There’s something about a tiny clay strawberry or a slice of watermelon no bigger than a coin that makes people stop and pick it up off the fridge. I’ve made a lot of clay magnets over the years, but the fruit ones are consistently the ones people ask about, they’re colorful, a little nostalgic, and…
Someone messaged me a few months back after I posted my leaf imprint jewelry dish, asking, almost apologetically, if it was “silly” to wonder whether she could actually sell something like that. It wasn’t silly at all. I get some version of that question more than almost anything else I get asked, right up there…
A desk can get cluttered surprisingly quickly. Pens end up scattered everywhere, charging cables disappear behind the monitor, sticky notes pile up, and somehow there are always a few tiny things sitting around that don’t have a proper home. I’ve found that air dry clay is one of my favorite materials for fixing those little…
I made my first clay gnome almost by accident, I had leftover clay from a coaster project and about twenty minutes to kill, so I shaped a little cone hat, added a round nose, and set it on my windowsill to dry. My daughter saw it the next morning and asked if we could make…
I made my first clay bookmark almost by accident. I had a small ball of air dry clay left over from a coaster project. It wasn’t enough to make another coaster, but I didn’t want to throw it away either. So I rolled it flat, cut it into a simple corner shape, and let it…
outer surface of a piece dries and shrinks faster than the interior, and that mismatch in shrinkage rate creates tension right at the boundary between the dry outer layer and the still-damp core. Enough tension, and the piece cracks to relieve it. Once you understand that’s the actual mechanism, most of the advice about speeding…
I went through a phase last spring where I couldn’t keep a single real flower alive in my house, not for lack of trying, just bad luck and a lot of travel. So I started sculpting them out of clay instead, and it turned into one of the most satisfying crafting phases I’ve had in…
A strawberry vase is a rounded, coil-built air dry clay vessel sculpted and painted to look like an oversized strawberry, complete with pressed seed indentations and a leafy green calyx around the opening, built to actually hold fresh flowers and water like a real vase. It’s one of the more ambitious projects on this site,…
There’s something about a little handmade keychain that makes even your everyday house keys feel a bit more personal. I’ve made plenty of small clay projects over the years, but keychains are the ones I keep coming back to, they’re small enough to finish in an afternoon, and there’s no shortage of ways to customize…
The first time I glazed a polymer clay piece, I grabbed whatever clear nail polish was sitting in my bathroom drawer and brushed it straight onto a set of earrings I’d just baked. Within a week, the polish had yellowed, gone tacky in the humidity, and started peeling at the edges. I learned the hard…