Tip 1: Lumina Clay works really well in molds and the details of a mold even fine details press in really easily.

Here is a picture of some candies I made from a mold

There is also a trick to using lumina clay in molds though. You either have to pop out the molded piece right away. If you dont then its better if you leave it to dry in the mold. The reason is as the edges of the lumina clay start to dry out the moisture starts to concentrate in the center which can get sticky and it sticks to the mold. If you pull it out while its at that stage , the edges will put up but the center sticky piece will stick to the mold and you’ll just tear your piece apart basically. Look at the picture below to see what I mean

also if you try and pop out that piece at this wet/dry stage the center section that is not dry yet may not have all the details but as it dries the clay will again attach itself to the surface and the impression of the details will be in the clay. When its fully dry you can easily pop it out.

It takes about 24 to 48 hours to fully dry and it really needs at least 24 and the bigger the piece the longer the better so your piece doesnt mess up when you try to pull it out of the mold.

Sidenote * I made a piece about 1 1/2 inch long and about 1/2 inch thick at its widest point and I recommend about a week of drying time in a mold for it to fully dry .

Tip 2: You can make a mold from lumina clay itself haha

I dont know how this will work out yet but I’ll update it. I think I probably should have a smaller mold and maybe not with a porous object lol but well see how it turns out

UPDATE: Yes it works and the picture shows my example.

it works great with dryer clays like paper clay , stickier clays can get slightly stuck. You could put some powder in the mold to prevent sticking. I think that shallow mini molds would work the best even with sticky clays since it would be easier to get out.

That mold is about 1 inch wide by 1/2 inch thick and I let it dry about 1 week before I popped the wood tile out. This is great news that it works with porous materials , so you could probably mold anything even organic materials like leaves and it wont stick to it.

I also recommend flipping the mold over like once a day. That way you get an even evaporation rate and no major soft spots which can speed up the drying time.

Tip 3: You can punch out shapes from thin sheets of lumina clay. I was watching a youtube video made about 2 1/2 years ago by polymerclayTV when they reviewed lumina clay.

and I figured if they can punch out big shapes I’ll just punch out mini shapes to make mini sprinkles for my deco sweets creations.

Here is another video but this one is made by camille who makes beautiful flower jewelry with lumina clay. She shows how flexible lumina clay is when you wrap it around wire for necklaces to make your own cord to make jewelry.

and here are a couple of pictures I took to show the flexibility

and here is a pic of it after, as you can see there are no cracks or anything in the center of it where it was bent. Its really flexible

Here are some random pictures showing you different ways to use the clay

I made lots of sprinkles and if you want more of a hard candy look mix the clay with ink

if you want opaque chocolate looking sprinkles use acrylic paint

oh and lumina holds it shape in 3D objects as you can see in the bow I made below. The loops hold the shape really nicely

and here is a rose I made

the pics shows the tranlucent petals and how perfectly it holds it shape as well.

TIP: Lumina only shrinks like 1% to 5% and it can darken maybe like 1 shade or in thinner layer the shade doesnt change at all.

TIP: Heating Lumina – so the package says to not allow lumina near flames and high heats and as always I ignore all suggestions so I can see what happens haha. So I put lumina in a small portable oven I have at 350 degrees , the temperature was probably lower since the mini oven temp isnt stable and it was the highest setting I have on it. Anyways …. so what happens? first it was a molded piece so it had a shape to it and when heated it gets really soft. It doesnt melt or burn at all just gets squishy and I guess it would actually be good if you had a piece you wanted to reshape. You cant turn it into a new shape since the outer “skin” is there but for example you could stretch it , turn it left or right, curve it a bit. Once taken away from the heat it cools in a few seconds so your adjusted shape will remain.

Now I wanted to see how the inside looked. So I sliced it open and inside it developed little holes in it which reaffirms my theory that it has some sort of thermo plastic kind of like perler beads which can develop holes when heated too much with the iron. The good thing is with those tiny holes it totally looks like bread haha so yayy to making miniature bread with lumina clay. The only thing is that the plastic look of lumina the mini bread might look fake. My solution to that would be if you saw in my lumina coloring tutorial that when mixed with ink the clay develops a powdery surface residue. That might work out really well with making bread and with the powdery residue on top the clay wont look like plastic and it will look like bread woo hooo. I love it when mistakes turn into a brilliant new technique. Now I just gotta buy me some more lumina clay since I ran out. sigh my excitement just went down like 8 notches realizing I have no clay to test this out lol I’ll update when I get some more.

Tip: Lumina says its waterproof, but I dont know if for instance you could make aquarium toys out of it. I think its waterproof in the sense that if caught in the rain it would be okay. Or if you made jewelry and somebody jumped in the pool or in the ocean it would be fine. I will be testing it out for its waterproof capabilities and then I will update this section with my findings.

