Clay - not my favorite medium

So my sis is visiting this week. Yay!

(Hopefully she'll still read my blog after I posted the picture she told me to delete...love you sis!) I thought it would be fun to try something new.

 from one of my Pinterest boards: link

Aren't those cool? Yeah, and didn't seem too hard so I picked up some clay at the craft store. Weellll have you ever used this stuff? Here are the detailed instructions:

Really, Sculpey?? That's all you can give me? How about a 6th line or something. No tips on making the shape or what to do when your clay starts smoking in the oven? Since I know absolutely nothing about clay I got two little packages. I thought that should be enough for a few little bowl plates...wrongo.

And we used hot glue sticks to roll it out...real professional-like. What? I didn't want to stain my nice bamboo rolling pin.

Not the best method, in case you're wondering. Also, you should probably use one package per dish unless you want your dish to be somewhere between cardstock thickness and 1/4". After lots and lots of futile rolling, it was time to cut out our dishes.

I knew there was a reason I kept those tiny plastic swords.  They worked like a charm (it's about time something worked right with this project)!

I had this idea to use a toothbrush holder I found in the bathroom to give it some texture.

My practice pieces turned out pretty cool...not so much on the actual dish.

Time to cook these things! We put them on oven-safe bowls so they would curve up on the edges.

We'll gloss over the part where there was a funky smell coming from the oven and perhaps a tiny bit of smoke coming off the clay. Apparently I didn't have the cooking time exactly right.

Looks like they didn't exactly turn out perfectly.

Oh well.

We still had the pearly clay to work with! Let's get this disaster over with Yay! I went for a mini tree that would hold my hair ties. My sis went for her initials and a flower. I had to hold mine up with thread because it wasn't exactly structurally sound before I baked it.

Andrea's turned out well...

Mine, not so much...this is what I saw when I opened the oven to stick Andrea's in.

I thought maybe I could fix it, but turns out I definitely couldn't.

Oh well, still fun to spend time with my sis and learn that I much prefer sewing to sculpting! More fun from our visit coming this week : )