Monogrammed Clay Trinket Dish

Design your own cute little monogrammed clay trinket dish!

Oh my gosh, you guys, this is the story of a regular old craft project turned big fat craft fail. I mean, obviously the end result turned out ok, but hoo boy, was it a disaster in the middle! And in the interest of keeping it real around here, I’m totally going to share it with you. It started out like a lot of my regular projects lately. With my favorite air dry clay. I rolled it out to about 1/4 inch thick and used a little bowl to trace the shape. Then I smoothed the edges with a damp finger and gently formed it so it had kind of a raised lip. Sometimes, if they clay is pretty wet, it helps to let it partially dry for 15 minutes or so so it will hold its shape better. When it was fully dry I painted the whole thing with a coat of acrylic craft paint  (Amazon appears to be telling me that they renamed this color, “Peony” as “Santa’s Flesh”…I think that might be the worst color name I have ever heard!) Anyway, I have painted this air dry clay tons of times and it always works fine. I don’t know if the clay wasn’t as dry as I thought it was or what, but the big fat craft fail is coming up… Either way, make sure your clay is 100% completely dry. At least overnight, probably longer.

The plan when I started was to make this a monogrammed trinket dish and I knew I want a fun script-y monogram so I laid it out in my Silhouette software and proceeded to cut a stencil from vinyl. Again, something I have done a million times. I transferred it to the dish and painted it with a thin coat of gold paint. All good. Or so I thought…

You guys, when I peeled the stencil off, it was carnage. I mean, complete and total disaster. Here, I’ll show you…The pink peeled off, the gold peeled off in places, it was a mess. And I have definitely had acrylic paint peel on me before, but that usually only happens on either a non-porous surface (not the case here) or when it’s been applied much too thickly (also not the case). So I don’t know what the deal was, but it was awful. I ended up repairing it with a tiny paintbrush and a lot of patience. It’s not as nice as I wanted it to be but it turned out ok in the end. I also added some gold around the edges for a little sparkle. (And maybe to divert attention away from any rough spots…)You might be wondering, since this is supposed to be  tutorial, how to do this project the right way… Well, if I was going to try it again, I would print the monogram out, transfer it by tracing it onto the dry clay with a pencil and just fill it in with a tiny paintbrush by hand. I think that would work better.

So tell me, what are you biggest craft fails? This is definitely going towards the top of my list!

If you liked this, you may also like some of my other posts…

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Cassie May

Craft and Knitwear Designer at Little Red Window Design

Welcome to Little Red Window! I’m Cassie, a professional craft and knitwear designer working in the field for more than 10 years. I have a degree in Art History from Northwestern University and a Master's Degree in Architecture and Design from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I've designed more than 300 separate knitting patterns, hundreds of craft projects, and I love to bring joy to your crafts and knitting with well-designed, easy to understand tutorials and patterns.

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