Tip for Slicing and Caning: Lumina has the potential to make canes but it can take alot of work and patience. First lumina does not stick to itself very well so you have to keep rubbing water on the surface to get it to stick to itself. I tried to make a simple strawberry cane and it actuall looked okay.

* I forgot to take a pic of the cane itself but I’ll post pic of the slices later.

Now when slicing lumina it can leave jagged rough edges. I think this happens because of luminas rubbery texture the resistance from it doesnt allow for a clean slice. This can actually be good if making things like fruit in which a clean slice would make it look fake. I do like the translucent nature of lumina for making fruit canes and rough edges because it can make it look really realistic.

* now that I just posted the picture below it looks a bit more like an eraser haha but still not too bad with a bit of tweaking it can easily look better.

Would I cane again with it? hmmm maybe but I think I would prefer making the individual slices rather than a cane just so that I can get it to look exactly how I want.

I dont think it would work really well with other canes that need a clean slice or with canes that need alot of details. Although once stuck together the canes reduce easily , the issue is getting it to stick together in the first place.

I hope these tips are helpful and if you have any questions let me know.

Also make sure to check out my other lumina clay tutorials

PART 1: LUMINA CLAY REVIEW
PART 2: LUMINA CLAY COLORING TUTORIAL

In this tutorial I will show you the results of coloring lumina clay and what works and what doesnt.

On the package of lumina it says you can color it with acrylic paint, oil paint, colored hearty clay to create custom colors.

Since Im never one to try the conventional lol I decided to first try it with ink. I wanted to see if using ink it would help increase the translucent nature of lumina clay.

I added about 2 drops of ink to a little chunk of clay and it blended easily and smoothly. Then as I was blending the clay after a couple of minutes I started to feel the clay dry out a bit.

So I added a bit of water
*and I do mean just a bit just a tiny tap from my finger tip was a bit much
When you add water to lumina it does get a bit tacky which is actually good because it helps the clay blend smoothly. I found that after I add water for about a minute or so after I can let it rest or keep blending it the tackyness will go away. I will be left with a perfectly smooth non dry piece of lumina clay. I really love that part about it.

When you do add water though, a very tiny bit may stick to your fingers but you can just flake it of as it dries fast on the skin. Here is a picture below for you to see what I mean

Now when I got back to blending I started to see like white residue all over the clay. At first I thought it was because I thought it was starting to dry out but the clay was still soft but it had this powdery residue all over it.

It wasnt until later in the day I realized that was just residue from the alcohold evaporating from the “alcohol inks” duh sometimes the answer is so simple lol

so after I let the paper thin sheet of lumina dry I just wiped some water on it and the white residue came right off

oh and if you’re wondering about the hearts you can see the answer HERE

I then decided to mix in some acrylic paint. The paint mixes in beautifully of course no residue with the acrylic paint.

The only problem I had with mixing in paint was when I was trying to make the lumina clay red. It has nothing to do with lumina but more so on the paint I was using.

Im going to share it with you because pigment strength is really one of the most important things we need to have to achieve the perfect color you’re after.

Most colors are really easy but RED you really have to have a paint with alot of pigment.

I was using ceramcoat acrylic red paint at first.

now mind you this is like at 2 AM haha yes Im a night owl at times. So I couldnt really make out the colors but I knew that red color just didnt look right. So when I started mixing to my surprise hmmm a pastel pink ball of clay grrrrrr .

so then I thought I’ll just add some more “red paint” that should make it red right. hmmmm

NOOOOOOOOOOOO….. Hot Pink…. now while sitting in my dark craft room barely lit by a glowing yellow light im thinking this doesnt make any sense since my other red paints always turned my clay red and not pink.

dont worry I’ll get it in the next 5 minutes haha

Sidenote * If you look in the picture above you’ll notice some specks of pink in the clay. Thats because when you first mix in the paint once you got it fully mixed the clay will dry out some as the paint is drying. At this step you’ll notice the dry paint on your fingers … well dont make the mistake that I did go and wash the dried paint from your hands. What I did was I put some water on my hands while I still HAD the dried paint on it and really all I did was mix in dry specks of paint into the clay. So make sure you dont do that.

Wash the dry paint off and then you can add additional water to the clay to further blend the clay and avoid the specks.

Here is a piece of clay done the right way… see no specks of dried paint

anyway , this is still like like 2 minutes later, theres still like 3 minutes left before I get the tada moment that lets me create truly red clay haha

so now Im rolling out the pink clay still a bit sad its not red but hey its pink and who doesnt love pink

as you can see even with acrylic paint when rolled thin its still extremely translucent.

here is a different chunk of clay showing you the different depths and that its only translucent when rolled thin

here is the same clay just lying down with no light shining through

the beautiful thing about lumina is when the light shines through it.

