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.<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/claytree.jpg\")
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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.<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/gingerbread.jpg\")
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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.<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/star.jpg\")
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10],"tags":[20],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ornaments","category-polymer-clay","tag-christmas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnalguard.com\/crafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}