Tutorial: How to Cover Test Tubes with Polymer Clay

These test tubes covered with polymer clay didn't turn out perfectly, but they did well enough that I know what to do differently next time, and they're super cute.

You will need:

• glass test tubes. I have quite a collection for our homeschool, although they often find themselves diverted to other uses, often to propagate our wandering jews and lavender (random aside: I took a half-dozen cuttings from my lavender plants this fall to propagate, and for the first time ever, all six failed! I can't imagine what I did wrong. Had the plants already gone dormant, do you think, and that caused it? Were the cuttings that I took too woody? Is it possible to have too much rooting hormone on a cutting? If you have any insight, please let me know!)
• Sculpey. My kids both LOVE super-soft polymer clay, and we've had a lot of luck with Sculpey. In fact, Syd has requested that I again purchase this exact set the next time I'm in a craft store and have a coupon burning a hole in my pocket. I will, but first I'm going to make her use the luster dust and food flavoring that I've already bought her. Y'all, my kid might be a craft supplies hoarder.
• Sculpey tools. You can get by with an x-acto knife and a toothpick, although over the year or so that the kids have gotten into Sculpey, I've collected a few tools recommended for working with polymer clay--this cutting set, some dental picks, a plastic rolling pin, etc.
• glaze. This is optional, but it really does make a world of difference in the look of your finished piece, and it's supposed to strengthen it some, too.

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1. Clean and dry the outside of your test tube, so that the polymer clay will adhere well. Use rubbing alcohol or vinegar, although if you use alcohol, make sure that you dry it completely, as rubbing alcohol will dissolve the polymer clay.

2. Roll out a very thin sheet of clay, then wrap it around the test tube. Cut off the excess, then use your fingers to smooth the clay and rub away the seams.

3. Use more clay to embellish the clay-covered test tube. Have fun with it!

I really like how Syd sculpted a flat bottom as a stand for her test tube. It worked perfectly!

4. Bake the clay-covered test tube. Follow the instructions on the package of clay. Don't worry about the test tube--it's made to be heated!

5. Let cool, then glaze. Both of the mistakes that I made with this project came after the clay was heated and then cooled. With Syd's creation, I cracked the top of her test tube by trying to force a clay stopper that she'd made onto the test tube. I guess the clay expands a small bit when it's baked? Lesson: if you want a stopper, cut down a wine cork. With my creation, I'd sculpted a groove around the rim of the test tube to make a place to put a wire noose, so that I can hang it. Again, I used too much force twisting the wire tight, and I cracked off the clay above that groove. Lesson: be SUPER gentle with the finished project. Clay is brittle! Hemp twine would have been a better choice.

I don't totally know what to do with these pretty test tubes. Syd is using hers as a bud vase, and right now I've got mine hanging from my desk lamp, as it's the perfect size to hold the black pen that I like to use for check writing and envelope addressing, but I'm very, very open to more ideas for how to use them, if you've got any!

The next thing that I want to make is this octopus tentacle, although I want to glue the tentacle to the cork, glue the cork to the bottle, add an eye pin, and wear it as a pendant. I wonder if it would look even more awesome if I poured resin around the tentacle, as well?

P.S. A message from Syd: "Hello. My name is Sydney. I'm a Girl Scout. Do you like cookies? So do I! You can buy some Girl Scout cookies for you, your friends, and family by asking my Mom for my Digital Cookie Shop link. This year, there is a new cookie called S'mores. It is a graham cracker cookie with marshmallow filling and chocolate. It is all-natural ingredients. If you would like to donate that cookie or the seven other types we sell to Operation Cookie Drop, which donates those cookies to the soldiers, click this link (Mom note: Every $4 donation buys one box of Girl Scout cookies for active and retired American soldiers, and patients in military hospitals)."

Additional Mom Note: Throughout Girl Scout cookie season, I'll be offering the bottom of each blog post to my kids to craft a sales pitch. They don't call Girl Scout cookies the world's largest girl-led business for nothing! Especially after last year, when the girls in my troop got to experience what amazing things they could do with their cookie profits (more on that in a future cookie pitch, I'm sure), they are on fire this year. They've got big goals, they know exactly what they want to do with their profits, and my challenge is to continually find opportunities for them to stretch their marketing, budgeting, goal-setting, communication, visual design, and math abilities. Just as I did in the past two years, I'm looking forward to watching them visibly mature in so many different ways in the next two months.

Homeschool Book Review: Three-Dimensional Art Adventures

You might have noticed that I don't often have art as a subject in our weekly lesson plans. Primarily, that's because Matt has an art degree and he gives the children an art lesson every weekend. I consider them to be private art lessons, thriftily outsourced!

I do like to do art with the kids, but I don't consider myself skilled enough to prepare my own lessons, so I really appreciate packaged lessons that include study of an artwork and a hands-on extension. I have several of those kinds of resources in my Homeschool: The Arts pinboard, my favorite of which is this site with leveled art history studies. I especially like to incorporate those lessons into our other studies--we used the lesson on Daniel French, for instance, in our study of the Lincoln Memorial.

