Floraphine's Creative Madness: Medieval Clay Crafts

Hello there :)

I wanted to share with you my middle ages inspired crafts. I made all of them for my brother because he loves these kind of things :)

Last year I first created a castle pen which was inspired by sandrartes who made this amazing castle bottle I fell in love with. I changed the project a bit and made a pen.
You can take out the refill if it's empty.

Here it is:

Polymer Clay Castle Pen

If you do this, make sure everything is oven-safe. To avoid melting plastic I always make some pen cylinders. I either use air-dry clay which I wrap around the refill, let it dry, take the refill out and then cover the air-dry clay with my design. What works even better for me is bending a strip of metal into a cylinder and then covering this.
I can make a tutorial on creating a whole pen if you like :) Let me know.

To go with this I later made pen holder from air-dry clay.
For that you need something to put underneath so it doesn't collapse. I used a Pringles container which didn't work out so great as it has this little rim at the bottom which makes it almost impossible to remove without breaking it (it did break...) It's probably better to use a jar underneath but you should put a piece of paper between the clay and the glass so that it's easier to remove. And make sure that the glass isn't bigger at the bottom. Otherwise, you won't be able to remove your piece at all.

I got the idea from Pinterest where they made Clay Castles around paper towel tubes. However, as I wanted a pen holder, mine needed to be thicker. The Website shows how to make the castles very easily.

Here is my creation. I painted it grey after drying and added some brown and green as well to make it look old and mossy.

Clay Castle Pen Holder

For this Christmas I then made a dragon plate for my brother where he can put in his keys or any other small 'treasures'.
I created the plate from air-dry clay with the help of a deep glass plate to help it keep its shape. I rolled out some clay, put it on the plate, trimmed it to size and added decorations using sheets of stamped clay which gives it these pretty patterns. I also added some decorations with polymer clay, it takes the stamps much better. After painting everything, you can't tell the difference. I painted it a bronze colour and added black in the deep areas to make it look old and weathered.

The dragon was made from black polymer clay. I shaped the body and added the head and legs. I had some problems with positioning the legs. It looked really weird at first and then I realised, I had the wrong angle and corrected it. I textured it using a wood carving tool to make all of these scales, added the eyes and with my finger i carefully brushed on gold pigment to highlight the raised areas.
I placed it on the plate and baked it. Then I added details like horns and claws with Liquid Fimo and put gold on those, too.

Here he is on his plate: