Cooking up Some #Cre8time Holiday Fun! AMAZING Cajun Tree Ornaments by Tanya Ruffin

I have an awesome crawfish cookie cutter that I wanted to use to make some Christmas ornaments. Start off with Amazing Remelt, Sculpey, cookie cutter, Amazing Clear Cast Resin, and a decorative tissue or napkin.

I conditioned and then rolled out some Sculpey clay and pressed the cookie cutter in the clay. I then punched a hole in the top of the clay crawfish with a straw. Then baked following the Sculpey directions.

I cut the Amazing Remelt into small pieces and melted in the microwave in 30 second intervals. I have discovered that if you stir the remelt, the heat from the melted pieces will help melt some of the unmelted pieces. Just like when melting chocolate.

A plastic sandwich storage container was the perfect size for my clay ornament. I used double stick taped the ornament to the bottom of the container and started to pour the remelt over the ornament. There was an unmelted chunk of the Amazing Remelt when pouring – I dragged it over to the corner. I left overnight to harden.

After the Amazing Remelt cured I could easily take out the ornament and the pop the remelt out of the container. The mold looks perfect – look how smooth the inside of the mold is!

I mixed a batch of Amazing Clear Cast Resin and pour a thin layer in the bottom of the remelt mold. I know you are supposed to spray the mold release in first but I forgot, but amazingly I had no issues. After about 6 hours I poured another thin layer of Amazing Clear Cast Resin. I repeated layering resin about 4 times.

After all the layers were made, I easily pulled the cast out of the mold with no damage to the mold. The top of the crawfish looks frosted but in the end it will look great.

Not only that, there was no pitting from the melting of the mold by the resin curing {thick/deep pours of resin generate heat during the curing process}. The secret is mixing small batches and pouring thin layers. While this is time consuming, Rome wasn't built in a day.

I had some chili pepper napkins that I thought would look great on the crawfish. So I separated the layers of napkin until I had just the printed layer.

I attached the napkin design side down to the back side of the resin crawfish. I want to paper to be attached to the back side and you look through the clear resin to see the design. I mixed a little Amazing Clear Cast Resin and used a Q-tip to glue the paper to the back of the crawfish.

After the backside cured, I used a Q-tip to apply a layer of resin to the front of the crawfish to bring the frosty look to shiny.

You can even layer the napkins for a cool effect.

How awesomely cool is this? 

I had one little corner that I didn't get the resin even and didn't realize until I had taken the cast out of the mold. Regardless, the crawfish came out amazing!

What kind of ornaments will you
cook up in your Cre8time?

Craft Your Own Way! ~ Tanya

Tanya Ruffin with Create Studios

Please visit my site to see more of my inspiring creations at www.tanyaRuffin.com

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I'm #Cre8time Dreaming of a White Christmas... or an AMAZING Melting Snowman by Rachel Whetzel

Hello, Amazing Creatives! Rachel Whetzel here... :::sigh::: with my LAST 'How To' post here on the Amazing Casting Products blog for a while!! Susan has asked me sneak on here and there when I have something to share with you, but I won't be posting regularly. I'm taking a break from a couple of my design teams to spend HUGE amounts of time watching and keeping books for basketball, and otherwise being suuuuuper busy. I appreciate all the love and support that you all give to the designers here! Of course, I won't stop creating, farming and generally misbehaving. If you'd like to keep up with me on my other interweb haunts, I would love that. There are links to help you do that at the end of this post, BUT FIRST!! 

You might think that something as simple as a melted snowman would be just that. Simple, right? Oh ho ho ho no!! It's totally NOT as simple as I thought, but it's definitely something I want to do again, and now that I have done it, I can share with you what I learned so that YOU can learn from my mistakes, and your project WILL be simple! How's that for a Christmas present!? 

HERE'S WHAT YOU'LL NEED

TO MAKE A MELTED SNOWMAN:

• Amazing Casting Resin
• Amazing Mold Putty curing mat (I made mine by rolling some Amazing Mold Putty thinly, and allowing it to cure). Please CLICK HERE for more detailed instructions on how to mix Amazing Mold Putty.
• Multiple mixing cups and stir sticks because each layer of resin you pour will require a fresh set. If you wanted to, you could make a cup out of Amazing Mold Putty, and pop your cured resin out between batches. This would mean you only needed a new stir stick. Unless you made one of those too! 
• Paints 
• Fake Berries (I got mine at the Dollar Tree) 
• Ribbon for a scarf
• Glue
• Glitter

To get started, you need to assemble all the pieces of your snowman! I guess I could have sculpted some arms for my snowman, but I really wanted some really stick looking arms, so I used a piece of a branch of berries that I bought at the Dollar Tree.

I pulled the berries off of the branches, 

cut them off of the main piece to make two "branches" and spray painted them black. 

Then I got to work making the top hat, eyes and mouth, and carrot nose from Creative Paperclay®. I used a toothpick to add texture to the teeeeeeny tiny balls for rocks, and to add lines to the carrot nose. When they were all dry, I sanded the hat to perfect it's shape, and painted them all with craft paint. I also frayed the ends of my ribbon to make it look like a scarf. 

Once all my snowman bits were ready, I mixed small batches of Amazing Casting Resin, which cures white. I poured it out in layers, and had to work EXREMELY quickly for each layer, so I could not get photos of the process, but I will do my best to explain what I did. 

THE PROCESS...

