Making 3-D ATCs

I'll be blogging my Raevn's Nest Art Retreat experience in installments. Last Friday, I took the "3-D ATC" workshop taught by Laurie Mika. I've never used polymer clay before (having vowed I was not going to take up any more crafts that involved buying even more supplies), and I was surprised how simple Laurie's technique is.

We rolled out Sculpey III or Premo by hand, stamped it with rubber stamps to create texture and then embellished with acrylic paints, mica powders and doodads, cutting and stacking shapes to make these three-dimensional ATC-sized works of art. My layers were only about 1/8" thick with my thickest ATC being about 3/4" but some of folks in my class made pieces over an inch thick! These were all baked at 275F for about 20-25 minutes or thereabouts. The temperature is low enough that we could include paper images in our pieces, so I used a Rossetti faux postage stamp and some tiny Victorian faces from Ten Two Studios. Laurie provided all these fabulous rubber stamps with words and textures for us to use. And no, these are not available for trade! :D

Here are some other folks who took the class and posted pix of what they made:
Carmi Cimicata
Gary Warren Niebuhr