Clay Leaf Ornaments – A Creative Fall Craft
The kids love making things out of clay. These air dry clay ornaments are so festive! We finished them just in time for Thanksgiving. They are perfect to give as gifts to loved ones or to decorate your tree with. You could make a small tree centerpiece for your Thanksgiving dinner!
You will need:
Air Dry Clay
Cookie Cutters
Rolling Pin
Parchment Paper
Water Color or Acrylic Paint
Paint Brush
Mod Podge to seal *optional* (if you use water color paints, you will need to seal so it doesn’t rub off)
Knead the clay to warm it up. Roll it out on parchment paper around 1/4 inch thick or thicker. Air dry clay is very fragile if it’s rolled too thin. Next time, I would roll ours thicker.
Is your clay sticking? Try using a little cornstarch under your clay. It kept ours from sticking and made picking up the cut pieces a lot easier.
Let your clay dry for 24 hours or until completely dry. Then you can paint them. For our Christmas Salt Dough Ornaments and our Marble Painted Ornaments we used acrylic paint but I thought for these Fall ornaments we would try watercolor paints. I am so glad we did! They turned out so neat.
The water color paints dry into a powder on the clay which allows you to use your finger to gently rub the colors together creating a really cool way to blend them together. This also means you will need to seal the paints so they don’t rub off.
To seal our water color painted ornaments, we used Matte Mod Podge. I took a foam paint brush and dipped it into the Mod Podge. Then I painted the entire ornament with it. Once it dried, which happened really fast, I turned it over and sealed the other side.
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