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Harvest Wreath and Accessories
I first made these wreaths when we lived in Italy - they reminded me of the overflowing bounty of the outdoor markets. I made many as gifts to friends and neighbors and it's nice to think that some of them might still exist out there, somewhere. The thing I like most about them is their sort of "Old World" look. They're rather complicated and time-consuming, but not difficult to make. I use a lot of very easy canes, Skinner blends and marbled blends, but you can just as easily use solid colors of clay for nearly all these things - that's what I did when I first made them. I tried to get things just about 1/12 scale in this wreath, but I wasn't really careful about measuring. If you're going to be making any of these items for a dollhouse, you'll want to be meticulous about scale. Hope you'll enjoy making these harvest-time ornaments and accessories! The small pictures here lead to large pictures which show the steps. |
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Tools and Materials
You'll need probably a block of translucent, about a half-block of white and small amounts of other colors.
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Tips and Tricks
Cure all the individual pieces that will go into your wreath for 10-15 minutes and set them aside until they're all done. |
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 For a pumpkin, wrap a 3/8 - 1/2" ball of scrap with a sheet of orange, roll it smooth and then shape it - short or tall. Use a round clayshaper tool to make indents in the top and bottom, then a narrow knitting needle to make lines between the two indentations. Create a tiny stem and poke it into the top, and a leaf to attach to the stem, if you like. |
 Apples are cores of white clay wrapped in reds, yellows or greens. Reduce the cane, cut it into small sections, then pull the color up at both ends to cover the white. Shape the winesaps in squatty little rounds - the red delicious are tapered rounds. Use a clayshaper to make lobes on the bottom of the fruit. Stems are brown clay threads baked and cut into short pieces. |
 Roll a thin sheet of marbled green and tear irregular little strips from it. Wrap them onto a base as if you're going to make a rose. Take more strips and ruffle them to curve up over the top, as if they're flowering out. The leaf edges can be further ruffled and creased. When you have a full head of lettuce or cabbage, cut off at the base of the head. |
 Take a small plug of translucent, add a thread of white clay down one side and wrap the whole thing in your grape color. Roll this down to about 1/16", then nick off pieces with a fingernail. Roll the little pieces into balls and start laying them in a triangular shape. Lay a brown thread over the first layer, then stack on more grapes. The last picture shows the grapes glazed. |
 Make a narrow Skinner blend, pale to dark yellow. Fold in half and cut the stack into strips - roll the strips to round them. Make the whitish end pointier. Use your tissue blade to mark lines across the top of the corn, horizontally then vertically. Tear thin strips of green clay to make husks along both sides. Don't worry much about what the back looks like for this project. Ruffle some of the husks. |
 All start with little balls of clay. Roll one end of the peach to make it conical, indent the top and run a line with a knitting needle from the indent down to the bottom. Insert a stem and brush with chalk or blush. Make the eyes on the potatoes with a ball stylus, cure, then rub on some brown paint with your fingers. The crookneck squash has a green stem and a tiny brown blossom end. |
 Tomatoes are a cane - translucent and a crimson/red mixture around a core of mostly translucent. Reduce, cut into small pieces and pull the "skin" at both ends to meet. Roll smooth, indent the top and roll the knitting needle outward a few times for lobes. Roll three little specks of clay into threads. Pick up the first thread on the end of the needle tool and apply it to the other two. Stick it into the top. |
 This is mostly translucent purple wrapped around a core of off-white. Reduce, cut into sections, pull the "skin" to meet at both ends and make a wobbly egg shape. Cut a tiny flower from green clay, drag the petals to make then stick, then use a knitting needle to roll up a stem from the petals. Start at the outside of the petals and roll tiny bits of extra clay up to the top, just a little bit at a time will make a nice stem. |
 Angie Scarr is my favorite clay miniaturist - she has put up a terrific lesson for making citrus fruit canes on her site, Angie Scarr's Web Site as well as a lesson for making sweetcorn that's considerably more complicated and realistic than the one I've made here. Just noticed that she's now got a leeks lesson up - those would add a lot to your finished arrangement, if you want to try it - her finished leeks are fabulous! |
