How to Sculpt Miniature Christmas Cookies Earrings | Fimo Miniature Food | Stephanie Kilgast | Skillshare
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How to Sculpt Miniature Christmas Cookies Earrings | Fimo Miniature Food

teacher avatar Stephanie Kilgast, Contemporary artist.

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:06

    • 2.

      Color Mixing

      7:40

    • 3.

      Free Sculpting

      7:45

    • 4.

      Sculpting with Cutters

      8:09

    • 5.

      Making Icing

      1:28

    • 6.

      Icing Round Cookies (Warming Up)

      15:40

    • 7.

      Mold Making

      5:29

    • 8.

      Icing Snowmen Cookies

      10:02

    • 9.

      Peppermint Candy Cane

      9:57

    • 10.

      Icing Gingerbread Men Cookies

      8:48

    • 11.

      A Note On Varnish

      0:36

    • 12.

      Making Earrings

      3:42

    • 13.

      Final Words

      0:27

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About This Class

This class has been designed specifically for beginners, guiding you through all the steps to create your very own miniature Christmas cookies.
These can easily be transformed into jewelry, but make them a bit bigger and they could decorate your tree or dining table!

Stéphanie
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Class Summary

I will guide you through different techniques and warming exercices.

- Introduction
- Color Mixing
- Free Handed Sculpting
- Sculpting with Cutters
- Making Icing
- Icing Round Cookies (Warming Up)
- Making Molds
- Icing the Snowmen
- Making Peppermint Candy Cane
- Icing the Gingerbread Men
- A Note on Varnish
- Transforming Into Jewelry
- Final Words

Ressources :

My own icing tutorial on youtube https://youtu.be/N_qWW_uHtq8
Different varnishes fit for polymer clay : https://thebluebottletree.com/understanding-polymer-clay-glaze-sealer-varnish/

Materials :

- Polymer clay (I use fimo and cernit)
- Liquid polymer clay for the icing.
- Dry pastels (I use Sennelier and Schmincke)
- molding material, two parts silicone (optional)
- varnish 
- earrings findings and glue (optional)

Tools :

- Needle tool got mine from a set like this one http://tinyurl.com/j5yodyg

- blades I get from a grocery shop (the cheap regular blades for razors) or from specific shops like this one: exacto knife http://tinyurl.com/joempqd

- sandpaper, I use strength 80 the most and got it at my local brick and mortar shop.

- brushes I get at my local art supply shop, you should be able to find them on ebay too.

Music

Garden Music by Kevin MacLeod https://incompetech.com/

 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Stephanie Kilgast

Contemporary artist.

Teacher

Inspired by natural forms, Stéphanie Kilgast’s artwork is an ode to nature and its current biodiversity. Plants, mushrooms, insects and other animals encounter in a vibrant swirl of colors under her brush or sculpting tools.

Since 2017, in her series “Discarded Objects”, she grows colorful organic sculptures on human-made objects, celebrating the beauty of nature in a dialogue with humanity, questioning the lost balance between human activities and nature.
Her work has a cheerful post apocalyptic feel to it, a reassuring reminder that nature has the capacity to grow back, if we only let it.

