Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Mushrooms!

Ordinarily fungi are NOT that intriguing. Unless they're in a Parmesan cream sauce or dipped in ranch dressing :) But after seeing a cute post over at OhDeeDoh, I had to try my hand at putting together a terrarium of my own with a couple of cute mushrooms!.

My first stop was Etsy.com, of course, to search for cute little mushrooms of the clay variety. After not finding any that 1) fit what I was looking for or 2) was worth paying for, my typical crafty nature said the ever popular phrase "I can TOTALLY make those!" So without further adieu, a trip to Michael's ensued.

I came home with Crayola Model Magic of all things! It was one of those crazy trips with ALL the kids in tow that quickly turned into an "OK! Let's get the heck out of here before I lose my mind!" Couldn't locate the FIMO or SCULPY so Crayola Model Magic it was...sorry didn't take any pics but it's easy to find anywhere. Also, picked up some black sand and preserved sheet moss...no LIVE plants involved. If you knew me, you wouldn't question why :) And these cute Apothecary jars were buy one get one free! Even better.

I first shaped the stems and skewered a toothpick inside to be able to put it into the moss. Then grabbed the first thing I could find after realizing they'd need 24 hours to dry and I couldn't lay them flat. Lucky for me there was a tasty box of Everlasting Gobstoppers nearby!

Fast forward 24 hours...I painted the mushroom caps with my trusty Making Memories acrylic paint and added white dots with the end of a Q-tip...easy peasy! Then BACK into the Everlasting Gobstopper box they went to stand & air dry once again.



Assembly was so easy....dump in some sand, use the lid as a template to cut the sheet moss & add it on top of the sand then poke in the cute little clay fungi! Ta-duh! With the exception of the dry time for the clay & paint phases, this really only took less than a half an hour. And they're SUPER cute!




This was a great project: fun, easy, inexpensive and I can't kill it! Perfect :) Next I'm going to try my hand at sculpting some other types of fun things to add to the terrariums. We'll see how it goes.

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