We will need:
- polymer clay (white, orange, blue (you can take other colors, but it is better to leave the snowman white);
- stacks for polymer clay;
- ordinary edible salt;
- connecting ring;
- black marker or pen;
- two black beads.

Step 1

So, first it is better to prepare all the small details of the future snowman, namely: a carrot nose and buttons. You can additionally make snowmen a scarf, a hat or something else. If you have baked clay, then immediately bake these small elements according to the instructions. If self-hardening - just wait until the elements become solid.

Step 2

Now let's start working with white plastic. The quantity is up to you. If you are making a Christmas tree toy or a keychain, then it should not be especially large. And if, for example, you want to make cute ones with snowmen, then you will need to take much less clay. Blind from white clay the body of a snowman (the largest ball), a round head (medium-sized ball) and the two smallest balls (future handles). You can make a snowman from three or even four parts, but this way it will look more neat.

Step 3

Next, pour ordinary edible salt on a saucer and roll all the white elements of the snowman in it - this will give the craft the effect of “snowiness”. It is necessary to roll several times, while not shaking off excess salt. But if you want, you can skip this step, leaving the snowman completely smooth.

Step 4

If you have baked clay, do not rush to put the figurine in the oven. Start immediately connecting all the elements: first the head with the body. The clay has a rather sticky texture, so glue is not required here - and everything sets well, although for reliability it is better to put small elements on the glue. The photo is not able to show the entire texture of the snowman: it turned out to be quite porous, resembling real snow.

Step 5

Don't forget the snowman's handles. By the way, it’s better to immediately insert the ring into the snowman’s head while the figure is damp, otherwise you will have to drill a hole under it later, there is a risk of damaging the figure, but you don’t want that, do you? But if you forgot about it, then take the thinnest drill for such work and act very carefully!

Step 6

As the eyes of the snowman, I took two black beads, but you can simply draw them with a marker. And in general, here you can take beads and other material at your discretion. The nose, although you have already baked it or waited until it dries, will perfectly attach to the raw figure. And in the process of baking, everything will grab even better. Well, if your clay is hardening, then you just need to wait for the figure to dry completely.

Step 7

Don't forget the snowman's buttons. It is better to glue them on with glue, as they can “slip off” the round belly of the figure. Holes-points are also drawn with a marker (in the case of baking, after the figure is completely ready).

Step 8

Something is missing: be sure to add a smile to the snowman so that he brings only joy to your home, charging everyone with positive energy! By the way, if something fell off in the process - do not be afraid and do not rush to be upset, just glue everything in place with glue! So, after that, you can safely bake the toy (in this case, paint on a smile after baking) or wait for it to dry.

Step 9

As a suspension, you can take a satin ribbon to match the craft itself. Thread it into a ring and tie a bow - it's simple! Although you can make a pendant from threads or any beautiful chain.

Ready-made Christmas tree toy "Snowman" made of polymer clay

So the toy is ready, which you can safely hang on the Christmas tree. Such a snowman stands out against the background of a prickly green beauty! And so that the snowman does not get bored, connect all the household members to the creativity and create a real family for the snowman! The process of sculpting snowmen on the Christmas tree will drag both adults and children with their heads! By the way, after the New Year, you can not put the craft in a long drawer along with other toys until next year: just remove the ribbon and attach the appropriate fittings to the ringlet - you get a nice keychain! Thus, even in spring or summer, you will be filled with a fabulous winter mood whenever you use the keys. Fabulous and snowy mood and creative success to you!

: Master Class

Step 1

Put polymer clay of any color on baking paper and knead a little on the surface. Roll out the clay with a smooth roller to a thickness of approx. 2 mm. Cut out shapes using cookie cutters. You should always work on baking paper.

Step 2

do it yourself

Step 3

For striped products, roll out a layer of polymer clay of the same color. Then roll out clay of other colors and cut into strips. Put the strips on a solid layer and roll out until smooth. Now you can cut out the shapes.

Step 4

Install a removable rollerball with a star motif. Moisten the roller with a little water. Draw along a smooth layer along or across and squeeze out the stars.

from yarn

Step 5

Step 6

Sculpting Christmas decorations from polymer clay is a pleasure! Such creativity delivers a lot of positive emotions, both during work and after it. Modeling has several advantages:

• do not need a large number of tools;
• you can sculpt anything;
• cheap and available material;
• minimum labor.

Prepare the workplace and get started

By and large, the manufacture of such crafts is no different from modeling from plasticine. The only difference is that the toy will need to be baked so that the clay hardens and the craft retains its beauty. Before work, you need to prepare a place. Put on the table all the necessary materials and tools:

• polymer clay;
• a little flour or talc;
• small knife;
• paints;
• paperclips;
• threads.