She built her reputation and her sculpting skills around hyperrealistic miniature food sculptures. Her wo... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: I am Stephanie and I am a sculptor, and today I am going to show you how to sculpt miniature Christmas cookies. This class is going to be a little bit different than my usual classes, than my previous ones. It's going to be almost real time, and so a lot longer, and with more details, and more insights into how I scope and how I do things. I am going to show you different ways of creating cookies, how to ice them, and even how to make a peppermint cake. I really hope you will take this class and enjoy it. If you do, please share your project with the class at the end. 2. Color Mixing: For the gingerbread, we're going to mix different colors. The base is going to be a dark brown and a core and then we're going to mix in some white and always some translucent clay. I tend to put translucent clay in all my mixes simply because I think it adds a slight transparency which makes every object look at little bit more natural. What we're going to do is to take ocher and just a little bit of brown. I would suggest to start with a little bit of brown and make your mixed first, because you might end up with the mixture that is going to be too brown and it's easier to darken a mixture than to widen it up. I'm also adding some whites and quite a bit of translucence. Fimo translucent bakes fairly translucent slightly white, so it also adds some whites to the mixture. However, when you are mixing, you are going to have a mix that is more white or lighter before baking than after. Then I'll just mix everything together. If your clay is little bit older like mine is, it's might be a little bit harder to mix or it might even crumble like here, like so. The brown will crumble right now. See, it easily crumbles like that. One way to do this is to just warm it up into your hands by simply pushing and pressing and rolling. Or another option would be to put it in the microwave for maybe 10 seconds. I can't do that because my microwave is broken, so I'm going to do it by hand. I also have a tendency to prefer doing it by hands anyway because it's not that much longer. Another thing that is good to know, when you mix colors and you have a very older color that is very crumbly, if you mix it with a new work color that's not as crumbly, and a lot softer then it's going to make the mixing a lot easier. I always tend to use it a lot of translucent and white, so I always have quite soft clay for those. When I mix it with the older clay, it's easier. If you have only old clay that is a bit crumbly, then clearly you need to put it in the microwave or maybe just put it in a plastic bag and turn it to make it while before are you able to mix it. See, now it's starting to warm up. I'm starting to be able to roll and fold. Then at some point what I'm going to do is to roll it through the Pasta Maker to make the mixing a little bit faster. Now as you think that this is a little bit too light, then you can always add a little bit more brown, which I'm going to do because I like gingerbread that is little bit more darker. Now to mix trigger cookies to have that dough color, what I always do and I personally prefer to you is to mix always translucent whites, and some ocher, so just a little bit of core. I always have ocher at hand even in my painting in the paint I use because ocher is a difficult color to mix by yourself and it is extremely useful to muddy colors or to make them look more natural. However, you can also buy colored clay that looks like dough, champagne from Fimo, is very good for that at Sahara from Fimo soft, is also a good colored clay that you can use without any pre-mixing. But now I'm just going to show you the mix I do with the ocher so you get an idea. I tend to premix equal parts of white and translucent. I just check that the parts are equal and when I wants to have a dough color, I will add some ocher. Again, it is best not to put too much ocher right at the beginning, just a bit, simply because you can always add more if you feel that it's two lights colored. When it gets softer like this I just roll it through a faster maker. This is the color dough that I have. Now I think this is a good color dough. It's quite light, but it's still strong enough. I'm still and always adding some dry pastel on top of it, so I don't want it too dark. I also know that because of the translucent that I added in, it's going to be a little bit darker after. 3. Free Sculpting: Now I have my lovely colored gingerbread doll. I fold it in two so I have the desired thickness. I'm going to draw the outline that I want to get the shape I would like. I want to make a gingerbread man, and I'm going to do this freehanded. For that, I am using a needle tool. However, if you don't have a needle tool, you can always use toothpicks, which are great tools. I have sculpted with toothpicks for years before. Or pins, or needles. What I'm going to do for the free handed cutting is to simply draw the shape I want first onto the clay. I know what I am doing. However, it might be useful to make a few sketches before or to have reference pictures to know where and what you want to do. Since these are going to become earrings, I would suggest not to make them too big. You can always readjust if needed, like I'm doing here. The head is maybe a little bit too big, so I'm just readjusting smaller. I'm making the arms and the two legs. I decided to make a very cute gingerbread man. Once you have the drawing and you're happy with it, so for me it was on my first try, however, take your time, you can redo it again and again. Maybe if this is a little bit