1. Make sure that your work surface will release from your cured resin. I have made a simple mat out of Amazing Mold Putty for this purpose. 
2. Mix your first batch of Amazing Casting Resin. 
3. Stir your resin, and as it gets how, you will also see it start to get thicker. This process takes only a few minutes, because stirring speeds up the cure. As your resin starts to get warm, pour a puddle onto your mat. 
4. Keep stirring, and as your resin gets hotter and thicker, pour another bit onto the top of your first puddle. This layer will set up faster than the first, and be slightly raised. 
5. Repeat this process to build out your "melty" base shape. 
6. You'll probably notice that there are some lumps and bumps in your layers that don't look particularly melty. (You can see an example of this in my photo near my snowman's left "arm") Don't worry about them too much. Our last layer will be different than how I actually did my piece, and this will fix some of the issues I had with my snowman, and make YOUR snowman much easier. 
7. Get ALL your pieces ready to place onto your last layer of resin.
8. Mix up one last batch of resin, and pour it when it just starts to get warm in your mixing vessel. Pour it in a thin layer over the top of your entire piece, and get to work placing your snowman bits onto the uncured resin. 
9. Allow this last layer to flow over the edges of your base layers, to create the most realistic melted look. 
10. BEFORE YOU LAST LAYER CURES: Quickly place the eyes and mouth first, then your hat and arms, and then your scarf.* Dribble some resin atop your hat if you'd like, to create a melting snow effect on your hat. Allow everything to cure in place. *If you run out of time for this step, and your resin has cured before you can finish, another layer of resin VERY thinly over the top of your piece will give you the time you need. 
11. Once your piece has cured, use some glue and glitter around the piece to create a frosty look!
12. Peel everything off of your curing mat.  

Now you have a melted snowman that will last much longer than the real thing! This little guy would go great with a cute saying like, "Some people are worth melting for..."

Thank you for reading! Want to keep up with me on the interwebs?

Visit me on PINTEREST and INSTAGRAM, or like MY PAGE on Facebook!

Thanks for stopping by! ~ rachel

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AMAZING #Cre8time Holiday Treats... #Handmade Chocolate Gifts by Tracy Alden

Hello! Tracy here with another Amazing Casting Products inspired project! With the holidays just right around the corner there are so many last minute crafty details I have yet to finish. One of my favorite crafty details is a holiday tradition to make flavored fudge to give as gifts to family and friends. I normaly make up the fudge, pour it into a square baking pans to cool and cut up into bite size pieces to be wrapped. However I got to thinking how Amazing Remelt might help me make the fudge pieces look more festive!

Supplies: 

• Amazing Remelt
• Wilton Fondant
• Plastic food storage container or reused salad container
• Non Stick Cooking Spray
• Spatula

 Fudge Recipe:

• 12oz Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips
• 1 can (14oz) Sweetened Condensed Milk
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp Kahlua Liqueur

I wanted to create little mini wrapped package pieces. The pieces needed to be created from something food safe so out came the fondant, such as I did with my Butter Pat Tutorial.

Starting with simple square and rectangle shapes to mimic packages, I rolled out some of the fondant thin to make a criss-cross ribbon pattern on each package. I let the fondant dry overnight in a warm, dry area until hard.

Once the pieces were fully dry (they will feel like a hard candy), I attached them to the inside of a plastic salad container with a little water. When dry fondant is touched with water it becomes tacky and sticky all over again, in this case sticking to the inside of the container.

I then sprayed all of the pieces lightly with cooking spray to act as a food safe mold release.

When heating up the Remelt I was careful to try heating it for 15 second intervals. Depending on how much Remelt you are trying to melt and how hot the microwave being used is, the time needed to melt can vary dramatically. 

From a 12 -15 inch distance I poured the Amazing Remelt in the mold box – the distance gives the Remelt a chance to release more bubbles before cooling. I used a small toothpick to drag any bubbles caught in the Amazing Remelt before it cooled to make sure to get a better casting.

Once the Amazing Remelt was cooled, no longer warm or sticky to the touch, I was able to carefully remove the fondant pieces.

If the fondant pieces are a wee bit gooey and soft it is because of a excess of cooking spray but it will not harm the Remelt. The fondant pieces can be left to dry and reharden if you would like to cast them again. Anytime you create a mold with your original made from fondant you will have to gently clean the molds to remove any sugar or oil left from the casting process and left to air dry on a cutting board.

Before I started on mixing up the fudge I placed my Remelt mold in the freezer, chilling the mold, allowing the Amazing Remelt to tolerate warm foods being placed into the mold without the Remelt mold melting. However the rather cold mold accelerated the fudge cooling, not allowing it to pick up detail as seen in the first row on the left. So with the second batch of fudge I put the Remelt mold in the refrigerator for less than 20 minutes, giving the Remelt some coolness but still allowing the fudge to be pushed completely into the mold to pick up the detail, as seen in the middle row of fudge.

I combined all of the ingredients listed under the fudge recipe in a nonstick pot and slowly stirred the ingredients over a medium heat with a heat tolerant spatula until everything was mixed together and the chocolate melted. *Be very careful not to overcook the chocolate, it can burn easily.

Once the chocolate is smooth I carefully and quickly transferred the chocolate to the refrigerator cooled molds. *Careful the chocolate will be very hot!

Using a spatula, carefully I pushed the chocolate into the molds; the spatula helped push any air bubbles out. I then placed the molds back into the refrigerator, letting the chocolate set.

Once the chocolate was solid it was easy to pop out of the molds, place each piece on a square of wax paper and place them into boxes. With the help of Amazing Remelt I was able to create a new twist to a family tradition!

What AMAZING arts and crafts can you create?

Please share them on the user GALLERY on the Amazing Crafting Products Website!

Visit my blog Art Resurrected for more craft tutorials!

Until next time, safe travels! ~ Tracy

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