From clay we will sculpt figurines. The knife is useful to us for leveling the surface, as well as applying patterns, recesses, and so on. The paper clips will play the role of the ears to which we will tie the thread. Talc or flour perfectly eliminates the sticking of clay to hands or a table, which prevents modeling.
We will paint crafts after the clay hardens.

Wash your hands thoroughly before sculpting! Clean hands are the basic rule of modeling. Not a single mote should fall into the clay: this material adheres well, thus it will “collect” all the garbage. This also applies to the workplace, which should also be as clean as possible.

Let's start simple

You need to start by making the simplest Christmas toys from clay. For example, from ordinary balls. In addition to the items presented above, you will need a foam ball.

Please note that balls cannot be made entirely from this material, as they will not be able to bake properly. The maximum thickness of clay should not exceed one centimeter! For the manufacture of three-dimensional figures, use the "stuffing" from another material, for example, from foil or foam.

If you do not have a foam ball, then take the foil. Make a small ball of foil, 3-4 cm in diameter.
Cover it with clay and roll it all in your palms to make an even ball. Take one small paperclip and stick it into the balloon so that the mute's ear sticks out. Roll the ball again in your palms: the paper clip will be securely fixed in the clay. Everything can be baked (read the rules for baking in the next section).

After firing, wait for cooling. It remains only to decorate our toy. The background color is best applied with spray paint. After it dries, you can paint with other colors (brush) anything you like: a symbol of the year, a snowflake, a snowman or Santa Claus. Insert the thread into the eye of the paper clip and tie a loop. A beautiful handmade Christmas ball is ready, just like a factory one! In a short time, you can make dozens of different toys, without much difficulty.

Learning to make various figures

The simplest of them are flat toys. Here you will need some clay and one little secret. Culinary cookie cutters with which we will literally stamp blanks. We put clay on the table and begin to roll it out like dough. We take tin molds and “stamp” blanks: hearts, Christmas trees, diamonds, and so on.

Insert paper clips or wire loops into the upper parts. Put them on a baking sheet and bake them like cookies. Further - only your imagination. You can stick or draw something on them.

Do not forget to sprinkle flour or talc on your hands while sculpting. Without this, the clay will stick strongly to the fingers and the table, which will make it much more difficult to make the craft!

Complex (voluminous) Christmas tree decorations made of clay require a little more attention and perseverance.
You may need to sculpt individual parts from polymer clay, and only then assemble a whole figure from them.
For example, this snowflake. It is assembled from a base, many different petals and circles.

Or, for example, a figurine of some animal, where the body, head, paws and tail are molded separately, and only then they are assembled into one.
Here it is better to use matches as a reinforcing material.

A beautiful house from a fairy tale.

A little patience and a cute owlet wonder bird will appear in your hands.

Firing rules

It deserves even more attention, compared to sculpting Christmas toys from clay with your own hands. Improper baking can lead to very unpleasant consequences. Agree, it will be a shame if the craft on which you have been working for a long time simply falls apart. Therefore, you need to follow the rules.

What to use for baking

As dishes for firing, faience plates, ceramic tiles or the simplest steel baking sheet are used. On the last one, be sure to put parchment for baking, and only on top - crafts. It is better to put several layers of paper so that the products do not deform.

What temperature is needed and how long

It depends on the craft itself, or rather, on its thickness and the type of clay. Such data is always written on the packages, be sure to read them before firing. Usually the optimum temperature is 110-130 degrees Celsius.

It is best to use an oven thermometer to monitor the temperature.

When the craft is thin, for example, a flower or a leaf, then the required time will not exceed five to eight minutes.
Massive textures sometimes take half an hour. If you decide to burn something bulky, use toothpicks, as shown in the photo. This is done so that the craft is evenly fired from all sides.

If fired incorrectly, poisonous gas can be released from the clay! Watch the temperature and time, be sure to follow the recommendations. Do not bake polymer clay crafts with food.

Polymer clay dog ​​- video

Lovely polymer clay Christmas decorations - video

Sculpting Christmas decorations from polymer clay is a pleasure! Such creativity delivers a lot of positive emotions, both during work and after it. Modeling has several advantages:

• do not need a large number of tools;
• you can sculpt anything;
• cheap and available material;
• minimum labor.

Prepare the workplace and get started

By and large, the manufacture of such crafts is no different from modeling from plasticine. The only difference is that the toy will need to be baked so that the clay hardens and the craft retains its beauty. Before work, you need to prepare a place. Put on the table all the necessary materials and tools:

• polymer clay;
• a little flour or talc;
• small knife;
• paints;
• paperclips;
• threads.

