Create a Mold for Your Polymer Clay Bowl

Series Summary

It has only been a few decades since the development of polymer clay changed the face of arts and crafts. This soft, pliable material is made from polymer polyvinyl chloride and can be used for almost anything as normal clay. Unlike traditional clay though, polymer clay can be baked, or cooked, at lower temperatures in a conventional oven. Because of this easy bake accessibility, polymer clay makes doing craft projects and creating beautiful jewelry or pottery as easy as baking a cake.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to use polymer clay to make a unique clay bowl. You will get step by step instructions for caning techniques used frequently with polymer clay, as well as tips on how to create a mold and a base for your polymer clay bowl. You will also learn how to create beautiful flower decorations and attach them to the clay bowl mold. If you are looking for a fun and easy art project to share with your children, let our expert show you how much fun working with polymer clay can be in this free video series.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina and welcome to Expert Village. Today we are going to make a polymer clay bowl. In this next step we are going to talk about making the mold. The first step for the polymer clay bowl is to select an item that has a nice bowl like shape that you would like to imitate. Now, if you have something that is metallic that you can pop in the oven, that is perfect. But, since I am going to use this piece of coconut, and I am assuming you may not have necessarily a metal bowl that you will have to mold around this and remove the clay and then put the clay solo in the oven. So, what we are going to do is we are going to take a piece of aluminum foil and we are going to wrap it around our object and smooth and as tightly as possible, like this. We are going to take a little bit of olive oil that we have put onto some paper and we are just going to oil the surface of the aluminum foil. And the reason why we are doing this is because we are going to mold clay to this. So you want to make sure that it doesn’t stick to the foil and a good way to do that is with oil. Now you can always use flour, I know some artists like using flour. I don’t really like using flour. I find that sometimes when you bake its stuck in the clay. I like to use oil. You can definitely wash it with soap and water. Polymer clay doesn’t dissolve in water or anything weird like that."