difficult for you, maybe just try to draw circles first like this. You can decompose the body into circles and potatoes. Don't worry about the clay sticking off because we're going to cut it after anyway. So just try and find the flow. Maybe this is too complicated and maybe you want to try but just behead. In that case, you can also just make a circle. Or you can also make a triangle for a tree. The options are quite limitless. But we're going to focus on this one. We're going to take a blade. So I'm using an exacto knife to cut. I simply follow the line that I did draw before. You can also cut like this, which much sometimes is a little bit easier. Also don't worry too much about making it perfect since it's clay. If you cut out too much, we can still add it after. Clay is a very forgiving material to work with. Now we made the whole contour, so we should be able to remove everything. Here I have the tiny man. Now, it still doesn't quite look like a cookie. What we are going to use next is some sandpaper. This is a really old piece. I have been using this for 10 years probably. What you're going to do is push everything down. You want to round the edges like a cookie basically. When it bakes, it rounds everything off. So this is what we're going to do here. Here you can readjust the shape a bit, and once you're happy with your cookie, you can bake it. Now what I do for baking is to use those tiny mosaic ceramic tiles. I delicately remove the cookie or I sculpt directly onto those tiny tiles. Then I am using this Efcolor stove, and I put it inside. Then I will bake it here. Now, this is a color stove and a candle stove, that is used for enamel. It's extremely handy when working with polymer clay. However, it gets very hot, and this is why I have sheets of paper and aluminum foil. I have a few here. Then I just stacked them so it doesn't get too hot. Normally you would use three candles to heat the oven. However, it's best for polymer clay to use just two. This is what I'm going to do. You can always readjust if you realize it's not baked enough. I only use this for prebaking, and I will bake at the end into a regular oven for 40 minutes because I just want to be sure that it's thorough and well baked. Now I lit the two candles and I'm going to wait for 10-15 minutes for it to prebake. Then we can go on and work on the moles if we want or directly on the icing. 4. Sculpting with Cutters: Another technique to make miniature cookies out of polymer clay, is to use these paper cutters. Now, this is very handy and has been used for years by many miniature artists to make tiny cookies. It's very easy and cheap to find these, and you only are going to need a pasta maker to make a thin enough sheet. You're also going to need me shock to put onto the cutter, and then you are just going to slice the sheet through it. You're going to need me talk or shock and a brush. You're going to brush, either you can brush the cutter itself so the clay doesn't stick to it or you can brush directly the clay so it's slides through the cutter a lot more easily. Then you slide it through like so, you punch, and then you have a perfect tiny little cookie. This is really good to make very tiny cookies. For earrings, they might be a little bit too small and fiddly, and breakable, but you could imagine making a tiny plate of cookies to put as a necklace or even tiny plate to put onto your ears. Now, there are also some bigger cutters, those are really good to use for earrings. This is what I have done in the past, if you want to make earrings out of those, you want to stack them so you cut out two pieces and then you stack them. Just want to be a little bit careful when stacking. Then like the Gingerbread Man, you use some sandpaper to round everything up. Of course, a tree is rather easy to make, so you can also simply make your own tree single-handedly or free-handedly and then bake your make, and make a mold out of it, all depending on how much earrings you make. If you want to make just a pair of earrings for yourself, then you don't need to make a mold, that would be stupid, but if you attempt to sell earrings, then molds can be handy. Then again, if you want to make a mold, put it on the tile and pre-bake it. I'm just readjusting the shape a bit. Especially when you plan on making molds, I would highly suggest you take your time to get the shape as perfectly as you can without losing too much time on it, because you are going to reuse it over and over again. Now, for this one, I'm going to use round cutters. We are going to make a Snowman. What I'm doing is simply using two round cutters and I stack them like this. I make them slightly overlap. This happens sometimes that the clay stays into the cutter, so what I do is just use a tool, your brush, and I push it out. This is an easier option. If you feel like drawing yourself, might be a bit complex. Also, here there's me dirt, so I'm just going to remove that. Well, it doesn't really matter because we are going to cover it in ice completely, and this is the prototype anyways. Again, using the sandpaper, I'm just pushing everything and rounding it up. You can see here my sandpaper was really dirty, so I added a bunch of nastiness onto my cookie. That is not too much of a trouble. You can always remove the dust with a needle pin. Since this is a prototype and I'm likely to make mold out of it, I don't mind too much. However, to keep things clean, what I do is, I use these cutters. To keep things clean you can use this. It's the sticky stuff you use to put posters on a wall. It's really good at gathering dust. You can always push the sandpaper into it first, which is going to clean it up before using it on clay and that way it's going to