 You might want to add a pitcher or amphora to your wreath, to represent the fluid harvests - milk & honey or wine & olive oil. It takes some practice to get a decent looking pitcher this small - this is one way to do it, but it still took me a dozen tries to get a couple of good ones. The picture shows the earlier steps in making almost a "bubble bottle" type of vessel. Dust the inside with cornstarch before you go on to the next step. |
 Now get out your little brass rod or the blunt end of a Bic stic pen, roll it in cornstarch and put it into the vessel. Hold the bulb in place at the end of the rod while you smooth a neck down onto the rod with your thumbs. Use your extra fingers to hold the clay around the neck, but not so tightly that the clay sticks. If it starts sticking, pull out the rod and dust it, again. You want to pull out a very thin-walled neck, so that the lip of the pitcher will appear proportionate. |
 If you want your pitcher to look like embossed pewter or molded ceramic when it's done, just dust a detailed part of any rubber stamp with cornstarch and roll the vessel across the stamp. You can use another detailed rubber stamp to roll it along. Try not to let the pitcher get too misshapen at this point. If it goes all wonky, just press it against the stamp to move it back in line. |
 Check the shape from all angles. Cut around the tube to make your pitcher as tall or as short as you'd like. Use the small rubber stamp to emboss around the top edge. Trim again, if necessary. Use a flattened thread of clay and two tiny dabs of liquid clay to apply a handle on your pitcher, wherever you think it will look good - just down a tad from the top lip. |
 Pull the pitcher off of the rod and use a knitting needle to flare out the top lip - this is best done gradually, to keep the clay from cracking and the shape of the opening from distorting. Tease out a pour spout and alongside the spout, the clay gently flares back toward the pitcher, while the rest of the lip will flare outward. |
 For "pewter," I mixed a few drops of Sculpey diluent with Platinum Authentic Metal Pulver from Houston Arts. Brush on this "paint," let it sit for a while to settle out fingerprints, then cure it. It will need a second coat to hit the parts you miss the first time, but if some of the color of the underlying clay seeps through, that's okay, too. It will just make our pitcher look older. |
 The "tablecloth" drape - probably the fussiest part. Roll out a sheet of white clay on the #3 setting of your pasta machine and cut it to about 5" square. Dust both sides of the sheet with cornstarch and then roll over it with a piece of fabric to give it some texture. The texture won't be in scale, but I sort of like it that way - kind of a rustic touch. |
 Around the outside edge of the square, cut into the clay to make "fringe." The cuts are about 1/16" apart. Dust lightly with the cornstarch and twist each one of those cut strips in your fingertips and let them fall where they want to. Then cut the square into two pieces just above the diagonal so that one piece is smaller than the other. Fold over a 1/4" hem. |
 Stuff some scrap clay down into the lower arc of your grapevine wreath to give the drape something to hold on to. I determine the "lower" part of the wreath by putting the part that has the most stray curls and fullness up at the top, leaving the less-attractive part of the wreath to be covered with our bounteous harvest. |
 Take the smaller piece and arrange it slightly to one side of the inside lower arc of the wreath. The textured side is facing out. Create folds and drapes where you want them - I was in a hurry as I did this one, but you can take your time and do a better job than I did here. Make sure that you stick it well to the scrap that goes down into the wreath. |
 Now take the second piece of drape and arrange it to the right of the first piece. I really should have put more folds into this. You'll want to create lots of little nooks in which to embed the items of the harvest. Arrange the front so that the "fabric" hangs down naturally. Now, you can start adding your miniatures! Get out the TLS. |
 Use a little drop of TLS with each item and start arranging the miniatures over the tablecloth drape. Let it sit for a few hours and do a final repositioning just before you cure it. Prop up anything that might droop in the heat with wadded-up foil. |
 The main concentration of items will be in the center-bottom of the wreath, with sprays of items popping up or cascading down from the central area. I cured the whole wreath for an hour at 275º - follow the manufacturer's recommendation for curing. |
 If there are blank areas, you can glue in more cured pieces. Some foods are shiny and others are not, so some of the pieces (and the pitcher) are glazed with gloss, some with semi-gloss and the rest are left matte. |
 The votive is covered with a coat of Liquid Sculpey (gold) and left to sit for a day to smooth and thin, then cured. Leaves were punched from thin sheets of brown clay dusted with cornstarch to add accents to these three pieces. |
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