Air Dried Clay - Nested Cloud Dishes

Last week, I made these nested cloud mini dishes from air dried clay.  They were for a friend with a birthday in November.

For supplies, I used a pen and paper air dry clay, paint to decorate (optional) and clear varnish.

The tools I used were a knife, and a sharp pointed tool to scrape the words, nail buffers to smooth the dry clay, and a paint brush.

I started by drawing three cloud roughly on a piece of paper, each smaller than the first.  They were pretty roughly drawn, and I didn't want them to be mini replicas of each other.  These were my templates.


I rolled out the air dried clay to about 3mm thick....enough for my first cloud.  cut it out and continue for the other two.  This stuff dries pretty quickly, so I tend to do one at a time.  Its really frustrating working with crumbly clay.

Using your cloud templates, cut out the clay and smooth out the edges and the surface with water, to smooth cracks and get a smoother edge.

You could start shaping here, but I wanted a cheesy message on mine.  I drew on the words with a metal spike tool  (a tooth pick would be just as good).  The clay drags quite a lots, so you need to keep "excavating" your word trench.

Once I was happy with them, I placed them over 3 balls of scrunched tin foil, to get a curved shape.  (sorry - I forgot to take a photo of this stage).  They will take about 24 hours to dry properly.  Once the shape is fixed, its worth turning them upside down to fully dry before doing any further work.

I sanded down and re excavated the words (actually I prefer the bowls without the words now...but I was too far along to bin this version)

All of the bowls were given a thorough sanding down with a nail buffer  (yay pound store)...or you could use very fine grade sandpaper

I used silver paint to do the edges, and the smallest cloud, and varnished them with 2 coats of clear mat varnish.  I picked up the grooves of the message in blue ink.  As I said before, I prefer the bowls without the writing.   I usually stamp messages on.  Oh well.

Mainly I didn't fully take the time to make a clean trail in the words, so it looked a bit scruffy.  Perhaps doing this dried clay would be more effective. I will at some point do a trial and update. 

Wrapped in tissue with a few more cloud embellishments....