Framed Clay Sunflower by Irit Shalom

Framed Clay Sunflower 

Designed by Irit Shalom

Hello my dear crafty friends and welcome to my first, but sure not the last clay flowers tutorial.
As this is my second year on Makin’s Clay® Design Team, I can pretty much make any project I desire and right now I am in a "flowers" mood and from this month on I will do some different clay flower tutorials monthly for the Makin’s Clay® blog.   The first one is a Sunflower tutorial and the techniques used are clay sheet die cutting and acrylic paints coloring over the dry clay.
The flexibility of Makin's Clay® is just perfect even when we work with  already dry clay, so we still can reshape our dry clay pieces. The perfect ability to be colored with acrylics makes it possible to work with just white Makin's Clay® and to paint the final shape into any possible color.
So here is my tutorial for May.  April showers sure brought us my May flowers!

Products used:

Makin’s Clay® White, Black
Makin’s Professional®Roller and Cutters set®
Makin’s Clay® Professional Clay Tools® 
Makin's Clay® Texture sheet set D- Woodgrain 
Makin’s Professional® Cutting Mat

Other products:
Dies- Sizzix® Sunflower set
DecoArt® paints
Beacon™ Fabri-Tac glue
Photo frame 4*6''

Instructions:

Step 1:

Flatten a big piece of white Makin's Clay® using a roller from Makin’s Professional®Roller and Cutters  set®. You also can use the Makin's Professional® Ultimate Clay Machine™ and roll to setting 5, but for this project I decided to use the roller only.
Let the  rolled clay dry for a few hours.






Step 2:

Die cut the dry Makin's Clay® sheets with Sizzix Sunflowers die set. As you can see the set contains two dies that build the flower, three  dies for leaves, the bottom die and the top die (the one with dozens of smallest possible flowers). I die cut the flower parts twice with each one of those two dies and die cut the leaves twice. The one parts were die cut just once. Do not push the small flowers out of the die cut sheet for now; it's almost impossible to paint them out of the sheet.



Step 3:

Add shaping to the die cut clay pieces using Makin's Clay® tools from Makin’s Professional® Clay Tools® .








Step 4:

Paint the shapes with acrylic paints. I used DecoArt Mixed Media line paints, but with Makin's Clay®, any acrylic paint works just perfectly!  Let the shapes dry and don't forget to paint the white backs too.





Step 5:

Arrange the painted dry leaves over a circle of black Makin's Clay® and use Beacon Fabri-Tac to
adhere shape to shape. This is the glue I have and it works just great with Makin's Clay® too.

Step 6:

Arrange flower parts as shown over the glued leaves.

Step 7:

Paint the small top flowers with a mix of DecoArt paints and now push them of the die cut sheet.







Step 8:

Glue the painted flowers on the top of the sunflower.








Step 9:

Make the background using Makin's Clay® in black, roller and Makin's Clay® texture sheet (woodgrain) from set D. Cut the background to the size that fits the photo frame.






Step 10 and final:

Glue the black background over the glass inside the photos frame. Cover with glaze and glue the sunflower over the background. Cover the sunflower with glaze. Let it dry and enjoy your first  Makin's Clay® flower.

More to come next month and so on!