Quick and Dirty Air Drying Clay

I have been gifted with a significant other who is amazingly crafty. I knew things were going smoothly when our first dinner date ended with her inviting me into her home. Once inside we proceeded to spend the next several hours using salt, vinegar, bleach, a heat gun, and a blow torch to apply various aging treatments to decorative copper foiling.

That incident pretty much defined our creative relationship. To her that copper foiling was a nifty embellishment for ornate scrapbooking projects and handmade cards. To me it was ideal for making decorative accoutrements for the cover of an eldritch tome. She uses our stock of polymer clay to make cute little bunnies and faux stone beads, while I use the stuff for Cthulhu idols and Elder Sign tokens.

While I was working on the retro gaff project she pointed out a material that would have saved me a huge amount of time- homemade air drying clay. I've fooled around with the store bought version in the past, but wasn't all that crazy about it because it was relatively expensive. Whipping up a batch of the DIY version is dirt cheap, and the result is a very fine grained material that can take an amazing amount of fine detail.

This tutorial from "CraftyGamer" on YouTube provides step by step instructions for cooking up a batch. It opens up a lot of prop possibilities because it's so inexpensive and easy to work with.