be clean. As I said before, I am coloring the clay and I'm using a range of ochres and siennas, and things like that to color the clay and brush. What I do is to just mix different shades together by simply dipping the brush into them like this and then I brush it onto the cookie, and so it looks baked. This is also why I never really bother too much about dirt onto your cookies because you are going to color them and you don't really see all the imperfections. Like cookies, you tend to color the sides more and the middle less. Now, if you want to make more of this and make a model of it, you can bake it. 5. Making Icing: For the cookies, we are going to need what I call icing polymer clay icing, and for that, basically you are mixing some liquid polymer clay. I always use fimo liquids and then regular clay so fimo white and I mix it into something that is a little bit sticky, and kind of looks like icing. I like to do it myself, because then I can play around with colors, and I can really have the colors I want. Icing also holds well onto time. I have plenty of icing that I have kept for years. Just be sure to use a container that is fit for polymer clay as polymer clay might eat certain plastics. More recently I have found colored liquid clay from Sculpey. This one is white, and also no, this one is clear. But this white one, and this one is black. I think there are different colors, so that is an option too. I am not going to show you how to make these icing because I have really no use for that and it's quite a long process. However, I am going to link down to a YouTube video I made about a year or so ago. You can check that out if you have no clue on how to do that. 6. Icing Round Cookies (Warming Up): We are going to warm up with the icing with some simple round cookies. For that, I am going to use a round cutter. However, if you don't have a cutter like this, you can either practice on square cookies or rectangle that looks a little bit more natural or you can cut them by hand or you can also start with a ball of clay and flatten it. Many options to do some testings and some warming up. Now I am using the sandpaper to texture all the cookies. First, I push from the top. Then I go from the sides and I push down to round all the edges. To give the cookies the big look I'm going to use dry paint cells. I used the brand shrinker and sonalie and I simply dip the brush into the different shades of ocra brown and sienna. Then I brush all around the cookies. Now we are going to practice with the icing. What I am doing is to dip a toothpick into the icing and then I pull a string like that. You just don't want so much, would just want to take just a bit. Then you pull it out. You don't want it to be too long. Basically, I'm going to put it to the mine fingers but something that is that length because that's easier to work with. If you take a string that is too long, it's going to fall, and you don't want it to fall. You want it to be able to simply put the string where you wanted to be. I am pulling a string. It's not dripping, it's not falling. I am going to guide it onto the cookie, how I want. For these we're just going to make straight lines. If they're too thin, you can double them, like this, and then you remove the string, here again. It doesn't matter if there's some icing like this because after baking we can easily remove it. So that is never really an issue. Now always with straight lines but slightly more complex. We're going to take the middle of one line and go to the middle of the other one, and then the middle of the other one, and so on. You can double the lines if they are too thin. Now we're making tiny lines just here so I double them and then I pull it up so it doesn't fall. I readjust the shape if necessary. For these tiny ones, you really want a small string that makes it a lot easier. Now for the second cookie, we're going to make something a little bit different. We're first going to cover the whole cookie with icing. As you see, I'm making circular motions to cover the cookie. I'm going to use a different color. I had made a lovely navy blue long time before so I'm going to use that. I'm going to pull strings out like with the first cookie but this time I'm putting it on top of the icing. This time I'm also needed to be a little bit more careful because it's not supposed to touch the cookie. Sometimes as you can see the string pulls out and it leaves a blank. When that happens just add another string on the top. Now using a needle on needle pin, we are going to pull the blue and to the white. If there is not enough blue which I think is the case here just add more, and I find it actually easier to use a pin. On the next one we're also going to cover it with liquid icing first and this time we are going to use some red icing and what we are going to do is to add dots in the middle. To make a dot, you also start with a string, rather short one and then you rotate. Now it's very high, so we are going to push it down a bit. Now using a pin, we are going to pull the white into the red and it's going to make a heart. We can also play around with shapes. On the rectangle one, we can use stripe and then make it zigzag. You go down with the string, you touch the surface of the cookie and then you go up again, touch up that way you can be very precise with your drawing. You can also play around with shapes, and then you always need to see how you can pull out the string without the string falling onto the cookie and if it had falls, depending where it falls, sometimes it doesn't matter because it's too thin or you're going to put something else. But you can always remove it with a clean toothpick. In this one looks like a monster now, with