The other way that I like to use art lessons, if I don't have an academic context to put them in, is as a fun weekend activity to do with the kids. We spend a ton of time together during the school week doing projects, so you'd think that the last thing that we'd want to do on a weekend is sit down for another project, but it seems new and different, somehow, when it's not also a task to be checked off of a work plan.

That *kind of* explains why I received Three-Dimensional Art Adventures for free from a publicist back in July, and I'm only just now ready to write about it. I made note of the most promising activities, then put the book in with my other resources, and when the time was right for a particular activity, there it was, ready and waiting for us!

I think the kids' favorite of the activities that we tried is the "trick hand." The lesson began with a study of From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes, which the kids found fascinating, then guided us through the creation of our own "tricky" piece:

I can't tell which one, but underneath Will's drawing is for sure one of those LEGO books I was telling you about yesterday!

Does it annoy you to try to draw or write on a picnic table? We do it all summer, and it bugs the crap out of me! Painting boards are on my long-term to-do list.

This is when the magic happens!

Everyone's turned out really well, although we all figured out ways to make the effect even better next time (use a ruler to draw the straight lines, elaborate the curve on the curvy lines, make the lines as close together as we can, etc.), so it's still an activity that's repeatable.

Another week, during our shark unit, the kids became fascinated with the clean, streamlined silhouette of the shark, and so I took that opportunity to introduce the "Capturing Simplicity" lesson. It began with a study of a sculpture from Ancient Greece (and now I'm putting that down in my Greek mythology lesson plans to look at again when we study Hermes!), and continued with our own simple, sculpted silhouettes:

I don't know why I didn't photograph Will's, but she did her first initial. It looks really cool!

The tutorial calls for air-dry clay and paint, but we used Sculpey, and it worked perfectly.

I've often wanted to create some sort of cataloging and indexing system for myself, to use with my homeschooling resources. I have tons of print and digital resources, and when I create unit studies, I'm always flipping through every single thing, adding a reading from here and an activity from there. I mean, just in this book alone, the artwork studied ranges from Ancient Greece to modern, geographically circles the world, covers a huge variety of themes, and uses materials from nuts and bolts to pen and paper to fabric to floral wire.

Next on my to-do list from the book: the collage lesson, just because it's been ages since the kids and I have done collages together (and I have a bunch of random materials that I've been saving up and would love to get used up!), and the lesson on sculpting movement using floral wire as the medium.

Because Hermes!

DIY Clay Rings from The Sparkle Factory

Futzing around with clay is a big pastime around here. The girls like it enough that I've occasionally considered signing them up for a pottery class, but ugh--scheduling! I HATE scheduling extracurriculars! I can't believe that I used to actually gripe that my kids never wanted to try anything new; now they want to try ALL. THE. THINGS, and I gripe about having to either deny them opportunities or overschedule our precious free time.

Anyway...

We were talking about futzing with clay. A publicist sent me a free copy of The Sparkle Factory, and the girls and I have spent a surprising amount of time in the last week playing with the surprisingly addictive process of making clay rings, using the tutorial from the book.

It looks a little like this:

And then you have this!

My ring is pretty sedate--

--but the girls' rings are AMAZING! 

Sydney's ring has a top embellished with clay discs.

Willow's ring has an embedded crinoid fossil!

The project has inspired us, as we've since crafted bracelets, pendants, beads, and other little trinkets, all from our Sculpey stash. I have plans to see if our cat paw prints that we usually do in salt dough would work equally well in this medium, too.

Would the chickens tolerate having their footprints made in clay, I wonder?

Recreating Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in Clay

The kids have been excited about this project for a REALLY long while. I told them about it, but then made them burn through a few weeks of Story of the World review questions, map work, and timeline cards.

But finally, FINALLY the review questions were memorized, the maps were filled out and colored, and the timeline cards were glued to our big basement timeline. We'd seen documentaries and read books on cuneiform, and I'd received several nice jpegs of cuneiform artifacts in the British Museum's collection (including some of the actual Code of Hammurabi, so woot!), so when I dragged out the clay bin and printed some word and alphabet charts from Google, the kids were ready to dig right in.

I suggested that they could carve themselves the correct triangle-shaped stylus, but after looking through all our clay tools, the little kid tried out a screwdriver--

-- and then switched to a toothpick, and the big kid started right off with a toothpick. There's a nice awl in the clay tools that also would have worked, but I think the toothpicks fit their hands better and looked less intimidating to use.

On this particular day, I just wanted them to explore writing cuneiform on clay. The big kid tried several figures but got frustrated when they didn't turn out as she wanted, and ended up with just one, but the little kid really took off and ended up with several nice slabs of writing: 

They looked pretty well like the cuneiform characters, too!

I think we'll use these slabs for the experiment found in the Story of the World activity book, but on another day I'd like to set the activity up again, along with a cuneiform alphabet, and have the kids create their names as keepsakes.

We'll do that in a couple of months though, after our road trip, because we're going to see Gettysburg, and until then, we're officially Civil War buffs!

Here are some of the resources that we used to study cuneiform:

• The Lifeboat That Saved the World: a Mesopotamian myth retold by the Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum.
• Hands-on History Mesopotamia: we didn't do any of the hands-on projects this time, but this series always includes a ton.
• DK Eyewitness Mesopotamia: the kids love the graphics and the bite-sized bits of information.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!