tiny coil pots

Celebrate the smallest and humblest of flowers by making them their own scaled-down coiled pot out of polymer clay (a.k.a.Sculpey and Fimo). Here's how! 

I attempted to do a gradient/ombre look, but it ended up more, ah... subtle than I wanted. And sometimes it's better to keep going with the flow rather than stop and restart from scratch, you know? If you want to try something similar, knead (to soften) a ball of colored polymer clay and a bigger ball of white. Place them on a proper work surface, like a scrap of parchment paper, or wax paper, or plastic wrap. Separate the two balls into smaller chunks of varying sizes. Matching a bigger ball of white with a small ball of color will give you a lighter color than a small ball of white and a bigger ball of color. Do keep in mind that a little color goes a long way. 

Knead together your matched pairs of balls. Add white to the ones that need to be lighter and add color to the ones that need to be darker. (Again, you can skip all of this and do a single color, or change colors with each coil.)
​Roll a dime-sized piece of clay into a ball.  

Flatten the ball with your finger. Pick the clay ball you want to have on the bottom portion of the pot, and roll it on the surface with your fingers to form a skinny snake. 

Once you finish with the first ball/coil, repeat the snake-rolling, end-flattening, and joining/coiling process with the second color of clay.

Continue with a third color. As you work up, keep pressing  and pinching the coils together and down, looking out for gaps and holes. This is polymer clay, so you can be stern with it. 

Make two short snakes. Bend them into curved handles and press them to the top of the pot, as shown. 

Bake your pot as directed. My Sculpey pot took 15 minutes at 275 degrees. Once it's cooled, fill the tiny pot with water. If there are any leaks, there are two things I'd try. First, once the pot is totally dry, use more kneaded Sculpey as crack-filler inside the pot, and re-bake. I had to do this with the creamsicle-colored number shown below, and it worked like a charm. Second, you can paint the inside (and the outside, if you don't mind changing the texture and level of shine of your pot) with Varathane Polyurethane Sealer. Blue Bottle Tree recommends it and she knows her stuff. 
Tie the ends of a length of string to the handles, or loop one piece of string through both handles and then tie the ends into a long loop. I did the former with this blue pot, and the latter with the creamsicle pot.

Happy pottering! xo