I [heart] clay.

After the little detour to storage improvement and home decor, I’m going back to the hearts. I’m sure you missed it already. Also because I got featured on curbly.com with my last love-themed post.

Well this project is a bit different, it’s with homemade air dry clay. I saw a few air-dry clay options on the web for a few weeks now and it was always one of those things that I wanted to try. I love clay and play-doh and everything that you can mold and get your hands dirty.

Once I found a recipe I didn’t need to go shopping in a drug store, I thought I give it a try.

I used:

2 cups of baking soda
1 cup cornstarch
1,5 cups of cold water

Put all ingredients in a pan and stir until smooth. Set the pan over a medium heat and stir until boiling. Stir out any lumps and cook until it is the consistency of mashed potatoes. At one point I got so confused, I tasted the mixture. I’ve never tasted anything that was more disgusting. Even the memory makes me almost puke. Ugh. Never again. It just looked so nice and tasty and white and harmless. At least it was the latter. Ugh.

Once cooled I could form a few things. That work really well but after letting it sit for 12 hours I wasn’t really happy with the results. Everything bigger than a fingertip got cracks and dried unevenly. Still moist at one end and completely dry at the other. After another 8 hours, it was completely dry but still got cracks. I had to throw out the bigger pieces and was left with a heart and birds and stands.

If you have a recipe for air-dried clay that works better than mine, please let me know in the comments!

I colored them with some cheap nail polish. This worked actually pretty well. I was even able to close a few smaller cracks.

Look what I made:

The card is the business card of a Austrian artist that I adore: childlab. Aren’t her designs adorable?!

Now. Carry on!