4. Ornament/Key Chain

Holiday Ornaments

All you need is a little Sculpey and some time. There are plenty of tutorials and projects to work from over at the Sculpey site, and many more scattered all over the web. The little guys up above I made last year with plain white Sculpey, and then painted with acrylics.

5. Screenprint/Paint Clothing

Napoleon Screenprint Tie

If you have the time, the gear, and a little bit of time to practice, you can screenprint a shirt, tie, you name it! I used EZ Screen Print, which is a great ‘no-chemical’ way to make screens, but I found that the shipping was so much for the special paper, and I wasn’t using the screens to their full potential. So another method of putting a desired image onto fabric is using the freezer paper method! Much cheaper, and works just as well I find! You do need a little more time to do it, and a little more practice, but you get *fantastic* results. Here’s a few good tutorials, but there are lots of other ones out there – investigate and decide what works best for you!

In the Jungle...

This lamp was a great group project, starting with me and my mother-in-law going off and getting a plain lamp, which is harder than it sounds. We needed one with a flat base, and a rod that we could enclose in bamboo. Now that I think of it, it probably would have saved us time if we just made the entire thing from scratch. The shade on the lamp was awful, so we got a separate shade. Back home, my mother-in-law covered the lamp shade with new material and glued cork to the base, while the mom-to-be and I sculpted the animals and leaves out of sculpey. We had my father-in-law drill some bamboo (its not completely hollow!) and remove the lighting switch while the sculpey figures were painted. I think it’s cute!

Holiday Ornaments

Cute little miniature sculpey ornaments, painted with acrylics. From the top left box moving clockwise, there’s Father and Mother Christmas, Grandfather and Grandmother Frost (she is holding Kolach), Simon the cat and Jersey the dog, and a cute little bunny couple. These were fun to make, but took me a long time. Probably because I am not very good at sculpting.