clay beads.

With two sick boys (yep, both) we took it slow much of this week. They didn't have much energy to do too much at a time, but did want to be somewhat busy, so in between playing a lot of board games, reading books, listening to books on CD, doing sticker books and watching a few movies, we also did some craft projects. Both boys really like working with the air dry clay, and enjoy any excuse to include that in a project.

This time around we made beads. Making beads is pretty easy - pinch off a bit of clay, roll it up, shape it into whatever you want it to be (cube, circle, tube), and stick it onto a skewer.


From there we decided we wanted some texture, so the boys rolled the beads over some stamps to imprint the moist clay. We also tried winding thin craft wire around and then removing to add a pattern too.


We let the beads dry about 24 hours and then moved on to paint.


Using acrylics, the boys painted a base color - we used brown and deep red. Before the paint was dry we wiped it quickly with a sponge to get most of the paint off (while there was much that did still absorb into the clay). The boys then added some metallic paint over the top. They liked the idea of copper (which we saw at the geology museum), so we used copper and green as our two metallic colors.


We let that dry and then just coated one layer of clear matte acrylic varnish.


We have beads! They turned out great. They can be added to twine or leather to make a necklace, or - what I think we plan to do - they can be tied on to string or twine as embellishments...I'm thinking holiday gifts!

While the boys worked on their beads, I played around modeling heads (inspired by Gwen). Here is one of my screaming heads in progress... ;)