We had a couple of extra glass cube ornaments left over from a project my husband did with our son a few years ago, and as I had recently watched a YouTube video where someone covered an ornament with polymer clay, I wanted to give that a try. I made a mokume gane stack using some Fimo Soft clay I’d been given a while back (white, cherry red, and tropical green), plus Premo gold. I used slices of this to cover the cube. I think it looks rather like a topographical map, with forests and snow-covered mountains.
That ornament only used up about half of the mokume gane slices. To use the rest, I thought I’d try a technique called the “Lisa Pavelka peel” as shown in a tutorial by Samantha Burroughs on her Jessama Tutorials YouTube channel. The idea is to place metal leaf (I used gold) over a sheet of clay, imprint it with a texture (I used Lisa Pavelka’s Fleur de Lis texture sheet), and shave off the raised bits to leave a flat surface with the metal leaf in the imprinted portions of the texture. Samantha used water as a resist in her video, so I did as well, but I forgot that while water is fine to use with Premo clay, it doesn’t mix well with Fimo. As a result, my clay became sticky and extremely difficult to shave off, and only one small area retained enough of the design to be usable. Therefore, this star was the only ornament I created from the project. Luckily, I had tested this technique on only one slice of mokume gane, so I didn’t waste all of it.
I still had plenty more slices of mokume gane to use, and since I was itching to play with Pearl Ex mica powders some more, I made these five small ornaments. I used Premo black clay on the front, imprinted it with Lisa Pavelka’s Fleur de Lis texture sheet, and rubbed mica powder over the raised areas. The reverse made use of what I could salvage from the remaining mokume gane. Unfortunately, by that point it had been sitting out on my work table for over a week. Though the clay was covered, it had still become unconditioned and somewhat dried out. When I tried to cut out the shapes, it cracked quite a bit. Not my best work.
I had already made a few candy canes using those same Fimo Soft colors (the top four in the next photo). I dusted three of the four with Pearl Ex mica powder, testing to see the difference between the colors macro pearl and micro pearl. Though the mica gives them a nice pearlescent sheen, it does mute the colors a bit. I think I like the one without mica better as it’s more vivid. After the previous gold leaf fail, I used the scraps to make a few more candy canes by just rolling out a log and twisting it to get the stripes (you can see the bits of gold leaf in the bottom three).
And finally, I made a pair of tiny Christmas trees using Fimo green glitter clay. For the stars, I used a mix of Premo gold glitter and 18K gold, and the balls were made from some scraps left over from last year’s gingerbread men ornaments (they had glittery scarves representing the four Hogwarts houses, although I decided not to use Hufflepuff yellow and black for these balls). The trees are double-sided, so the reverse looks exactly the same.
