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Has anyone every played around with Translucent polymer clay's? I'm thinking about sculpting out a hollow form and lighting it internally with some LED's but the sculpey appears to cure very opaque and i'm afraid that the lighting will be lost unless it's in a dark room.

Also, if anyone could recommend a solid tutorial for some basic LED work, I would be greatly appreciative. I'm just trying to do something simple for now with an LED strip connected to a 12v battery and a little switch. Still new to all this but i've seen all sorts of stuff about special connectors, transistors, and transformers. Do I need all of that stuff if i'm just doing a simple strand with an on / off switch?

The easiest thing to do is ordering LED assemblies already wired together from a site like modeltrainsoftware.com instead of trying to put together your own. Then you just drill out the necessary parts of models and glue it in.

If you just want to make a light turn on with a switch then as long as you have the LED attached to a resistor (a little cylinder on one of the wires) you'll be fine.

Yeah, the 'translucent' sculpey is only translucent when it's very thin. Might still work with a bright enough LED, but would need some experimentation.

I had a friend who sculpted little mushrooms out of sculpey (it was a fluoro yellow coloured one) which he embedded LEDs into - bright white ones.

They were surrounded by the material, so survived the oven firing, but when wired up to the power supply, they glowed with an eerie yellow glow. It is possible, but you will need to experiment and know what you can get away with for the construction.

You need to protect the LEDs from heat (since sculpey is oven fired) - because heat kills them and the leads WILL conduct heat into the circuit that makes them up.

I do not have a tutorial, but I generaly do my LED work in a string using a 9volt battery (the one with the two buttons on top, I find these the easiest to buy and hook up leads to. I have tried watch batteries and they never put out enough for what I want, although I am NOT an electrician or anything). Four to six LEDS seems to be the right number, although at times I have placed a resistor in. Straight loop wire, battery to switch, switch to string of LED's, to optional resistor, to battery. I just posted a lighted Hellbrute. He is a string of 3 lights, no resistor. This may be obvious so don't take offense, but the LED's I buy do have a pos/neg side, so must be strung correctly and not backwards. Generally a test run with the wires just twisted together works for this.
I have no experience with lighting sculpey, so sorry.