More clay work

I've spent the last week plugging away at some clay orders.  I'm almost caught up!!!! =D  Today I finished the most challenging part of this particular order... POPCORN!  A dear friend of mine has been commissioning me to make her daughter foods for her American Girl dolls for several years now, and I must say this latest order almost stumped me.  I was asked to make a couple bowls of snack foods. Cheese and crackers, potato chips and popcorn.

 The cheese and Ritz-type crackers were easy. These are all glued into the bowl, with a few left loose for play.  I want to give them a bit of gloss and a sprinkling of 'salt' but other than that they are done. The Cheddar cheese cubes are also glued down, save for a few loose ones.

Up next I started the potato chips...only to discover that the half pound block of Translucent clay I bought a couple of months ago was the WRONG brand!!!  (My claying friends will understand my dismay at discovering that it was Sculpey III rather than my standard Premo!) I ended up doing a little research online I deciding to order some Pardo from Poly Clay Play after remembering I had some of their clay in my desk.  My biggest issue with the potato chips is they have to be rather thin, but still sturdy and some flexibility is important too.  Pardo actually fits these criteria really well!  Yeah it's a bit more than Premo (especially when that's on sale) but sometimes you have to pay a little more when there is something your clay MUST have! *shrugs* Thankfully my order shipped really fast and I was able to have my new clay within just a few days.

I have since this pic added a few more chips and adjusted the ones in the bowl so that the poly-fil underneath doesn't show.  This set also has a few loose ones to play with. (While I was at it I created a jar full of 1:6th and 1:4 scale chips for future sale items too!)


So the big stumper for me was the popcorn.  I initially wasn't sure exactly how I was going to make the pieces.  But a couple of days after I accepted the commission this video came across my Pinterest boards. Popcorn Charms It was very serendipitous for sure!  The gal who made the video uses a homemade texture plate and low and behold I had some of the molding compound she used!

So I set about making the mold, letting it cure a couple days and then starting to make the popcorn. It took me a few tries to get the motions down right, but I am totally loving the end results!!!

In this pic this batch of popcorn hadn't yet been baked.  I ended up making about 2 dozen more pieces what will fill up another red bowl like the chips and crackers above.

I posted the pic to my Facebook last night and received many compliments, but the best being from the girl they are destined to go live with!  She loved them!