eyes and teeth. But it's really just for practice, so you get used to drawing like this with a string attached and here again, make maybe straight lines. Really the key to succeeding here is to have a string that is not too big. You can also practice again with the double icing and on top of that, you're making just lines, parallel lines. This sign with your pin you are going to start in the middle and pull the icing. I always move the pin up and down. I just basically touched the icing and pull it and I don't just stay into the icing because it's very small, otherwise it might look very messy. A bit like a sewing machine. Just up and down and pull it through and then on the other side, this technique is really a technique of regular icing. You do icing in miniature basically. You can get inspired to do more complex icing, you can always look at real cookies and how master cake artisans ice their cake. 7. Mold Making: Now your cookies are baked, and we're going to suppose that you want to make molds of it. You have two options. You can make molds that will last in time, that you can reuse over and over again for a very long amount of time. The most common, the silicone mold, pretty that is a two-part silicon mold. You can buy it in any good craft store and you get to potties. This one is blue and white, and then you simply mix them together and they dry in maybe 10 minutes, so you push the clay inside and you have your mold, I'm going to show you just in second. Or if you intend to make something just once and you want to be able to reuse the mold for something else. There's also this one part for usable mold which I used before in my work in which is very handy and it's very easy to use. Basically it's very hard and you warm it up, and then you push it in and then you put it in the fridge and the freezer to cool it down and then you can reuse it quite some time. However, it tends to leak some fluid, so it's best to use it for just one application and not for something you want to reuse over and over again, over several months or years. It's really going to depend on what mold making you want to do. If it's just for this Christmas and you just want to make one or two or three pair of earrings, then I would suggest you take and you use this reusable mold if you wanted to sell Christmas jewelry or make or something every year again, then, I would suggest to use a two-part silicone mold. Now I'm going to show you how to make that two-part silicone mold which is very easy. You basically take your tiny cookie off. You take some of the white and some of the colored clay. On clay but silicon potty. You want equal amounts and you want just enough for the cookie, not more, not less. It's nice this to be pretty precise because it's drying very fast. Then you mix everything together until it's one color. I like to warm it up into my hands because that way it's more sticky and soft. Then you make a tiny ball you take the cookie, and what I do is I push it in and then I just beat it down so to speak. There are no air bubbles, and then I push the sides, so there is no gap between the mold and your prototype. You also want it to be flat, so I just like so. And then you just wait for about 10 minutes for it to be hard. What we're going to do now is to make the cookies. For that, I have mold, I have some chalk, and I just brush it with a brush so the clay doesn't stick too much to the mold. Then I push them both inside, and I will remove the excess with a blade, being careful not to cut myself, also be careful not to damage the mold. Just pop out the cookie and place it on your tile. I'm going to make a bunch of them.. You don't always need to add the chalk. It's especially useful in the beginning when the mold is still fresh, because it tends to stick to the clay, but after a while, you don't really need it. 8. Icing Snowmen Cookies: I decided to make four pairs because they're going to be for Christmas market. I'm going to color them with some dry [inaudible] and some okra brown [inaudible]. I just dip my brush in the difference shades and then I color the cookies. You do not want to use very expensive brushes for that. Because when you use brushes on raw polymer clay, you tend to destroy the brush itself as you can see here, it's got burnt by the clay. Please use cheap brushes for these because you're going to be very sad if you use your favorite brushes. But then you can keep them quite a long time. I have never changed the specific brushes for the okra. I also keep one brush for a specific color. I only use this brush for the brown tones. But if I want to use blue, I have a specific brush for blue, and a specific brush for green and red, etc. Be sure to color all edges. I'm going to transfer these onto these tiles, which it's just a piece of wood with some aluminum paper around. I'm going to push them down onto the tile so they lay perfectly flat. It's important to have a flat back since you are going to glue earing posts at the end to make earrings. Now I'm going to use white icing. What I'm going to do is to follow the shape of the snowman, and I repeat this on all snowmen. Now, for the eyes and the buttons, I am going to use some brown clay, and I'm going to roll out very thinly. Then I am cutting tiny bits of clay, and I'm forming incredibly tiny bits of tiny, tiny balls, and I am adding the eyes and buttons. For the scarf I use liquid icing in red. Once you feel ready enough with the warming exercises we made on the round cookies. This is where steady hand is useful, you go and make your scarf. If you are a little bit afraid of this, you can also pre baked the cookies and add the red scarf afterwards. That way you can brush it off if you miss. If you decide to do it