I just received a beautiful package filled with craft supplies from our site sponsor, Wholeport. The main feature of which, so far, has been a huge supply of polymer clay in all colors of the rainbow.
Fancy these!
Note: all these food items are photographed at slightly larger scale than their actual size. They have been made by a 10-year-old. Working with polymer clay is easy, even for those less dexterous! What a cool craft for kids and what an incredibly great job this kid did, right?!
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Over Christmas we had a blast trying to use it all up ~ which was impossible ~ and we made a count of 32 different craft items with all this polymer clay. It looks like we barely made a dent in our supply however, so envision many more polymer clay tutorials coming up in the new year.
For now, I have a new polymer clay tutorial for you:
1. How to make polymer clay food.
And tomorrow, I hope to have finished another article on …
2. How to make polymer clay art.
Then, next week or so, I’ll add 2 more tutorials: how to make polymer clay jewelry and how to make polymer flowers (chrysanthemums).
I welcome you to purchase anything you wish through our links, as your affiliate commissions is what pays our rent and keeps this blog life. Thank you for your support. And it is really a win-win, as there are many bargains to be had at this shop which might now easily be the biggest craft supplier online.
How to Make Polymer Clay Food
1/ How to make a polymer clay banana.
What you’ll need is yellow and brown polymer clay. Roll a bit of the yellow clay between your fingers till it is about 1” long. Stretch one end a bit to make a banana stem. Add a tiny bit of the brown to the top of the banana stem. Squeeze the little banana roll a tiny bit so you get slightly flattened sides. Smooth your flattened roll with any of your polymer clay working tools. When the shape is right, add very thin rolls of brown on each of the four ‘corner’-edges of the banana, so as the resemble the peel.
2./ How to make a polymer clay cupcake.
You will need at least 3 colors of polymer clay. Roll the largest amount of the 3 into a ball. Flatten the ball on one end. This will be your cupcake base. With your fingers, shape the ball into a cup shape now, with a slightly smaller base and a slightly wider top. Slightly flatten the top of your cupcake base. Not the detailing: with a thin polymer clay tool, draw vertical lines into your cupcake base to resemble a cupcake liner.
For your polymer clay cupcake topping, use a contrast colored clay. By rolling your clay on a surface and stretching the roll with your fingers while rolling, you will create one long snake of polymer clay. When the roll is thin enough to resemble cupcake icing, start coiling the snake along the outside of your cupcake top, building it up higher and higher, as you normally would with your icing/whip cream. Make sure you have enough clay to reach the top in the center of the cupcake.
To finish it off, add a tiny ball of the 3rd polymer clay color on the top. Like a cherry so to speak, but we realized, it can be any color you wish, as long as it matches with the other two colors of your cupcake.
3./ How to make a polymer clay pie cake
You will need to create 2 colors: one for the pie crust and the other for your pie filling. To create a pie crust color, you probably will have to mix a bunch of colors, such as white/cream, yellow/beige, and a bit of orange.
Simply kneed the colors together in your hand. To create a smooth mix you may place the colors on top of each other. Smash and stretch your clay and twist it. At first this gives a beautiful color twisting effect. Keep going and don’t be distracted: you want to make pie crust! When you then double- fold and kneed your clay, you will quickly create a smooth even color mash.
To shape the pie, take of 20% of your clay amount. Now roll the rest into a medium-sized ball in your hand. Then flatten it with one of the clay tools into a large disk.
Do the same with a much smaller amount of pie filling colored clay: make a ball and flatten it into a disk, which should be smaller than the pie crust. Place it on top of the pie crust in the center and tap it snug in position.
With the remaining 20% of your pie crust –colored polymer clay, roll thin strips which you lay crossed over your pie filling. Tap the edges to secure the strips.
Sculpt the pie as is needed with your polymer clay tools.
As you can see in the picture, this 10-year-old also made a red apple, with tiny stem and leaf at the top, a block of chocolate for which she even designed a wrap, a bag of M&Ms, a baguette, a couple of candy canes. Plus a polymer clay cinnamon roll and 2 eggs. Quite a big production for one lovely afternoon of polymer clay craft! And that is not counting the flowers she made…
The trick of the trade with things like chocolate and bread made from polymer clay is the color mixing. Mix bits of those clay sticks till you have the color just right. Then the shaping is fairly easy and it looks great.
Baking Your Polymer Clay Food
Once you have created all your polymer clay food items, it’s time to pop them in the oven. The polymer clay is baked between 265 °F (129 °C) to 275 °F (135 °C) for 15 minutes per 6.4 mm of thickness. You can also steam polymer clay, but for me the oven works best. More in line with real baking, right?! After all, it’s food we’re talking about here. No matter how miniature!
