A Hodgepodge of Stuff!

I'm back again, briefly. :) Oh how I miss the blogs! I am taking it easy, resting (lots) and any time I have the strength to play with clay, I go for it. Five minutes here, twenty minutes there. It adds up. Even with multiple daily rest periods. I accumulated quite a neat collection of pictures since my last post, and finally had the strength to post them. I couldn't wait to share these little cuties with everyone! Hope all of you are having some wonderful clay days!

Click on photos to enlarge...

Going bananas! Finally got some decent banana canes going....

Still working with tomato canes...one day, I will get these 100 percent right! Better than my first attempts, but not quite there yet. 

More school locker magnets - a BLT sandwich set with a fun tomato and lettuce face.

Channeling Elvis. :) Peanut butter, jelly, and banana sandwich magnet set. 

Tacos! This magnet set was really fun to make!

Remember the stoves? I did a little restoration work and transformed the all-black stoves I had purchased into something a little more fancy. These are going to be Christmas ornaments when they are all finished, so a little silver and gold detailing seemed right. The two stoves on the left were purchased online (and, on sale!!) from Manor House Miniatures and they arrived just as they look - these two are wooden replicas of the vintage German dollhouse stoves by Gesetzlich Geschutzt. Nice!

A before/after shot. Before on the right, after on the left. :)

I made tiny coal chunks from Fimo Classic black polymer clay, and enhanced them with colored chalks to make them "glow." 

Trying my hand at making my own cookie/baking trays - Kato silver works great for these because the Kato brand is a harder clay which makes it easier to cut the lines very very straight and slightly angle the edges. 

Made some painted pie pans (what a tongue twister - "painted pie pans" ...say that one 10 times fast, ha ha!) I used jewelry bezels, the kind for cameos, and painted them. The spatulas were easier than I thought - mixing colors with lots of translucent clay makes them super transparent and very real looking.

Testing my skill making cast iron skillets and pots. 

More silver cookie trays (remember - Kato clay for these) and cupcake tins - I made these by casting a mold and then using Fimo Soft silver - because you have to work the clay into the cups of the mold,  Fimo Soft works best here. Kato is too hard, it will tear when you try to work it into the mold. I bake the cupcake tins in the molds, and then pop them out when they're done.