Braided Clay Planter 2021

Braided Clay Planter 2021-Okay, I so for this project. I'm going to use I think this is a 4 inch terracotta pot. I got some Crayola air-dry clay. I picked this up at Jo-Ann craft store and I got white and black. For this project. I'm going to use a pair of scissors, hot glue on it, and a water bottle. Just just water in here and some hot glue and that's it. First. I'm going to get my air dry clay, ready, and I'm going to start with white. So the

 All them air-dry. Clay is completely new to me. This stuff is so cool. It's not messy. It doesn't crumble and the water bottle is here, just in case. I'm working with it. A little too long. I can just spray it and it just kind of soaks it up and turns back to its original consistency. So, what I'm going to do is just kind of break it up into small pieces, the whole big bunch of this. Okay. I'm starting with 12 small pieces. It'll probably turn into quite a bit more than that. I'm thinking, it's going to take about four braids to get up to the rib of this pot, which is what I mean. And for, so I'll take my first piece and I'm just going to roll it out into kind of a long snake like this long. What does that like 18 inches ish? I'm going to spray it kind of Midway through just to keep it nice and moist because if it dries out, it does start to crack. So keep it moist throughout the whole process kind of like that right there. So, to do that two more times and then I can make my first braid.

 Okay, so I have my three pieces made so I'm just going to Fan them out on the table, kind of like a giant fork and then I'm going to press the ends of one side together. That will be the beginning of my braid and then you just break them. This is a little bit of a tricky business because you don't want to touch the pieces together because they will stick. If they stick, just try to like gently pry them apart. Done. It many times in my first attempts. So here we go.

 You want to be careful not to pull them because you can see like right here. My braid is getting really, really thin and it will break. So I'm just going to kind of refold that one up and that's totally fine. And then just kind of roll it and it'll cut a just go back to the original size there. That's weird. That was a weird explanation. I'm sorry, really bad at explaining things. Sometimes you guys get it.

 First braid is done. And so I made this one kind of probably too long. You just want to make sure that it'll go all the way around your pot and this one will for sure like that. So I'm just going to set this aside and make three more and then we can start attaching them to the pot.

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Okay, so I've got all four braids ready to roll and I can start gluing. So I'm going to start at the bottom and work up. We use my hot glue a little bit on there.

Can start in. And as I'm gluing this on, I'm going to gently drape this on the pot. I'm not going to pull on the clay and I'll show you why here in just a minute. I'm going to cut it. Just a little bit bigger about a quarter of an inch longer than it needs to be. And then I'm going to kind of coax it into its spot here. And pinch the two ends together. Okay. So the reason why I cut it a little bit long, and I made sure not to pull on the clay was because I didn't realize when I was doing this for the first time that this air dry, clay shrinks up to 15% as it dries. So if you're pulling on that clay, you're going to end up with some great big ol cracks all over the place. Like I did, be gentle with it and don't pull on it. Okay? Got to be that three more times.

Great, so I'm all done with my white braids, and I'm going to go ahead and make two black ones that are pretty much identical to this, and then we'll attach those. So we are almost done. You can stop at this point if you like the way it looks, but I'm going to make one more piece that goes around the top, just as kind of a cat.

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That's just going to be two pi. The play Twisted together like a rope, so I'm going to just make that real quick.

 Okay, it is all done and I think it turned out awesome. Hopefully a lot better than my first attempt. I'm going to go ahead and plan it up. So you can see how it looks. Obviously you would probably want to wait for it to dry to do this next step, probably about 24 hours, but I'm just going to be really careful. Another thing about this is definitely not an outside container. This needs to stay inside in order to stay nice because this air dry clay won't take to water and you know, all the elements outside. So keep it inside and it will Keep looking nice. I hope you guys enjoyed this project. I think it is such a fun thing to do when it is so cold outside. If you live in a warm climate, I don't even want to hear about it because I'm totally jealous. If you do, try this project though, at home.a

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