Make Your Own Dept 56 Accessories This is one of the many Make Your Own Dept 56 Accessories reports that describe, in detail, the necessary steps to make you own D56 accessories. All accessories are made with fairly common things which, if you don't have them already, can be purchased form your local arts and crafts store. Every cemetery needs tombstones. These are easy to build from polymer clay. I myself never used polymer clay before and had none of the special gadgets for pressing or extruding shapes. So I had to come up with some simple ways to get things nice and flat. Let me explain one way you can do this. First you need to form an image in your head of how you want the tombstones to look. I imagined the old type with a rectangular shape with a round top. (Here are three sizes you can use. Simply print this.) You can also make the more modern type which are thicker and squarer. Get your polymer clay. I used the Fimo brand. They don t have a whole bunch of different colors so you have to make your own color by blending. They have a gray, but it doesn t look like the gray a tombstone would be. To try and make this gray, I started with three colors, white, black and transparent. After trying a number of different mixes, I tried the ratio shown in the following photo, using the gray as the larger ball and black as the smaller bowl. 1
Take these two balls and mix and knead them together until you have a nice uniform color. This is how I started. (The larger ball is not blue. It is gray.) When I pictured these tombstones in my mind I pictured little specks and holes throughout the tombstone. To imitate this I simply ground some pepper onto the clay and mixed it in uniformly Now that the clay is all made up, we need to make it flat, smooth and even. To do this without any special equipment is not a problem. Get a couple of pieces of wood (about 3 or 4 inches square), a piece of wax paper and some coins, washers or anything else that is flat and the same thickness as you would like the tombstone. 2
You can use both pieces of wood (as in the following pictures) or just one of the pieces (as shown below) As you can guess the wax paper is to keep the clay from sticking and the wood pieces are just used to press the clay ball flat. Here we set the clay ball on the wax paper which is on the block of wood. We press out a relatively flat piece using your thumb. To get a relatively flat and even piece, place a piece of wax paper over the clay and then press it flat using the other piece of wood. To get a perfectly flat piece, lay the washers, coins or other flat pieces around the outside of the flattened piece of clay. Cover them with wax paper and then push the second block of wood down til the outer edges of the wood rest on all the stacks of coins. You will have a perfectly flat piece of clay. 3
You are now ready to cut the tombstone shape. Cut the pattern out of the paper and place it on the flat piece of clay. I used a sharp knife to cut the 3 straight sides. Cut the top rounded portion by free hand or find a round shape (like a quarter) and cut around it. Inscribe your saying. The easiest is to make it Rest in Peace (RIP.) You can use the point of the knife for the inscription. When all done, bake the polymer clay in the over to harden it up. After baking the color will not be much different than before it was baked. To make the inscription stand out more, paint the letters with black acrylic paint. Before you do this though, you might want to sand the front face of the tombstones flat. (You will have raised spots from where you carved the letters. You can use regular sand paper to do this sanding.) 4
When the tombstone is relatively flat, take black paint and paint the letters. To do this simply take a brush with fairly stiff bristles (like a stenciling brush) and force the paint down into the letters. You don t have to be neat about this. You can just slop the paint on. The key, though, is to wipe the excess paint off the front immediately. The paint should come off easily. Whatever doesn t come off can be sanded off when they are dry. Again, when you are sanding, if there are trace marks of paint that won t come off, let them be. Depending on the type of black left, it will not really detract from the overall look since you want the tombstones to look old with spots and other irregularities. 5