Process Art Clay Stars
We love to make all sorts of different play dough and clay is no exception to this. We've got the easiest air dry clay recipe that we used to make these stars that will look lovely hung up on the Christmas tree or any time of year really.
What you'll need to make air dry clay stars:
- corn starch / corn flour
- white glue
- mixing bowl and spoon
- star shaped cookie cutter
- gems and sequins
- assorted material
- a straw
- crayons
- string
Making the air dry clay
To make the clay we simply mix together 2 parts corn starch to 1 part white glue. I use a small cup to measure them out and then get the kids to pour everything into a mixing bowl and stir it all around.
The clay needs a lot of kneading to get it nice and smooth, so we all take turns doing it together. It's great for building up the kids hand strength in preparation for writing activities. Once the clay is smooth the kids took turns rolling it out, we kept ours quite thick so that the clay wouldn't break or crumble too easily.
Then we used our star shaped cookie cutters to carefully cut out the dough. It is a bit of a challenge to get the clay out smoothly, but as we were much more focused on the process of creating these stars we weren't worried if they weren't completely straight (some of them look a bit like starfish now, which is quite fun too!)
Exploring different processes to decorate our clay stars
We experimented with different ways of printing patterns onto the clay by using different materials that we pressed down gently onto the clay.
We had mesh material as well as a sort of ribbon with larger holes that made really lovely patterns onto the clay. We also tried rolling pom poms along the clay and stuck lots of gems and sequins onto our clay stars.
We then used a plastic straw to poke a hole into the top of each star so that we could thread some string through it when it was finished to be able to hang them up.
The air dry clay takes at least a few hours to dry depending how thick it is, we usually leave ours overnight to be sure that it's dried all the way through and that it is ready to decorate.
Once the clay is dry then it can be coloured using permanent markers, paint or crayons. All of these look really lovely, but we chose to use crayons to colour on ours today as we wanted some light colours and didn't want to take away from the textures and embellishments that were already there.
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See more process art clay activities here:
Snowy Scene Clay Nature Sculpture // To Be a Kid Again
3D Clay Christmas Tree // Adventures of Adam
Glitter Handprint Ornament // Arty Crafty Kids
Invitation to Create: Clay Mosaics // Views from a Step Stool
DIY Fingerprint Snowman Ornaments // Mum in the Mad House
Air Dry Clay Stars // Play and Learn Every Day
Take a peek at some of our other Christmas crafts, games and activities!
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