From clay we will sculpt figurines. The knife is useful to us for leveling the surface, as well as applying patterns, recesses, and so on. The paper clips will play the role of the ears to which we will tie the thread. Talc or flour perfectly eliminates the sticking of clay to hands or a table, which prevents modeling.

We will paint crafts after the clay hardens.

Wash your hands thoroughly before sculpting! Clean hands are the basic rule of modeling. Not a single mote should fall into the clay: this material adheres well, thus it will “collect” all the garbage. This also applies to the workplace, which should also be as clean as possible.

Let's start simple

You need to start by making the simplest Christmas toys from clay. For example, from ordinary balls. In addition to the items presented above, you will need a foam ball.

Please note that balls cannot be made entirely from this material, as they will not be able to bake properly. The maximum thickness of clay should not exceed one centimeter! For the manufacture of three-dimensional figures, use the "stuffing" from another material, for example, from foil or foam.

If you do not have a foam ball, then take the foil. Make a small ball of foil, 3-4 cm in diameter.

Cover it with clay and roll it all in your palms to make an even ball. Take one small paperclip and stick it into the balloon so that the mute's ear sticks out. Roll the ball again in your palms: the paper clip will be securely fixed in the clay. Everything can be baked (read the rules for baking in the next section).

After firing, wait for cooling. It remains only to decorate our toy. The background color is best applied with spray paint. After it dries, you can paint with other colors (brush) anything you like: a symbol of the year, a snowflake, a snowman or Santa Claus. Insert the thread into the eye of the paper clip and tie a loop. A beautiful handmade Christmas ball is ready, just like a factory one! In a short time, you can make dozens of different toys, without much difficulty.

Learning to make various figures

The simplest of them are flat toys. Here you will need some clay and one little secret. Culinary cookie cutters with which we will literally stamp blanks. We put clay on the table and begin to roll it out like dough. We take tin molds and “stamp” blanks: hearts, Christmas trees, diamonds, and so on.

Insert paper clips or wire loops into the upper parts. Put them on a baking sheet and bake them like cookies. Further - only your imagination. You can stick or draw something on them.

Do not forget to sprinkle flour or talc on your hands while sculpting. Without this, the clay will stick strongly to the fingers and the table, which will make it much more difficult to make the craft!

Complex (voluminous) Christmas tree decorations made of clay require a little more attention and perseverance.

You may need to sculpt individual parts from polymer clay, and only then assemble a whole figure from them.

For example, this snowflake. It is assembled from a base, many different petals and circles.

Or, for example, a figurine of some animal, where the body, head, paws and tail are molded separately, and only then they are assembled into one.

Here it is better to use matches as a reinforcing material.

A beautiful house from a fairy tale.

A little patience and a cute owlet wonder bird will appear in your hands.

Firing rules

It deserves even more attention, compared to sculpting Christmas toys from clay with your own hands. Improper baking can lead to very unpleasant consequences. Agree, it will be a shame if the craft on which you have been working for a long time simply falls apart. Therefore, you need to follow the rules.

What to use for baking

As dishes for firing, faience plates, ceramic tiles or the simplest steel baking sheet are used. On the last one, be sure to put parchment for baking, and only on top - crafts. It is better to put several layers of paper so that the products do not deform.

What temperature is needed and how long

It depends on the craft itself, or rather, on its thickness and the type of clay. Such data is always written on the packages, be sure to read them before firing. Usually the optimum temperature is 110-130 degrees Celsius.

It is best to use an oven thermometer to monitor the temperature.

When the craft is thin, for example, a flower or a leaf, then the required time will not exceed five to eight minutes.

Massive textures sometimes take half an hour. If you decide to burn something bulky, use toothpicks, as shown in the photo. This is done so that the craft is evenly fired from all sides.

While the male half of our team was carefully choosing a green beauty that would decorate our editorial office, the girls were thinking about how to prove themselves in decorating the Christmas tree and make its decoration different from every year. Inspired by a trip to the Christmas tree factory, we decided that we should certainly try to make toys with our own hands. Unfortunately, there were no underground glassblowers among us, and we began to invent alternative options. There are a lot of them, and we will tell about each in detail.

In my area of ​​​​responsibility, I took clay toys. Polymer clay is very popular with craftsmen: it is easy to handle, like plasticine, and hard after drying, like ceramics.

Still, it was scary to master a new craft on your own. I remembered how I saw the wonderful and jewelry crafts of Irina Agladze on the Internet: felted cutie animals, charismatic cats and decorations in the form of food worthy of living in roomboxes.

