I got the striped clay working this time, but there was a lot of contamination (red clay gets all over every surface and tool and white clay picks it up so easily) so I only got one sort-of-OK candy cane out of it before giving up. That’s the flat one in the upper, left-hand corner. What worked better was twisting strands of different colors together as you can see in the other canes.

I didn’t make any ornaments this year. Usually come Christmas-time I’ve got a box full of that year’s output but this year I had to sit down and make some. I decided to make clay ornaments from cookie cutters. Here are an angel and a stocking, decorated after baking with glitter.

Then I made a raft of candy canes. At first I was trying to get a real candy cane stripe going using that cane method (not named for candy canes but hey, it works) that I’ve read about but that wasn’t working out at all. I ended up with some crazy results and they started to grow on me, so I made crazy tie-died candy canes. Each one is unique, front and back. You just keep putting red and white clay into the pasta roller, folding and twisting, until you see something you like. Then cut. Fun.

This was made from polymer clay. The basic shape was formed using a cookie cutter and then embellishments were added.

These I think came out just adorable. For my first efforts with polymer clay I decided to start with stamping shapes out with cookie cutters, seeing as I’m not that artistic. The books make it sound awfully easy to make characters – just make a ball, now add a square, etc. But experience tells me it always takes more artistic ability than they let on.

So first I made a tree. Using the pasta maker to roll out sheets is fun! I made tiny little Christmas tree lights and strung them on, then balls of different sizes to fill in. The hardest part was the star on top. I didn’t have a cutter that small so I had to free hand it. This was the best of about a hundred tries.

Next I made a gingerbread man. Isn’t he cute? And so simple too. My favorite part is his curly hair. It was cuter before but I accidentally broke a little bit off trying to force a hanger through the hole.

Lastly I made a star. At first I couldn’t decide what to do with the star shaped cookie cutter. How do you decorate a star? Just a shape cut out of clay would be pretty dull. I thought about painting it and adding glitter but then I had an inspiration. I decided to make it look like a star shaped Christmas cookie of the sort we used to make every Christmas when I was a kid. So I applied “frosting” made out of a couple of different shades of red/pink, not fully blended to give it a swirly look. And then I made a bazillion little white shots. Yes, each of those is clay! The brilliant part of this idea is that any imperfections only add to the authenticity. I should have made one with multi-colored shots plus silver balls and green sprinkles on top of red and yellow swirled frosting, which would have been a more accurate representation of the kind of work we did as children.

All in all, I’m not sure I like working with clay. A lot of time is spent house-keeping. Either warming the clay up or cooling it down or cleaning it off your hands and your tools so you can work with the next color. But I do like how these came out and there are so many fun ideas out there, I’ll probably try it again.