Weddingbee Blog

Remember how I said I was looking into Etsy stores for my cute kitty cake toppers here? Well, I had a slight change of heart. You see, I was at Michaels helping my boss pick out new framing for a painting to go up in her home (She says that I’m not just any nanny, I’m Mary Poppins, Betty Crocker, and Martha Stewart combined), when I got bored and wandered away. I found myself in the clay aisle. And low and behold, polymer clay was 50% off.

I wrestled with myself in the aisle for several long minutes. I’m sure I looked like a crazed bride, muttering to herself, holding up clays, pondering if they were the right shade or not. Finally, I figured that if I totally botched making my cake topper myself, I would only be out 8 bucks. If I succeed, I will be saving like 80 bucks. So I decided to put my clay skills to the test. I bought about six little packets of clay in varying colors:

Each of them, other than the copper color, ended up being 64 cents. The copper color was on sale for $1.39. As soon as I got home from Michaels I went straight to my room and holed up in there, determined to conquer this DIY.

I turned on a little Florence + the Machine and got to work.

As you can see, being a live-in nanny has its slight downfall (only two weeks left, and then back to home and back to my comfy apartment with Mr. D!), my work space consisted of a box top that I converted to be my tabletop.

A word to anyone who has not worked with polymer clay—it’s very tough clay. It takes a lot of working and time to get it into a malleable form. My hands were killing me when I was done with this project, because I had to work the clay for so long and my fingers kept cramping. I pulled up pictures of my kittens and carefully tried to capture their characteristics in the clay.

After about two hours, I was surprised to find myself done, even with the difficulty of trying to get Kelly’s calico colors just right. I just carefully shaped and molded until I got the two cutest little things!

I haven’t fired the clay yet, because There still some little things that I need to do, like make Kelly a bit taller and skinner, but I once I get that done, I will be putting these two on a little round, wooden platform, and then set them aside until the day they finally go on our cake! I’m pretty proud of my $8 project.

What do you think?

Are you doing your cake topper yourself? What were some of the frustrations you came across? Were you happy with your work at the end?