In general, I plucked up the courage and asked for a visit in order to learn from experience. Irina answered me with the most cordial invitation and even promised to call her friend Evgenia Shatko, a craftswoman, so that we would have more sculpting hands and fantasizing heads. Zhenya has her own language school, where Ira also teaches with her. As if the main characters of Fathers and Sons, the girls were divided into peculiar Slavic and Anglophile Westerners: Ira teaches English, and Zhenya teaches Serbian and Slovenian. And in her free time from lessons, Ira introduces Zhenya to needlework in its most diverse manifestations.

Needless to say, I went to the girls in anticipation of magic. But what awaited me in the rented apartment of Ira and her young man turned out to be more wonderful than all my ideas. Firstly, before modeling, Ira and Zhenya made me drink cocoa with the “Flight” cake (I think I have never lived such a sweet life). And secondly, at every step I came across some incredibly cute and beautiful hand-made Irina.

In the bathroom, a decoupage set was waiting for me with roses so realistic that I thought I could even smell them.

But Irina's beloved man, Denis, began to decoupage the table in the room.

The panels on the kitchen wall are made using the same technique and are combined with delicate curtains and soft cushions for the bench. Ira confirmed my suspicions that the curtains with pillows are also the fruits of her creativity, saying that their family does everything that can be done with their own hands, and that, in general, she is not a big fan of the Provence style, but when she saw it was this magnificent jacquard, which is also sold at a big discount, that decided that the fate of the kitchen was determined in its direction. To each of my enthusiastic exclamations about her skill, Ira modestly answered: “Yes, it’s very simple!”

Seeing my interest in decoupage crafts, the girls offered to make the first clay toy using this technique. And it turned out to be really, really simple. We rolled out plastic from brown clay, cut out a violin from a napkin with a musical theme, removed all the extra layers of the napkin, and glued the violin face to our clay, which we then cut along the contour. To translate the picture, we used perfume, but if available, alcohol and any strong alcohol would do. We decided not to cover our violin with craquelure, let it be as good as new, without cracks. We inserted a hook for a thread - and our toy is ready for firing!

I asked Ira to show a few more easy-to-implement ways that everyone could repeat. Ira thought and said that now we will make a set of patterned toys - a good option for those who like to decorate the Christmas tree in a monotonous manner. Zhenya and I were given tasks to roll clay cords, wrap them in plastics or combine them in a symmetrical way with other cords. I didn’t understand why we were doing this until they began to fold into something pretty on the cut.

Ira revealed to us the secret of the “milfiore” (“many colors”) technique, which is used by Venetian glassblowers. It is by the same principle that they create their intricate, bright and elegant flowers.

Then we cut the resulting bars into thin squares and circles, and from them we laid out an excellent bright canvas, which it was even a pity to cut into toys.

Christmas toys made of polymer clay

Zhenya drew stencils of Christmas trees, mittens and Christmas socks on paper, according to which we cut out toys from the canvas with a paper knife.

According to the same stencils, Ira suggested cutting “knitted” toys as well. I sculpted clay yarn, and Zhenya immediately wove it into two-color braids, which then stick together to form a relief canvas.

It took us less than an hour to produce two sets. And from the remains of white and red sausages, in a few seconds we wound up delicious candy sticks.

Templates also helped us in the manufacture of the following toys. You don’t need to be a sculptor and you don’t even need to have a good eye to sculpt round animals that look like cartoon Smeshariki. To make even circles, we used an ordinary glass (it looked like we were sculpting dumplings), but we rolled out clay with it, like dough, from which we then cut out the details.

Ira adorned the owls with playful eyebrows. She took small clay balls and pressed them with a needle, and very naturalistic feathers were obtained!

Five minutes later, Ira, like a magician, gave me a red poppy! I asked her how she managed to make the fluffy center with stamens so quickly, and the answer was again “very easy” with nail scissors!

By the way, they can also make a Christmas tree.

Over the next ten minutes, the girls made a few more New Year's friends in front of my admiring eyes, and we laid out all our art on a baking sheet. Clay "Sonnet", which Ira prefers for its plasticity, brightness and favorable price, needs to be fired from three to ten minutes.

In general, in five minutes I was already the happy owner of a whole hill of Christmas joys and even one pair of owl earrings for my young niece!

The girls put the new things for our Christmas tree in a box, decoupaged by Ira herself.

Ira invited me to come again, now to the felting lessons, and look at her group workshops on felting, soap making, modeling and other creativity, which she regularly reports on in her