Making Scandinavian Style Christmas Decorations out of Sculpey
These Scandanavian-style Christmas Tree Decorations are made from Sculpey Ultra Light. Sculpey Ultra Light is a very easy to use, lightweight polymer clay that can be cut or molded into any shape and then baked in a domestic oven to make the items hard and strong. After ‘firing’, objects made with the Sculpey Ultra Light can be carved into, sanded and painted with acrylic or oil paint.
For these designs, we worked some clay into a ball – the clay is soft so this does not take much effort – and then rolled it out on a marble surface. Perspex or any other very smooth, cold surface would do the job as well.
Once the clay is evenly rolled to around 5mm deep, you can either use readymade cookie cutters or gently draw your own design onto the clay. Below, we have supplied templates for our Christmas Tree Ornament Designs so that you can print these off, cut them out and draw round them if you would like to.
If you use your own design or one of ours, use a sharp knife – we have used a Swann Morton Scalpel – to cut the shape out. Do not drag the knife as this will pull the clay. Instead hold the knife at 90 degrees to the clay and use more of a sawing action. Wait until you have transferred your cut out shape to a baking tray before adding any decorative marks and then, once on your baking tray, use a fork or the tip of the scalpel to add detail and use a skewer to make the hole through which your ribbon or twine will be threaded to hang the ornament.
Moving the shape to a Baking Tray can be a delicate operation. Use a spatula or a fish slice to gently lift your cut out decoration onto a baking tray. The clay will be fairly floppy and may stick to the surface at first so this needs to be done rather carefully especially with a design like the tree, above, which has a a number of fine or thin areas which can break off. Bake for around 15 minutes at 130 degrees Celsius. If your clay is much thicker, you will need to add more baking time. Simply keep an eye on it to ensure it does not start to burn.
Decorate as you wish with paint, glitter, pens or Gilding Wax as we have done. In a majority of the designs, we have simply rubbed wax onto the surface with a tissue. The Wax will cover all raised areas, leaving the recesses to show the white of the clay. With the stocking, however, we sanded the wax off a little to achieve a more distressed look.
Below are the templates for each of the above designs.
Angel
Reindeer
Robin
Christmas Stocking
Tree