on a raw cookie and you miss, you can still reuse the clay by simply mixing it. Never throw away your raw clay because you can always remix it. You're also going to add a little carrots with some orange clay and for that, we're also rolling out some orange clay, cutting a thin slice and for that we are starting to make a tiny ball. Then I'm going to show you on a bigger ball of clay so you have a better understanding of what I'm doing. You have your ball of clay and what you want to do is to have a cone and for that, you are going to roll out like this, see, and that way you create a cone, which looks like a carrot. We are going to do exactly the same as that, but in really small. When you are working on a such a small scale, what is important is to not push your clay too much. If you push too much, you're going to end up with stumping, you're not going to be able to roll out the clay. It's really a very light touch. You don't really push down, you simply roll until you have a tiny carrot, and then you place it. You repeat the process on the other snowmen. Another way of doing the carrots is to do from the bowl and then pinch the sides to roll it. Again, you hardly push and that way you have a carrot that is going to be more pointy. 9. Peppermint Candy Cane: For the tiny Gingerbread Man, I am going to show you how to make some candy. As you can see, the cheeks and the tiny buttons are slightly different they're not made with icing. This is completely optional, you could also use just icing to make the buttons and the cheeks. But I am going to show you how I do this. Since I have been doing Miniature food for a long time, I still have a lot of candy left on what I call candies, since this is baked polymer clay. These sticks they have around base, they are simply extrude clay. To extrude clay, you are going to need clay extruder. This is a very high-quality one from [inaudible]. It is stainless steel, we have a cheaper one that is green. However, mine broke because they're used to it so much and I hate when things break. So I decided to upgrade and buy the more expensive one. How it's working basically you open it up here. Then you have many different disk, this is an hexagonal one, but there are many shapes. Usually it comes with many different shapes. You can buy more if needed. We are going to use this one which is slightly round. What is going to happen is, you're going to put some clay inside. Since we are going to need pink, I'm going to put some pink clay inside. You want to warm it up a little bit and then you simply put it in, put this on, a little bit and then you turn the lever. At the end it's a bit more difficult, but here it comes out. As you can see, you have a very nice and here you have it. Then you bake this, and then you can slice it and you have those perfect little cheeks of rounds, it look like candy. Now, further peppermint cane, this is a little bit more complex, although it's not difficult. You are going to need white clay and some red clay. What you want to do is you want two cylinders that have the same size. We are going to use the white one, you can make it smaller. It's easier to make canes when they are big. However, you don't always need to have that much definition for those candy canes, it doesn't matter too much. So no need to use a lot of clay. If you use too much, that's fine too you can always mix the white and the red and it's going to give you a lovely pink shade. I didn't warm up this, so I'm just going to do that quickly. Once you have about the same size of cylinder, which we are going to do is to cut them. It's basically like slicing a cake in eight pieces. The same on the white. You actually just need four pieces of each cane. Then you're going to put them together. I tend to reshape the slices a bit. You want to put them together, making sure that the edge in the middle is nice, that is actually the most important. Just reshape them as needed, and then put them together. We have one half, we're going to make the other half. Then we put those two together making sure it's nice in the middle. Now you have a peppermint cane. So you can make a second one with the other ones, but I'm not going to do this, so I'm just putting this aside. Now we're going to reduce the cane and for that you always start to push all around towards the middle. You can roll it out. Now I'll like to check if it's good, so cutting and checking, yes. It looks nice. Then you just continue to roll, and so we want to do something like that. I always tend to do this twist at the end simply because I used to cut them into tiny sticks of peppermints to decorate Miniature Gingerbread houses like this one here. This is the kind of work I used to do. For that we are going to first roll it out into the desired thickness. Depending on how big your Gingerbread Man is, you might stop here, but mine are very small. Then at some point you start to twist. Twist and you still reduce. It's easier to cut out a bit so you don't have to worry about this. You just continue to roll down and always you twist slightly. You don't squish down the stick, you don't want to push too much. It's like just going to show you on this because it's crap clay. As you see, I hardly push if I would push, I would do something like that, and then it's not round anymore. You put your fingers on the clay and then you simply roll it. You don't really push onto the tile, you just have the contact and then you roll. This is very important when you do this fine, this rather thin canes. Because if you push, you're going to make it all flat and it's not going to have round base anymore. This size seems fine to me, and now I am just going to bake that one. I'm cutting off the things that I know I'm not going to be able to use. Because raw clay can always be re-mixed and re-used somewhere else, so never, ever throw out raw clay you can always re-use it. Then you can bake this here and the extruded stick we did just before. To have the candies we are going to need for the Gingerbread Man. 10. Icing Gingerbread Men Cookies: Now for the gingerbread man, I assume you already made your mold. We are going to replicate the tiny men a few times. Another option would be of course not to make more than maybe just two, if you want just earrings for yourself or to offer mold making is really more if you are going to make lots of those tiny men, so it really depends if it's useful to you or not. I have been selling these for years, and this is why I have molds of many different Christmas cookies because that way you can be faster at making them and more importantly, they are recolor which is, especially for cookies. Real cookies are made with a cutter so they are all the same size, so when you make them using the archers, molds make sense. I would not use molds for things that look more natural, like flowers but for cookies, I think it's great. Then you flatten them a bit and texture them with sandpaper. Now with the same techniques we used before on the round cookies, we are going to use strings of liquid clay, liquid icing to draw a smile. For all the eyes, we're not going to have a string, just some of the icing on the tip, and then we touch the cookie and we do rounds like this until we have something that looks like an eye. So you just want to have icing on the tip and then touch the cookie and then play around with it until you have something that is working, like so. On the arms and on the legs we are going to make the zigzag line we tried on the rectangular cookie before, so go down with a string and touch the cookie, go up again, down, touch, up, touch and up and you repeat that on the legs and the arms. How to make the buttons and the cheeks we're going to use the candy I showed how to make before. What we're going to do is to cut very thin slices. I am using some liquid clay and then you dip the tiny slices into the clay and put it onto the cookie, and then you push. You repeat the process on how many cookies you have. Now you can bake your cookies. 11. A Note On Varnish: If I want to add a little shine and I wanted to on this particular cookies, I always think that a little shine helps quite a bit on food. I use this varnish. Now, this is a French varnish, which is awesome. It is resin-based and it is perfect on polymer clay. It also bakes. Very useful. However, if you live somewhere else, I am going to link down below to a blog post from the Bottle Tree, who has tested plenty of different varnishes, also, in different shines. and this will surely help you out. 12. Making Earrings: Now to transform these cookies into earrings, what I always do, and have done for years, and I have been selling earrings for about eight years, I still do on occasions, is to sand them first, to sand the back first. This is really important because once the surface is a little bit more porous, it's going to make the glue much more efficient. I've always used this glue. It's a universal glue, basically. I like specifically this glue because when it dries, it's not brittle; it's slightly grease, so to speak. It really holds in place, sorry. Especially for earrings, you are going to remove the back over, and over, and over again, so it needs to have some flexibility. The glue needs to have the glue needs to have some flexibility. If it's too brittle, it can break. This is also why I would never recommend one of the most famous glue in Jewelry, is the American E6000. It's an awful glue because it's brittle, and so it breaks off really easily. I would not suggest that. Always sand it first, and then you are going to apply the glue. I tend to add a little bit more than necessary. I just add a bit of glue, and then I put it onto it. Then what I do is I push down, and I move slightly just to ensure that there is as little glue between the polymer clay and the metal as necessary. Then I will use a toothpick, and then brush the glue over the metal and onto the clay so there's no glue sticking out. This is also important because then the glue is going to make a hold of the metal onto the polymer clay, and then you just wait at least 10 minutes for it to dry. That's pretty much it; that's all I do. I found this to work well enough for selling, it's strong enough, and I hardly ever get any issues with it. It's still glue. Sometimes, if your surface is not flat enough, which can happen when you bake it, that there's an air bubble trapped underneath, then it might not work well. You really need a very flat surface, and then the sandpaper, then the glue. Usually, it really works very well. However it's glue, so it might still glue off if you sell it, and you have a customer complaint. I had maybe three complaints in the eight years or so. it's really nothing. Things break and that is something that happens. Another option would be to add polymer clay onto the metal so the metal would be in the polymer clay. Now, this can work for certain designs. For cookies, it's a bit difficult because cookies are quite flat, and you want it to be perfectly flat onto your ear. If you add layers and layers underneath, it's just going to look a little bit odd. That's pretty much with it. 13. Final Words: Thank you so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed this class. Please share your project with the class, so I can see what you came up with. Since you're on Skill-share, maybe check out my other classes as well. There are quite few, and I really hope to see you in my next class. Bye.