so you wannabee a Domestik Goddess?

I’ve almost decided to go with a gingerbread house theme for Christmas this year, inspired by Sur La Table’s ceramic gingerbread house Advent calendar, so it was quite delightful to come across an illustrated tutorial on how to make gingerbread houses from polymer clay (Polymer Clay Express).

The basic technique is not far different from making cookies, cutting out the little house shapes from a flat piece of clay, but cutting around a cardboard template instead of using a cookie cutter. No problem there!

(And much easier than the Winnnie-the-Pooh cookies I once made for a kids’ party, cutting one fairly complex shape at a time by running a sharp knife around a template based on the classic fat-bellied Disney cartoon character — that seemed to take forever… Fortunately, houses are all in straight lines!)

Making all those tiny little pieces of candy with which to decorate the houses, however, would be fairly time-consuming. I can see that my patience might be stretched, given the long list of other things that need to be done in the countdown to Christmas…

Also, making the clay candy shapes would call for a number of different colours of polymer clay — “small amounts of light brown, white, translucent, tiny amounts of green, red, orange, yellow, pink, purple” as well as Liquid Sculpey both opaque and translucent. Anyone who works with polymer clay on a regular basis (either as a hobby or for a craft business) would be likely to have these already on hand, but I don’t… so there’s the cost of materials to consider, as well.

But the Polymer Clay Express tutorial is so well done and appealing, it makes me really really want to follow through with a gingerbread Christmas theme — can’t you just see a tree decorated with these tiny whimsical houses, among old-fashioned strings of popcorn and cranberries, with traditional red-and-white striped candy canes hung over the occasional branches? Nice!

Hmmm. What if I used the polymer clay tutorial as a jumping-off point, but made the ornaments out of salt dough “baker’s clay” — what we sometimes call homemade playdough — and painted them up with my large supply of acrylic craft paints…?