After finishing a few fiber art pieces with deadlines, I was able to get back to work on sculpting items for the Mouse House this last month. I’m trying to finish up the kitchen and dining room food pieces while in California so when I return to Michigan I can pull those last rooms together.
I need dishes for the food I made last year, so I’ve been experimenting with various methods of making plates and bowls. I practiced for many hours with various air-drying clay thrown on the mini pottery wheel Andy gave me for Christmas.
These turned out okay but I wasn’t happy with my ability to “center” the clay and thus spent a lot of time fixing the plates so they ended up round. I will continue to work on this; I find the wheel so cathartic and want to get good at it, but my impatience to move forward with the Mouse House has prompted me to move on to other methods right now.
The next thing I tried was molding polymer clay on these small “knock out seals” I found at Home Depot. I cut out circles to fit the seals, then stamped an impression in the middle with a bolt. These turned out fairly well but there was a LOT of sanding once they were dry to thin the edges of each plate.
Finally I cut out circles using a thread spool and used a washer as the template to make the inner circle on each plate. I made bowls using various molds I have laying around, including these wooden bowls I found at Michael’s.
I’m still experimenting and learning, but I’ve made quite a few useable dishes and am ready to load them up with food the next few days.
While I’m enjoying making colored and “pretty” plates with various colors of clay and with nail decals (see the plates above with flowers), I think the food will look better on the plain white plates. We’ll see what I end up using once I get back home.
JPT Unraveled 