Tutorial: white clay Christmas ornaments

I'd love to post one of those pinterest winning style posts on picture perfect Christmas crafting only this is me and I can't craft.  We excel at the imperfect.  We're messy, noisy and a bit wobbly.   We balls things up.  A lot.  We're clumsy and impatient. 

So how about some real life imperfect crafting that's craptastic to but ours?

I'm not a huge fan on salt dough especially the color.  Mine always dries bubbly and curls up.  So we use White clay .

All you need is:

❄1 cup of bicarbonate Soda
❄1/2 cup of corn flour
❄3/4 cup of warm water

Optional extras:

❄Glitter
❄peppermint essence

The method is simple too. Mix all the ingredients together and heat in a pan over a medium heat until it starts to bubble and stick together. 

The process isn't immediate and goes through several stages before it's 'done' when it starts to look like play dough you can take it off the heat.

With our first batch we added irredescent glitter to give a snowy sparkle throughout the dough and some peppermint essence to give it a festive fragrance.  We added this part way through cooking though you could add it afterwards too.

The mixture will be really hot so you need to let it cool down.

Once it's cool down knead it until it's soft and pliable.  Roll out then get cutting.

You can dry them in the oven or leave them to air dry.

Firstly we made some pretty snowflakes which we pressed some random gem shapes we found lurking in the cupboard of crafty doom aka the craft graveyard.  These looked infinitely better in my head.  You need to push the gems in before you dry them.  If, like us, you even fail at this simple task you'll need glue. .. For when they're dry and half the gems fall off.

Next we did Christmas trees.

This time we pushed sequins in.  Once again many of these little buggers fell off and I had to glue them back on. Messily.  With much swearing.

Reindeer,  something else that looked awesome in my head.  Not so much by the time we'd finished with them.  I sprayed them with gold spray paint, nearly gassing us all in the process.  The glittery parts and drug addled eyes were added in haste with Moomin in a sling on my front somewhat obscuring my view whilst I multi tasked cooking Tea.  I can't even blame the result on Thing Two and Three Dude as all they did was cut out the shapes.

The ghost was going to be Olaf. Did I mention I'm artistically inept?  It was supposed to be The Dude's footprint.....

For what it's worth if you want to do footprints and handprints you need to roll the dough a lot thicker than I did.  Oops. However The Dude rather enjoyed standing on the kitchen table.

The Eagle eyed ones amongst you may have noticed handprints on the baking sheet.

I burned them.

To a crisp.

Black and smoking.

Shut up.

If you want a much classier (& successful ) tutorial on white clay ornaments do visit the wonderful  Imagination Tree . Theirs are beautiful.  I'm not envious at all.  Honest. 

Ours however were made with love (& profanity )