Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Sculpey utensils

No photo yet.

But it occurred to me yesterday that my failure at creating sculpey utensils was that I tried to make them all in one piece. An entire spoon, an entire fork, and entire knife. They just flopped around and were extremely difficult to handle, not to mention shape, especially since I was trying to make them fairly thin, like real metal utensils.

When I was considering using the toy or doll house utensils, I was thinking that I'd build bases for the pieces and then attach the purchased utensils to the bases. Then the lightbulb went off—I could make each in 2 separate pieces. I could make the business end of the utensils, bake those; make the bases for them, bake those; attach. Voila! I also realized they don't need to be functional, they just have to represent utensils. This freed me up to make pieces that are thicker and much easier to handle and shape.

So those are made, but not yet baked. More tomorrow. Yes, for Christmas, I'll be baking sculpey utensils.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't you roll out a really thin slice, then use real metal utensil as form and bake them together? I think you should be able to get really thin, harden sculpey utensil. Then you remove it from the metal one.

Shumei

fingerstothebone said...

I thought about that, but there are a couple of problems:

1. I don't want life-sized utensils. These are game pieces and need to fit into positions on the game board.

2. Since the ovens used to bake them need to be dedicated ovens, I figured that if I baked real utensils with the clay, not to mention putting them in contact with each other, that might render the utensils unusable afterwards.

I came up with another way of doing it and the handles are baking in the oven now. I should have pictures tonight.