Earlier this year, a friend dropped off 4 bags full of polymer clay, tools, books and magazines and asked for 1 thing in return, to make her some windchimes.

I haven’t really messed with it because it was just before summer, and the clay was already too hard to work with because it was crumbly and I figured I would just watch some videos before playing with it. Also, I figured it would be more difficult to work with in the heat of the summer.

Well, I finally started playing with it and I had to buy a few new tools to help. Like clay softener and a pizza stone, but I also bought all these Makin’s molds from Etsy. The fruit mold came with the Makin’s clay conditioner, so I just bought the rest of the molds.

Getting to the point now lol. I tried using these molds, and the clay wouldn’t release. I went to YouTube for a tutorial and the makers of these molds sell their own clay that releases from these molds easier than the Sculpey clay that I’ve been using.

I don’t remember if I had read this in a help section, or if I heard it in a video, but one of the things I was told would work is to put corn starch on the mold, then press the clay in and then pull it out. Well, of course that didn’t work for me. Just now I wondered if I dipped the clay directly into the corn starch, would it release easier? And it did. It worked.

This isn’t a color you can buy, that I know of, this is a color that I made by blending a lot of different colors of scrap clay together to use as scrap to experiment with things like trying to figure out how to get the clay to release from the molds. You can probably see a little bit of corn starch still, but I used a paint brush to brush off the remaining corn starch. When I do use the clay to make something like this, of course I will brush it off, then after it is baked, I will brush some gloss glaze on it to make it shiny.

These things from this mold are thin enough that I can use them when I make cards with my Cricut. That was the main motivation for buying all of these molds, so I can use them somehow with papercraft. And now that I have finally figured out the best way to get them to release, I will finally be able to make embellishments to help my cards win accolades from friends and family. Not really, but it could happen.