MINI CHRISTMAS TREE ORNAMENTS TUTORIAL

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Yaye! It's Christmas, which means it's the season of giving so here I am giving you the colour recipe for the miniature ornaments I made for my Daiso Christmas Tree makeover! 😊

I'll also be explaining some things that might not be immediately obvious from the video hohoho!

As usual, please make sure you watch the video to get a rough idea of how everything is made and how! 😊

Please read before proceeding:

This article is by @handxmade, and is free for personal use ONLY. Do NOT distribute. Any reproduction is prohibited.

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The things that I made are BAUBLES, CANDY CANES, a STAR, and some PRESENTS!

Tools and the things you will need for this are as follow! You can click the link to the articles I wrote about for each tools individually for a better understanding of the tools. I haven't written some of them, but when I do I'll update this post 😊

TOOLS:
X-ACTO Knife
Blade
Needle Tool
Curved Needle Tool
Liquid Clay
Roller
Pocket Roller (optional)
Tweezers (optional)
Rubber Stamp Block Acrylic (optional)

Other things you'll need:
Oven
Working Surface
Eyepin
Threads
Scissors
Glue
PearlEx or Glitters (optional)
A dab of blutack
Kikki.K Fake Snow (optional)
A small plate to catch the fake snow (optional)
Fairy Lights (optional)

BAUBLES

COLOUR RECIPE

The colour recipe format would be as follow:

NAME I'VE GIVEN THE COLOUR
Name of clay colour on packaging (how much of it)
[name of PearlEx colour I used]

If you're unsure, do read my article about colour recipe.

COLOUR RECIPE FOR BAUBLES

BLUE
Cobalt Blue Hue (1)
[True Blue]

RED
Pomogranate (1)
[Super Russet]

GREEN
Green (1) : Spanish Olive (1/4)
[Spring Green]

SILVER
Silver (1)
[Pearl White]

GOLD
Antique Gold (1)
[Brillant Gold]

For baubles, it is relatively straightforward!

First, soften the clay with your fingers, roll it into a ball.

Poke your needle tool through the ball. You want to leave a hole for the strings you'll be putting through the bauble later on!

I use an eyepin to expand the hole a bit more. You can use a thicker needle tool, but make sure the tool is SHARP, otherwise you might distort the ball!

This part is optional, but since I had tons of PearlEx that I've never used, I decided to use it for this project! The gold and silver clay is already shiny, but it can't compete with PearlEx hahaha.

Putting PearlEx on raw clay helps to stick it to the clay better after baking 😊

For the Baubles, especially for the coloured ones, I actually left some WITHOUT the PearlEx so there's some more variety (I love matte textures!) and I quite like the effect it has on the Christmas Tree!

Roll it around your finger to make sure every part gets the PearlEx! 😊

Bake the baubles!

Put your thread through the baked bauble, tie a knot big enough so the bauble gets stuck there (for me it's three times), and then tie it so that you leave a gap to hang the baubles later on!

CANDY CANES

COLOUR RECIPE FOR CANDY CANES

GREEN
(same as Baubles)
Green (1) : Spanish Olive (1/4)

WHITE
White (1) : Translucent (1)

RED2
Cadmium Red Hue (1)

For the candy canes, the most important part is to roll it out as a snake as evenly as possible. I'm not sure how to explain it with words, that's how the GIFs comes to save the day!

I usually will use two fingers, I feel that I have better control of the clay while rolling compared to rolling with one finger.

Another example! See how I always use two of my fingers and going from left to right to even it out.

When it's long enough, I'll use my other finger to "stretch" the clay while I roll and control the clay with my right hand!

Place the two colours at opposite direction from each other.

From this GIF you can see the thickness I made for the WHITE vs GREEN and RED2 clay. GREEN and RED2 is at least half the thinness than WHITE!

Squeeze RED2 and GREEN to WHITE, making it stick to each other, so it doesn't come out when you twist the clay.

Twist it to the distance you want for each colour, and try to make it as even as you can! Start rolling the clay again after twisting it. You might feel a bit scared to ruin it but trust yourself, don't think too much and just do it!

It might start to look like the distance of the colours is a bit further than you intend to be, but as long as the distance is CONSISTENT, you can always adjust it afterwards 😊

Here I'm just rolling it out a bit more, adjusting the distance while I'm thinning the snake.

Remember to "stretch" the clay to actually thin it! 😊

Once you get the desired thickness, you can cut them into size and start to bend them into candy canes!

TIP: Roll it a teeeeeny bit thicker than you want the size to be. Since clay turns a little bit crackly after you left it out a bit, what you want to do is to roll out the clay that has been left out (which will happen since you're gonna make tons of candy canes with this), and that will "warm" the clay up a little bit, so when you bend it, it wouldn't crack! But this will make the candy cane a bit thinner.

Bend the top into a candy cane shape like so! You can use an E-XATO knife to trim the edges to make it a little bit sharper.

In my video, you see me do that, and I just use the knife on my fingers HAHA. Do not do that unless you're very comfortable with your knife and know what you're doing ok! Put it down on your surface and cut it there if you're worried you'll get cut!

You only need to tie the thread on one end, since you'll glue the string to the candy cane 😀 It hides the thread better if it's straight!

STAR

COLOUR RECIPE FOR STAR

YELLOW
Cadmium yellow (1)
[Aztec Gold]

Pinch 5 sides from YELLOW clay. Try to make sure they're even as much as you can!

Use any of your tool's cylinder shape to make the indent of the star a little bit deeper.

I focused on shaping one side of the star first so I get a better idea of how I want the star to look like! Smoothen the rough edges made by the previous step.

Flip to the other side, and blend with your fingers!

Poke your needle tool through again, and this time, you can make the hole bigger (make sure you can put on top of the tree!)

Rub your PearlEx colours or glitters over the star!

BAKE IT 😀

After baking, I use a dab of blutack to help the star to stick on the top of the Christmas Tree a bit better! ☺

PRESENTS

I don't really want to get into presents a lot since it's relatively straight forward. You make a square/rectangle, cut out some stripes of clay with your blade, and put them on the presents with the help if liquid clay!

I used random PearlEx colours for these, and I find that PearlEx on black polymer clay looks a bit nicer! You can make patterns like I did by "drawing" random lines on the PearlEx before you bake the clay! 😊

Here's a real-time GIF of how I make the squares with the rubber stamp acrylic block which I thought will be helpful. I find that making flat surfaces this way is better than using our fingers because our fingers aren't completely straight hahaha.

Use your creativity to make different kinds of ribbon style, colours shapes! Obviously I don't have that much creativity HAHA.

I've linked this video to the part where I start making the presents, in case you want to see more!

There you have it, all the ornaments I made for this DAISO Christmas Tree makeover! I thought it will be nice to share this, and it'd be a good beginner "tutorial" since it's relatively simple yet there's some challenging parts.

Hopefully this was helpful and you learnt some helpful tips too!

FULL COLOUR RECIPE (for convenience sake 😉)