So anyway yayyy we are now at minute 5 and I get my DUH moment and I realize that I really should be using my artist grade paints with lots of PIGMENT

cuz the truth is ceramcoat red is not really red its really more like magenta which is why my clay turned pink

so i took out some of my strong oil paints and decided to mix those in and see would it turn red and of course it did

as you can see in the picture my oil paints are actually red and not pink like the ceramcoat “red”

here you can the pieces of clay and how they came out. The ball on the left was made using the cadmium red and the ball on the right was made using the crimson red and the pink sheet on the bottom was using the ceramcoat red

Hope these tips help you out and now on to PART THREE OF THIS LUMINA TUTORIAL

and dont forget to read PART 1 which is my LUMINA REVIEW

I turned my oven to 275 degrees. Once it was ready I took a chunk rolled it into a log and put it on the bottom rack. I checked it at 5 minutes and it was starting to puff up a bit than I believe I left in the oven for a total of 10 to 15 minutes and this is what it looked like.

hmmm not very pretty.

Then I remembered reading somewhere to add some baking soda so I took another chunk and this time rolled it into a ball with the baking soda mixed in. When I was rolling it into a ball it had a few cracks but I didnt try to smooth it out because I was making a bread bun. So I figured the cracks might develop into a nice texture.

I put it into the oven checked it at around 5 minutes and it was rising nice and evenly. I think I ended up leaving it in the oven for like 20 minutes or so. As you can see in the picture below it turned into a darker cream color.

The cracks spread open and created a realistic bread texture within it. I then split it open and whoila just what I expect it looks just like bread woo hoo.

Once I split it open I put it back in the oven to see if the insides would rise even more. It did rise a bit more and the cracks started to fill in a bit more.

So my conclusion: Hearty Clay can be baked but the way it rises is unstable. If you add baking soda hearty clay rises at a more even rate and can produce really nice breads, cakes and pastries.

Hope this Hearty Clay Test is useful to you. Have a great day.

Happy Crafting

~Mixi

Here are some neat tools I’ve found to help with this problem.

Twist N Seal Caulk Saver Plug

CAULK SAVERS

and here is a pic showing how long the caulk savers stem is

LITTLE RED CAP

PRAZI SEAL-A-TUBE

You could also use some duct tape to keep the air out

Some people use nails to block the air but alot of times the nail rusts and will discolor or damage the caulk on the inside depending on the coating of the nail.

Screw in hooks or eye pins have been used as well

golf tees may work as well althought it wont be air tight its better than nothing

Also wire nuts also known as marr connectors can be used as caps . The caps are usually sized by color, I read someplace that the grey colored one’s should fit nicely on caulk cartridges but I cant vouche for that since I havent tried it yet.

HERE is a video link showing what they are

Plastic food wrap secured with some tape could work as well

and somebody else recommended using a toilet wax ring, they said to push the wax ring unto the tip to seal the caulk tip. He used Harveys Thick Toilet Bowl Wax. I think maybe any type of wax should work then. So maybe a candle could work as well? not sure but if anybody tries it out please let me know how it works out.

and the cheapest way that I think will work out of the products you can randomly find in your house is using things like marker or pen caps. Just make sure they dont have a hole at the top of them. Then just wrap some tape around it to make sure it stays on.

I hope these tips were helpful

I bought some coarse white decorative sand.

*Click on the pictures to make them bigger

This sand works really well at simulating salt and sugar.

Now you can add fake salt on fake pretzels woo hooo. Also I found this decorative sand in the wedding section of the craft store. In the regular kids section there was sand but the white sand there was still like brownish gray. So just check the wedding section, it just seems like they bleached this sand to make it look so white.

and here is a comparison shot between this sand and the Glass Glitter that I used in my fake sugar tutorial.

and I also grinded up this sand to make it finer to make fake powdered sugar I’ll post a pic of that later though. Its cheaper to just grind it up yourself instead of buying a whole new bag of fine sand.

anywho I hope this post was helpful

~Happy Crafting *Mixi

Creative paper clay is a fun clay to work with. It feels alot like a fluffy dough.

The site recommends that you can paint it after its dry but I wanted to see if it would change color if I mixed paint within it.

It worked pretty well

but it does stick to your fingers as you are trying to mix it in. I recommend wearing gloves or your hands will look like this afterwards.

I then tried to mix in some dry pigment

It did not take the pigment well for me

there was no color change even with the dark purple. I guess the paint is my best bet wether I mix it in or paint it on afterwards.

You have to let it dry for like 3 days to let the water evaporate from the clay as it cures and gets hard.

