Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays

It's finally time to sit back, sip some hot chocolate, and enjoy the beautiful spirit of this season. I wanted to show you a couple of the handmade gifts I made this year-- upcycled pine trinket boxes. I painted the boxes and faux distressed them, made paper clay embellishments and painted them, glued them on, and varnished the final product. These were VERY fun to put together! In fact, I'm planning on doing some more of these fantasy-style for my Etsy shop. These can also be personalized with special words, dates, or names.

The paper clay embellishments were made using various methods. I sculpted the moon, the leaves are reliefs of actual leaves, and the star and the words were done with stamps. The moon box was made to house the moonstone and lapis lazuli necklace that I also made, which has a matching paper clay moon pendant. Unfortunately, I wrapped the necklace up before I remembered that I wanted to take a picture!

The "garden" box has a dried pansy that was pressed in the spring adhered to the inside of the lid.

I traced the box's lid onto wax paper, then sculpted the moon directly on the paper before transferring to the box.

Leaf Sprites, Part II

The Leaf Sprites (or Green Men) have been completed and worked into beaded necklaces. I've got my new(est) Etsy shop up and loaded up with eight of these guys (there were ten in all, but I am keeping one and giving one as a gift).

This photo shows how I reworked the orange leaves by adding paper clay right on top of the paint.

This is an actual leaf being pressed into the paper clay. This is also called multi-tasking, or "I can't take too much time away from crafting to cook." 

Leaf Sprite Pendants

I'm taking a little detour from working on Sidera to pick up a project I had started earlier. Before I began working with air dry paper clay, I did some research to see what I could do with the stuff. I ran across this tutorial for leaf pendants. This was interesting to me because a while back, I was experimenting with homemade paper mache "clay" and wanted to make some leaves like this, but was unable to get my home brewed product to work in such a way. As it was (technically still is) fall when I ran across the tutorial, I decided to hurry up and press some leaves into my new clay before they were all gone. I did not follow the tutorial for painting, which suggests using water colors. I like to use gesso and acrylic paints for several reasons: 1) I find that applying water color can mess up the surface texture of the clay because it is so...watery, 2) I like the added protection that several coats of acrylics gives the clay, and 3) colors seem more saturated when applied over white gesso versus added directly to the clay.

Here is what I have done with the pendants so far. The yellow/orange/red leaves where the ones I painted before starting Sidera. The other leaves now have faces-- they are Leaf Sprites or Green Men pendants. These will be put on chains and possibly some on hemp with coordinating beads and/or stones. I like the faces so much that I'm thinking about adding some to the orange leaves and repainting. That's the wonderful thing about paper clay-- you can rework your piece after you thought it was finished!