Make your own clay!

Is your house feeling a little sparse now all of your Christmas decorations are coming down? This is the perfect craft for you, we are going to be using our creativity to make beautiful decorations for the whole year round.

Things for the shopping list:

-corn flour

-pva glue

This month’s Happy Hut Makes is an amazing 2 ingredient clay. The possibilities for this creation are endless and I can’t wait to see what all of you creative wonderful humans come up with!

All you need is 1 and a half cups of corn flour and one cup of pva glue. Mix together in a bowl. Eventually you will have to get your hands dirty and knead the ingredients together. You need to work on your consistency depending on your clay, I have now made this twice and both times it’s been very different. If you clay seems dry and isn’t getting smooth or you can see some cracks you should add more glue. If you clay is wet and sticky you need to add more flour. If your dough is to wet the shapes won’t hold as they are drying, they melt into a new form…

Once you have your consistency right, tip the clay out onto a floured surface and roll it out, it’s really up to you how thick you make it. If it’s thin it’s more likely to be fragile, if it’s thick it will take a longer time to dry. Just go with what you feel is right. I have lots of cookie cutters I used to cut out my shapes however using a knife and cutting out a shape from free hand would work too. Or you could even mould this into a 3D object, you have complete freedom on what you use this clay for. This clay is like nothing else I have worked with and so remember it is an experiment and if it doesn’t quite work out how you hoped the first time you can roll it up and try again. The clay might start to dry out on the floured surface and so you may need to add a little more glue as time goes on. Once cut place your creations onto some grease proof paper, this is then when you should add your holes for hanging up or treading if required. I simply wiggled a sharp pencil where I intend to treat the creation. Then place them somewhere safe to dry out – an airing cupboard would be ideal.

After several hours, or days depending on thickness of clay, your creations should be ready to decorate. I choose to paint mine but you could leave yours as they are, decorate them however you wish or even put some colouring in the clay as you are making them.

Once painted I am going to seal and shine the decorations using PVA glue, yes really! Then I am going to find some string, pretty or plain and thread these pieces together.

Just for an experiments sake I attempted to turn these into earrings, and would you just look at how these turned out.

I really hope you enjoyed making your own clay, something a little different. Let me know what you decided to use it for my tagging me and using the #HappyHutMakes