Clay Photo Ornament Tutorial

Clay Vacation Map Photo Ornament 

Happy Tuesday friends! I hope your week started off great and you are having a wonderful Tuesday so far! Can you believe we are just over two weeks away from Christmas?  Thankfully we are almost done shopping for everyone and the gifts are wrapped for the most part.  

Today I wanted to share with you a tutorial on a cute ornament idea that you can make for yourself or others.  If you remember a few weeks ago I participated in an ornament exchange where I exchanged ornaments with a fellow blogger.  Well the ornament that she made me, inspired me so much that I HAD to make some of my own for my travel buddies.

Supplies

• Oven-bake Clay
• Old Cookie Sheet
• Rolling Pin 
• Map of Uruguay - cutout
• Water
• Straw
• Picture 
• Twine
• Letter Stickers or Vinyl Cutouts 
• Matte Mod Podge
• Foam Paint Brush

Making the Clay Ornament 

I have always wondered how people transfer pictures onto other items and thankfully Christine did the research about what you need to do.  The first step is to pick your picture you want to transfer onto the ornament.  Once you have you picture picked out, invert the picture in your system (so that it is backwards) the picture needs to be printed with a laser printer.  It is important that you use a laser printer because an ink jet printer puts the ink onto the paper differently and will not come off properly.  Justin and I only have an ink jet printer at home, so I took the pictures to work with me and printed them off there.  

Once you have your supplies gathered, roll your clay out to be 1/4" thick.  You can make your clay thicker or thinner - I just preferred it this thickness as mine is that thick as well.

Once your clay is rolled and ready to go, place your picture face down onto the clay and begin wetting the paper.  Once your paper is good and wet, you will be able to see your image through the paper - this is when you start gently rubbing the paper off of the picture.  It is important to not press too hard as the picture can rub off of the clay.  Thankfully I only had it rub off along the edges, so it gave it more of a vintage look.  

I also found the rubbing in small circles helped to not allow the picture to rip off the clay.  Once you have as much paper as possible off of the picture, you will bake the clay at 250 degrees for 15 minutes.  The instructions said to bake for 15 minutes for every 1/4 thickness.  

After baking, I was a bit surprised at how soft the clay "felt" but once it cooked down the clay hardened right up and was easy for me to handle.

After baking, I added the location and year to the back of the ornaments plus the Uruguayan flag.  I made my ornaments a little larger than I had anticipated to, so there was a lot of blank space.  The flag made the most sense to me because you rarely see ornaments with the countries flag on them.

I don't have vinyl at home right now so I purchased some alphabet stickers at the store to put the lettering on the back of the ornament.  Once I finally figured out how I wanted them to be placed, I used my mod podge to seal the letters and the flag down to the back of the ornament.  The stickers seemed like they would have stayed on with no issue, but the flag was not a sticker. 

Once the back of the ornament dried, I also put a coat of mod podge on the front of the ornament to help seal down the picture a little better and give it a more finished look. 

Once the mod podge dries, take a ribbon or twine and make a little knot to hang the ornament onto the tree ~ and you have a clay ornament!

I am thinking about making more of these ornaments with other shapes as gifts for newly weds and new parents - they are relatively easy and cheap to make!

Question of the Day: What is your favorite ornament?

 

I'd love to hear from you!

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