Creating beautiful and useful objects from recycled paper
Here are the last steps for (finally!) making a papier maché clay bowl. You’ll see how to wrap the mold, so the bowl will remove easily when it dries and get some helpful hints about working with the clay.
Now that you have some paper pulp, it’s time to turn it into papier maché clay. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s squishy. What’s not to love?
Rather than reading through all of the steps in the posts about making the new papier maché clay recipe and using it, you can now see it on video.
What a lovely image to sit at the top of this post! Hope you haven’t just eaten.
The other day, I needed a tiny bit of the black papier maché clay smooth finish material for the bottom of a bowl I’d covered with it. There was a white speck on the bottom that needed to disappear.
When I opened the container, this is what greeted me. This was made about 2 months ago, and was tightly covered. I really didn’t expect it to happen.
Balloons can be used as a wonderful mold for making papier maché clay bowls. Their full, rounded contours, variety of sizes and shapes and their elasticity offer a wide range of possibilities for some gorgeous finished pieces.
While they do present a couple of challenges that need to be worked around, they let you make forms that you can’t otherwise get with a solid, inflexible object… especially one you’d rather not destroy trying to get the finished bowl off of it.
After making and putting a smooth finish on bowls from the black papier maché clay recipe, the next thoughts turned to “How will I decorate these?”.
One of the ideas involved making a series of black and white bowls, with chalk or chalk-like designs on the outside. That (such a surprise) begged other questions…
After experimenting with the recipe for a smooth, thick finish for the black papier maché clay, it was clear that the dry surface needed to be protected.
It scratched easily and left a fine black residue when it was wiped. I love the charcoal-like feel of the finish and wanted to keep that, as well as the matte look.
I was very happy with the look of the black papier maché clay when it dried. But of course, more possibilities for it came into the picture.
It’s nice to have the option of either the handmade paper look, with all its nooks and crannies or a super smooth finish. This coating acts as something of a spackle, filling in the low points.
It also minimizes sanding, which is not my favorite part of any project.
Well, I finally got around to trying out the last hopeful contestant that I had around the house, in the search for a clear spray finish for my papier maché bowls.
I tried out Krylon’s “Crystal Clear” finish, using the same kind of coverage as I had in the previous experiment.
The results were disappointing, to say the least. I had thought the polyurethane and Rustoleum sprays were yellow. This was slightly more yellow than the Rustoleum, and not much less so than the polyurethane.
There have been shelves full of decorative papier maché clay bowls just waiting for the weather to be warm enough to spray a finish on them. The time has finally come!
To make sure any finish worked well before I use it on the bowl that I’ve put time and effort into, some testing seemed like a reasonable idea.
The spray finishes were some I already had from other projects and wanted to make sure wouldn’t do something funky to the surface, like discolor it or react strangely (bubbles, stickiness, etc.)
I also have a few bowls with a white painted surface, so I wanted to make sure they’d stay white.