Experiments with Goo

I have been having vague ideas about making cupcake charms recently. But how, I thought, would one make the little swirly mountain of icing that traditionally sits atop one? Tricky... But wait! Why not use actual icing equipment? Brilliant, no? Er, not so much actually. My theory was sound - mix enough clay softener with the Sculpey to make a suitable texture for squishing out of a piping tip and off we go. What I hadn't quite bargained for was just how very, very sticky the resulting goo would become. I managed to cover pretty much everything in bright pink gunge. Whilst I found this quite entertaining, the boy found it less so, as he was working on a Very Important Document for work. Apparently my sitting at the table giggling like a small child and chatting away to myself about pink squelchy stuff was distracting or something. It was pointed out to me that I appear to have no internal monologue...

Anyway, here is a picture of some pink goo whilst it was still relatively contained in one space:

The swirling actually worked okay, but the consistency of goo was a bit too stringy, hence all the wobbling great ends everywhere.

After the swirling, they went in the oven. Which smelled very, very bad. I feel I should take this opportunity to apologise to my mother for all the small and misshapen Fimo creatures I baked in her oven as a child, thus filling her kitchen with the vile stink of burning chemicals. Sorry, Mum!

I think I may have failed at oven temperature setting. Or left them in too long. Whatever. They ended up somewhat burned and very much welded to the base of my tart tin:

Managed to find a couple of usable ones and prised them off the base though. Look, tiny swirls!

So, in theory, I could now make a silicon mold of the best one, fill it with silver clay and fire it to create a pure silver swirl. I think perhaps before I do that, I might have a go at carving a swirl out of wax instead though...

In other news, website 2.0 is looking much better than the first attempt. It's still very much work in progress, but it's mine and I made it all by myself, so ner!