it to her daughter Sophie Rehbinder-Kruse, nicknamed "Fifi" — which is where the name comes from: FIMO, short for "Fifi's Modeling compound." It was later produced under Eberhard Faber and eventually by the German stationery giant Staedtler, which makes it to this day.
As a polymer clay, Fimo stays soft and workable until you bake it in an ordinary home oven — roughly half an hour at a low temperature — after which it hardens permanently and can be cut, drilled, sanded, or painted. That simple magic made it a defining arts-and-crafts staple through the 1980s and '90s, in friendly rivalry with the American brand Sculpey. Kids and hobbyists rolled it into beads, charms, and miniature food, and the truly ambitious learned caning, or millefiori: building a log of colored clay so that a picture runs all the way through it, then slicing off thin beads that each carry the same image.
Still a leading polymer-clay brand under Staedtler, Fimo was reformulated to be phthalate-free in 2006. For a generation, though, it's remembered as the smell of a baking tray full of homemade beads — the raw material of every friendship necklace and clay pendant the decade produced.
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