Garden Jewelry

Over the cold and stormy winter days when we stayed home I experimented with using some sculpy clay.

You know the kind of day – you look out the window and only see white where the road and driveway are buried and you listen to all the cancellations when you know you really don’t need to. Thank goodness for being retired as you don’t have to go anywhere.

I had tired out a bit at one of the Creative Crafting sessions where they were making jewelry. As I’m not a jewelry person I came up with an idea to make garden jewelry. There wasn’t time to do all the steps so I tucked my idea away in my head and thought about it.

Another day I headed to Michaels with my 50% off coupon in hopes what I wanted wasn’t already on sale. I found a packet of Scuply clay with 12 different colours of clay in 1 oz blocks. Just perfect for me to experiment with on a stormy day.

Taking a little bit of a few colours, I rolled them into snakes, twisted them and rolled again, twisted into a ball, rolled and flattened. It was like being back in kindergarten all over again!

The magic starts to happen when you use a piece of glass from an old picture frame to roll the balls. Put it over the ball of clay and start to roll on a hard surface in a counter clockwise rotation.

It developed into a shape rather like a spinning top or pieces of candy. Then you put the glass on top of the pointed end and press down and the colours of clay swirl together into a flat shape. I used my fingers to stretch it into an oval shape and then rolled flat using a little round glass jar. There are special rollers for clay but I like to improvise.

For some other pieces I used a leaf cutout to form coloured leaves. You could use any cutter that you have, depending on the size of the piece you want to end up with.

The clay has to be baked in a 275F degree oven for 15 minutes and then left to cool. Before baking I used a paper clip to poke holes into each piece as I planned to hang them with fishing line from pieces of driftwood.

I packaged the remains of each colour into a small ziplock bag, and then inside a bigger bag with the directions cut from the box for use at another time.

Pieces of driftwood, collected in British Columbia, had holes drilled in them and using fishing line I attached the pieces of clay.

Now we just need spring weather to arrive so I can start decorating the garden.

Other garden jewelry :

Lots of garden whimsy.

This is not a sponsored post but sculpy clay is the type I chose to purchase as it was the most reasonable priced and offered the most colours.