The last couple of days I’ve tackled some basic salad ingredients in miniature: tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.

After my struggles with the apples, the tomatoes were easy. I mixed bright red and translucent clay, shaped it into balls, cut the “star” shapes on top, then inserted green clay into the stems. (I added longer stems and leaves to a few of them as well.)

After baking, I glazed them with gloss medium. I made sure they varied in size and added cherry and green tomatoes to mix it up a bit.

The cucumbers took a bit longer as I assembled another cane (similar to the orange slices) so I could have pieces as well as whole vegetables. I made the cane with green and natural translucent clay. (The picture below shows how it was built before I wrapped it in green clay.) Once I rolled it into a log I cut slices that looked like cucumber pieces with seeds. I made lots of these slices, but also cut longer pieces of the cane and pinched the ends closed to make whole cucumbers. Then I used my old toothbrush to add grooves and dimples into these pieces and dabbled them with dark green and yellow paint so they would look realistic. The big picture below shows what they looked like before baking.

The results were pretty good. I wanted the slices to be more translucent– perhaps they were overbaked?

The lettuce was easy. I spread a thin sheet of dark green clay in a fondant mold I picked up at the Goodwill yesterday for one dollar. Once this sloppy and raw edged clay was baked, I just broke it into little pieces.

For fun I threw these pieces into a miniature bowl and added cherry tomatoes and cucumber slices to make a salad. When I sent a picture of it to Andy at work he thought we were having that salad for dinner!