Now, I'm dreaming of miniatures...

One of the most fun blogs, one that I go 'ohhhhh, how adorable' with just about every new post, is Vicki's Turkey Feathers. And she gave me my most 'ohhh, how adorable' moment ever last week with the reveal of her and her daughter's miniature sweet shop, Le Petite Patisserie. It is a picture of perfection with miniature pastries in tiny bakeshop cases and teeny dolls peeking in the windows at all the goodies. Kali and I liked it so much, we decided we needed another hobby...making polymer clay miniatures!

Our first results are not exactly perfection, but we had the most fun time! Polymer clay is a wonderful craft for children. We used Sculpey III, which was soft and easy to condition, and the sample pack contained more than enough colors to satisfy everyone's creative desires. We ended up with a small sea-turtle soccer team (Jack, 7) and a palm tree, smiley sun and snake-dog creature (Kali, 9). I focused on tiny food: little apples, chocolate chip cookies and a birthday cake.

Oddly enough, my clay cake looks very much like the cakes I bake...a bit uneven and lopsided. At least my edible cakes make up for any fault in presentation with tasting great :-) We have 2 books coming on making dollhouse miniature and tiny food out of polymer clay, so I'm hoping for some improvement to our clay efforts.

I received some tips on getting started from a terrific clay artist, Jessica of Jogee Designs. Here were her hints on supplies and resources to help kids have fun with clay:

• I think polyclay is a perfect craft for kids! They can start over, and over, and over again..... plus it never dries out!! It does react really poorly with some plastics though, so when storing stick to plastic sandwich bags or glass/plastic baby food containers.
• Well, for books I would recommend any by Maureen Carlson, or Shelley ???? Carlson has a few just for beginners, and her style is fun!
• As far as tools go, I would say she'd have to have an acrylic roller (pasta machines are really the best, but if you're just starting her out you might not want to spend the money on that yet, so the roller would be just fine for conditioning and mixing colors.) I use my exacto knife ALOT, also any nail cuticle thingy from the drug store. I use both the tiny wooden ones and the ones with the rubber tip. They actually do sell a tool called The Clay Wipe Out Tool that does the same thing, but I've only seen it on line. So a roller, wipe out tool and needle tool are must haves I would say (also a knife of some kind..... they sell the clay blades but I don't use it much. I have to have my exacto knife). Everything else, like cutters, glitter, mica powder, clay extruder gun, bead rollers, are fun to have but not necessary.
• As far as clay goes, Sculpey and Fimo soft are very easy to use....extremely soft (show lots of finger prints though). I don't like to use them by themselves for that reason, but they are easy to condition.
  

I suspect we're just beginning a long relationship with polymer clay, so we'll keep you posted on our progress!