I just thought I’d share some of the Christmas presents I made this year. I’ve been pretty busy for the last few months, creating ornaments, scarves and hats, toys, slippers, and many batches of cookies.
Today I wanted to share a pair of red ornaments I made using recycled glass spice jars, polymer clay, and glass beads. I’ve collected so many of these glass spice jars, knowing that I’d be able to make something really cool with them eventually.
For some of these ornaments I covered the top, bottom, and outer edges with clay and left the center area clear. I attached a string of glass beads to hang inside the ornament. These look really pretty hanging in a window with the sun shining through.
I had a lot of fun playing with my shape cutters, stamps, and Pearl Ex powders. I just love the effect you get from stamping the unbaked clay and then rubbing Pearl Ex over the raised surface. It really helps to bring out the design.
I liked playing around with layering the shapes. I got a set of shape cutters made for cake decorating and they work great with polymer clay. I spent hours just totally lost in my little creative world 😉
Above is a different type of ornament. Here I wanted to experiment with cutting shapes out of the clay. For this one I used red sparkle paint to cover the jar so that would show through the cut outs.
Once the paint was dry I covered the jar with a sheet of red clay and used a star cutter to cut out stars around the ornament.
I made good use of my stamps and Pearl Ex powders with this one too. Rubbing the flattened sheet of clay with Pearl Ex and then pressing in the stamped design works really well. The powder keeps the stamp from sticking to the clay and you can get a nice deep impression.
Part of the fun of making these ornaments (and I made quite a few all together) was sifting through all my stamps and deciding which to use. Polymer clay plays well with so many different mediums: paint, stamps, powders, beads, inks, and all sorts of other embellishments!
Before I covered this in clay I added a cardboard armature to the bottom so it came to a point like this.
I really enjoyed creating these ornaments and took my time with the whole process, just letting my muse guide me. There was absolutely no “plan” for any of these (I’ll be sharing more ornaments later), just a vague idea. These turned out even better than I expected and I plan to make more, eventually listing some in my Etsy and ArtFire shops. This year I just wanted to be sure I had enough to give as gifts.
I’ll be sharing more of my Christmas creations in future posts, so stay tuned!
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope your holidays have been full of laughter and love.
~Michelle
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