With that said, here’s the progress. I have all of the picture frame molding and the crown molding installed in the foyer. I didn’t remove any of the crown molding that was already there, even on this area where the crown molding stopped short of the corner where it had once wrapped around the built-in cabinet that was here. Once it’s all sanded smooth and painted, that joint won’t be noticeable.

I’m really pleased with how this picture frame molding turned out, and I’m very glad I decided to go with one rectangle on each wall regardless of how wide the wall is.

I think if I had tried to break up these wider areas into smaller rectangles, it would have looked too busy. I’m aiming for colorful but calm, not busy.

And, of course, it always has to go through this stage where it looks like the molding has chicken pox with all of the nail holes filled with wood filler.

A lot of people use caulk for the nail holes, and that’s a perfectly fine option. It’s also much faster and easier. The reason I do wood filler instead is because I find that caulk shrinks a little bit as it dries and leaves slightly detectable divots where each nail is. I like that I have more control over wood filler because, while it shrinks also, I can build it up a bit to account for the shrinkage and then sand it perfectly smooth.

I could kick myself for not taking a picture of it before trying to repair it, but you can see here that I started off trying to fill it with wood filler. It was a mess.

The other problem I had was with the chair rail on the right of the doorway into the walk-in closet. Again, I forgot to take a picture of the before, so I tried to recreate what I was working with using these scraps. The reason it didn’t come together is because that door jamb is obviously not square, so my pieces that were cut at perfect 45-degree angles didn’t meet. And this one was bad, but I was still confident that I could disguise it somehow. It looked something like this…

So as I was trying to fix the crown molding with wood filler, I thought to myself, “I just wish I had something that was less wet and more moldable.” And then it dawned on me. I DO! I just made a chandelier out of a product just like that! Air dry clay fit the bill! I wasn’t sure that it would work, but I decided to give it a try. I pushed it into the crack and then molding it as much as I could with wet fingers, but I wasn’t trying to make it look perfect at this point because air dry clay sands beautifully. Here’s what it looked like when I left it to dry overnight.

Here’s another look. You can see that it’s definitely not perfect. Just like I do with wood filler, I wanted to build it up a bit to allow for shrinkage as it dried.

And then this morning, I sanded the dried air dry clay. Just look at this!

Y’all!!! I can’t even believe how good that turned out!! Air dry clay is my new secret weapon for near-perfect trim. Oh, I so wish I had taken a picture of this before I filled it in. You would be even more amazed. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that the gap on the trim at the very furthest point from the wall was maybe as big as 1/4-inch, but certainly no smaller than 3/16-inch.

So I dug out the wood filler that I had used to try to repair the crown molding, and I replaced it with air dry clay as well. This one was much deeper than the one on the chair rail, so as I started sanding it this morning, I realized that it’s not completely dry yet. It’ll need another day before I can sand it perfectly smooth, so it’s still looking a bit rough. But once it’s completely dry and sanded smooth, you’ll never know that there was a big 5-inch-long, 1/2-inch deep chunk of trim ripped off of this crown molding.

Then I realized that there’s no way that can happen. The flowers take about 24 hours to fully dry, and then they have to be primed and painted before I can attach them to the chandelier. So there’s really no way I’ll have this light finished before Monday. I guess, in hindsight, I really should have used oven-baked polymer clay. Now that I feel comfortable working with clay, perhaps I’ll go back to Michael’s today and pick up some oven-bake polymer clay and try my hand at that as well.

Anyway, I had some questions about using air-dry clay, and since I’m an expert now (having used it for two whole days and since I’ve made a total 18 flowers with it now), I figured I’m now fully qualified to answer these questions.

First, let me show you all of the flowers I’ve made so far. Here’s all 18 of them…

I definitely found my groove with making these flowers as I went along. The first ones I made look a little different than the ones I made yesterday because I kept working with my technique a little more until I found just the right method that I was really pleased with. I mean, I used the same method that I shared yesterday, but I began to roll the clay strip in such a way that the center petals stuck up a bit higher, and then I curved the outer petals down more so that the whole flower has more dimension and height to it.

A few people had expressed concern that the flowers looked nice from the top, but once they are attached to the “stems” of the chandelier, the pretty part will be hidden from sight. But the flowers really won’t be seen from underneath. There will be an island underneath the chandelier, so I’ll never be standing directly under the chandelier. And since this is a chandelier and not a flush-mount or semi-flush-mount light, the bottom of the chandelier will be about 60 inches from the floor. That means that the flowers will mostly be seen from the side rather than from the bottom. And from the side (like when someone is standing in the doorway to the room) or seen at an upward angle (like when I’m standing at the island), I think it’ll still be obvious that these are flowers.

Here’s what I’ve learned about this particular air-dry clay (Creative Paperclay) that I used for these flowers:

Air-dry clay can be sanded once it’s dry.

I used some 220-grit sandpaper to smooth out some edges and some areas that looked wrinkled on the petals. The air dry clay sanded very easily and smoothly. I was actually quite impressed with how smooth it looked after sanded. I don’t really plan on sanding all of my flowers because I actually like the somewhat messy, handcrafted, papier-mâché look that the air dry clay has without sanding it. I don’t want it to look like porcelain. But there are a few areas here and there that I’d like to smooth out a bit.

Air-dry clay is not brittle once it’s dry, but it’s also not durable like ceramic or porcelain.

A couple of people asked if the air-dry clay is brittle once it’s dry. Of course, the durability will depend on how thick the material is. If you’re making something like a bowl, it will be more durable because it’s much thicker than the flower petals I’m making. But even on these flower petals, I still wouldn’t call it brittle. It’s also not durable like a kiln-fired ceramic or porcelain, though. On the sliding scale between brittle, like a dried leaf, and durable, like a kiln-fired ceramic piece, I would place the air-dry clay right in the middle, especially on the thin flower petals that I’m making.

