Dabbling in cold porcelain

Our eight-year-old great niece, Violet, came for a two-night sleepover earlier this week, so she and I  got right to work on a new project: making cold porcelain.

Cold porcelain isn't actually porcelain. It's made of corn starch, white glue, a dab of Vaseline, and some water. (I add a few drops of tea tree oil to prevent the items we made from developing a mold or fungus.)

I found several recipes for cold porcelain on Pinterest while I was looking for recipes for homemade polymer clay. The two might be one and the same; I'm not sure.

I got the white glue at Dollar Tree, two 4-ounce bottles for, you guessed it, $1. I used maybe 1/4 box of corn starch. In other words, the cost for making cold porcelain is minimal.

Cold porcelain creations on Pinterest are much more detailed and complicated than those that Violet and I undertook. We're novices, though, and some of the Pinterest cold porcelain creators are artists, from the looks of things.

Violet sculpted a cat, a bird, and, of course, a violet blossom.

I used cookie cutters to make what will eventually become gift tags.

The porcelain takes 3-4 days to dry, so I'm just now putting layers of ModPodge on mine. Next I'll spray them with an acrylic sealer.

Maybe I'll mix up another batch of cold porcelain and branch out a bit with my creations. It's fun stuff to work with, and I'm sure the possible creations are almost limitless.