Marbled Clay Dish Fail & Lessons Learned

After a slightly longer-than-planned mini break from blogging, I had hoped to make my triumphant return with an out-of-this world (okay, that’s a bit over the top) project. 

Something to wow you with, my dear reader.

Oh yes, I did indulge in some Bridgerton binging during my longer-than-planned-mini-blogging-break!

But alas, my project failed.

To be upfront, there will be no tutorial on how to make these marbled jewelry dishes. And the reason for no tutorial is I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this project to you gentle reader.

Well, at least not recommend it in the way I made them.

And because I’m verbose, I’m going to start with a little backstory. You see, for some reason I’ve been obsessed with creating things from clay. I’ve tried to create many, many things from air dry clay and all I’ve managed to execute successfully were these adorable conversation heart tags.

Sigh.

All my other air dry craft attempts cracked and split as they air dried.

Not one to give up, I graduated to oven dry clay. 

Surely this is going to be my clay crafting salvation.

And I found this tutorial at Bless This Mess for marbled clay ring dishes. Using oven dry clay.

So pretty, amiright? Surely I can do that clay project!

I immedately jumped on Amazon to purchase multi-colored oven dry clay (maybe I got the wrong clay?) and got to work.

You might be asking why am I even sharing this with you all? I mean, the photos look decent, right? And there’s the rub: just because the photos look good doesn’t mean the end result looks good.

Or, more accurately, feels good.

And by feels good they just feel … rubbery. Like the clay never completely dried. And then I tried giving them a clear coat matte spray which just made them feel … sticky. Rubbery and sticky marbled clay jewelry dishes was not what I was going for!

I guess the lesson here is that not everything you try works. And sometimes it’s okay to share a failure with the wins. Oh, and don’t be fooled by social media (and blogs) because with the right styling and lighting and camera settings and editing, you can make a fail look halfway decent.

And perhaps the lesson for me is there is no quick at-home fix for my desire to work with clay and to satisfy this – Need? Urge? Obsession? – I might just need to find a pottery class. You know to work with real clay and real kilns and real glazes.

What do you think, dear reader? 😉