Printing on White Clay Hearts

I'm guessing the snow dance worked. From my previous post you'll remember here at the Blue Barn we have been wishing for a good snowfall. You know the road closing hunker down for days kind that means I get my kids home to have fun with, chili is in the slow cooker while we sled and then warm up with hot chocolate by the fire.

I obviously have more pull on the weather than I realized. Since that post we have had 6 inches of snow Saturday morning when we woke up and the 'big storm' that ended up not being quite so big for us yesterday. All in all it's looking pretty white outside and with the kids home from school for a day we had time to make a Valentines decoration I've had in mind for a while.

So you've been following my posts you'll know that I'm a big fan of white clay, you can buy the Crayola model magic kind, but here at Blue Barn we like to make our own, plus we were in the middle of a snow storm remember, anyway here is our link. Today though after making our batch I had the kids cut heart shapes for a Valentines banner.

You will need:

One batch of our white clay recipe
Heart cutters
Any thing which would leave a cool imprint, we used play dough tools and bottle caps
Paint (Printers ink, tempera paint or acrylic paint with work)
Roller

Step 1

Rolling out the batch of white clay cut as many hearts as you can from it, place hearts on a baking tray ready for the oven. Before you cook them remember to make a small hole through which to thread the string. At this point I also had the children create patterns on the clay with the various tools. Then we cooked them.

Step 2

Once they were hard and had cooled off we began printing on the hearts. For this we used a print block roller but I have done it before with my sons play doh roller so if don't have one improvise, you could even cover a rolling pin (or other cylinder object) in cling film and use that. Using the roller we started adding paint to our hearts.

The kids were so excited to see how the paint stuck to the raised pattern highlighting it for them.

I also brought out a few heart shaped stamps I had to use on some of the hearts we hadn't embossed before cooking.

They all looked so pretty when they were done.

Step 4

Once the paint was dry we threaded the hearts onto some bakers twine and strung by the fireplace. They turned out really nice and were a great project for a snowy day. 

Now for some sledding!