These are some cute deco items that you can make with paper clay

If you want to make your own glue that dries white all you need to do is to take your glue and just add some white acrylic paint and stir and as easy as 1.2.3 you have glue that dries white.

You can also do this with other colors or create your own custom color glue. The possibilities are endless. Now you can make rainbows from glue, tie dye effects, make cute characters from the glue, add embellishments and make flowers, jewelry or on paper tags there is just so much you can do that this sentence is going on and on and on and on .

This is a really fun thing to do.

It is very simple to do.

MATERIALS NEEDED

• Sculpey III
• Liquid Sculpey
• Bag or a container to mix in and a stirrer

Ok lets get started

Step 1: Gather your items an take your sculpey clay in your color choice and your bottle of liquid sculpey. Instead of making white whipped cream I want to make banana cream.

Step 2: Now you just have to mix the two items together to make an uniform mix.

At first I started to mix them in my little tin container but that was getting too messy for me.

So I just put it in a miniature zip lock baggie and mushed it together in there.

The baggie really is a better choice because to pipe it I was gonna put it in the bag anyways so it saved me time.

Tip: also when you are mixing the 2 together in the bag make sure to first squeeze out any excess air because one time the bag popped a hole because of the air pressure and the squeezing back and forth.

Step 3: Once its mixed cut a tiny snip in the corner of the bag and u can use that too pipe it out unto your fake mini cupcakes or whatever it is you’re putting it on.

I usually make a miniature piping tip but I didnt have time to do that today. I will show you that trick another day.

Step 4: Bake according to the clay package instructions and that is all you have to do. Once its done baking you can stand in awe of your super awsome creation.

If you have have any questions or if you liked this tutorial , leave me a comment below. Hope this tutorial was helpful.

Happy Crafting
~Mixi

This is really like part 2 because I did make a previous tutorial on using puff paint as icing but in that tutorial I realized I used older puff paint so it came out harder and not as fluid. So I wanted to make this tutorial to show you the true texture of puff paint and how it can be used to make delicious deco sauce or melting ice cream and other cool effects.

So lets get started.

Materials Needed

• Puff Paint
• Item to cover in puff paint

Step 1:  Take your puff paint and your item u want to cover. I used Scribbles 3D Paint and the color is called Hot Chocolate so its fitting that I make a melting chocolate effect with it. Yum

Step 2: Think about the pattern you want to create.

*I want to make it look like the chocolate is dripping and melting of the candy bar. I really should have the chocolate look like it had a bite taken out of it and then put the melting chocolate there but oh well lol maybe next time I think you get the point.

Step 3: Since this puff paint has a fine tip like an icing tip as you can see in the picture below its easy to pipe and make a melting dripping effect. Just squeeze the bottle in the shape that you want it to go on. It is pretty thick so you can let it dry vertically and it wont mess up.

You can also make it look like deco sauce

and there you go, a super easy and cheap way to make melting effect on your candy and ice creams. If you have any questions leave me a comment and I hope this tutorial was helpful.

I do have a part 2 of this tutorial that will show you how to make the chocolate with glue. So make sure to check back for that one.

Happy Crafting

In this tutorial I will show you how to make realistic coarse sugar for your miniatures and fake food creations.

MATERIALS NEEDED

• Item to cover in faux sugar or salt
• Twinklets Diamond Dust
• Crafters Pick The Ultimate Glue

Step 1: Take your item and get your glue

I used Crafters Pick The Ultimate glue, it holds on pretty tight to the loose powders and crystals so I think its a nice glue for this project.

Step 2: Add glue to the area you want to cover with faux sugar or salt. I just added some glue to the end of my strawberry.

Step 3: Get a piece of paper and in one hand hold your glue covered item and with the other sprinkle the diamond dust over the glue until its all covered.

Then just set your piece aside to dry, I like to let it dry for at least 24 hours or more before I move it.

You can then just take the piece of paper and pour all the diamond dust back into the jar to reuse. I like to do this because dipping the item into the jar may get other icky specks into the diamond dust and I dont want that.

SIDE NOTES

So what is Twinklets Diamond Dust?
It is ground up glass also known as vintage glass glitter and german glass glitter. It doesnt feel sharp at all it really feels like granulated sugar or salt. It is still glass though and it can be dangerous if it gets into your eyes or it could knick your skin accidently.

I suggest washings your hands after using this product and do not let children play with this.

What else can I do with diamond dust?
Besides fake sugar this would look great on fake pretzels to make it looks like salt. It can also be used to make crushed ice, or shaved ice parfaits.  Fake snow crystals is another cute item you could make with this. Its really great all around for projects where you want a sparkly reflection but not really glittery or a  crystallized or frozen look.

If you have any questions feel free to ask me

Happy Crafting

~Mixi