That means that I won’t be assembling the whole chandelier, flowers and all, before hanging the light. I would certainly break a few flowers in that process of trying to install the chandelier. I plan to paint the chandelier, hang the chandelier, and then attach the flowers after the chandelier is installed. That way, there’s very little chance that any of the flowers will get broken.

Air-dry clay can be painted.

I haven’t gotten to the painting part of this project yet, but air-dry clay can definitely be painted. I’ve watched several videos of people using air-dry clay for various projects, and I’ve seen it painted with both acrylics and watercolors. I plan to prime mine with a spray primer (shellac-based primer) and then spray paint them with the same spray paint that I’ll be using on the rest of the chandelier.

According to what I’ve read and seen in videos, the paint can also add to the durability of the air-dry clay, depending on the type of paint you use. I wouldn’t imagine that using watercolors would add to the durability, but I can definitely see how primer (especially a brush-on primer) and acrylic/latex paints would add to the durability.

I’ve even seen that you can use resin to coat the air-dry clay, and that would certainly make it much more durable once it has cured. I actually just bought some new ArtResin for a different project, so I might give that a try on these flowers. ArtResin is pretty easy to use, and it can be brushed on as long as you mix up tiny batches at a time and don’t let it sit for too long before using it. So I’ll be testing that out on a flower or two and see if that will work to strengthen the flowers and make them more durable.

But like I said above, if you’re really concerned about the durability, and you don’t happen to have a kiln on hand, and you don’t want to use paints or resins to add to the durability, oven-baked polymer clay might be the better option. You just have to keep in mind that oven-baked polymer clay, once it’s dry and cured, has some flexibility to it. So depending on the project, that might be something you’d need to consider.

As you can see from this photo that I showed you yesterday, on that bottom row of metal I had kept the same spacing (i.e., the same 5/8″ measurement) between the metal rods that I used on the top upper rows. But that resulted in the bottom row of rods not being evenly spaced between the two upper rows of rods. And this became a problem when I started bending that bottom row of rods up. It looked messy, uneven, and unplanned.

So yesterday, I knew I needed to redo that whole row. But I already drilled holes through the metal, so I needed to figure out how to do that. After removing those metal rods (which took quite a bit of brute force and sheer determination since they were held in place with JB Weld), I then used more JB Weld epoxy clay to cover over the holes that I had already drilled, making sure to push the clay into those holes as I molded it around the bottom metal piece. I tried to get it as perfect as possible before the epoxy clay dried, and then when it was completely dry, I used 100-grit sandpaper to smooth it out.

This gave me a new base into which I could drill the new holes, and then I re-inserted the metal rods and held them into place using super glue. It actually worked quite well!

Once I had that row of metal rods in place and secured, I used a 1-inch wood dowel rod to bend that row up, just like I had used an empty quart paint container, and a spray paint can for the first two rows. I have to admit that I was pretty proud of how this whole frame turned out. I know it looks like a mess right now, since there are no flowers, and the whole thing is an ugly color. But just imagine the flowers attached and the whole thing painted white.

I was also concerned about the overall size, but once I brought it into the closet and set it on the island, my concern went away. I think it’s going to be the perfect size!

I do plan to trim the rods down. I wasn’t sure how tall I wanted the tallest rods (stems) to be, but I think these are too tall for a closet.

Also, I apologize for the poor lighting in these pictures, but this chandelier is the first light in the whole chain of lighting in the closet, so without it there, none of the others on this switch will work.

I also don’t plan to keep all of the rods on that bottom row all the same length. I want them a bit more staggered instead of having 16 flowers around the bottom that are the exact same height.

So I’ll keep eight of them the height they are now, and then I’ll cut the other eight down about 2-3 inches, so those eight will be about here…

And then I’ll adjust the heights of all of the rest of the rods from there.

After watching lots of videos on how to make flowers with various types of media, I had pretty much determined that air dry clay would be the best option for this chandelier. But since I have hundreds of wood tasting spoons on hand, I thought I’d try those out first. These were a fail. The spoons aren’t curved enough. Since they’re so flat, it’s hard to get them into a flower shape. I tried gluing them to each other like this, but you can see how flat that made the flower shape.

That’s not at all what I’m looking for. So I tried gluing them more upright, but again, since the spoons are so flat, and they’re wood, so I can’t bend them at all, that didn’t work out either.

So I went to Michael’s and purchased some Craftsmart air dry clay. I had already watched several videos on making flowers with air dry clay, and they all looked so easy, so I was fairly confident that I could do this.

Well, this was a complete mess. In my humble opinion (even though I’ve never used air dry clay before), this product is way too wet. It stuck to everything! I couldn’t get it off of my hands.

And after attempting to roll it flat between two pieces of plastic wrap, just as I saw person after person doing in the videos I watched, it was so sticky that it wouldn’t come off of the plastic wrap.

So both of those experiments failed. I’m thinking I just need to try a different brand of air dry clay. Or maybe I need to go with an oven-baked clay. I don’t really know. I’m feeling a bit out of my element here. I only have a tiny bit of experience with clay, and it’s been years since I’ve attempted any kind of project with an oven-baked clay. But I do remember it being a lot easier to work with than this, and it didn’t stick to everything it touched.

If you have any experience with clays, I’d love to know what you think! Is there a better brand of air dry clay that I should be using? Should I go with an oven-baked clay? Is there another product that I haven’t thought about (or don’t know about) that would be easier for sculpting flowers? Tell me what you think.