Dragon pendants

            The dragon pendant mold is now in use! It looks like this now:

            So it basically looks the same, except it is sturdy now. I made the 8 porcelain pendants before leaving for Thanksgiving. It took a surprisingly long time to figure out how to best make the pendants from the mold, but it turned out the solution was to use a rolling pin to squish the clay in. Just using my hands didn't allow the clay to pick up the texture evenly, but the even pressure from the rolling pin worked a lot better. Here are the pendants as they are drying:

            And this is what the back looks like:

            The eyes were all done individually after I removed the pendants from the mold. The mold technically has eyes, but it seems that I put them in the wrong place! If I leave the eyes alone, they are on top of the dragon's forehead, which just looks wrong. It's easy to fix, though, and otherwise I'm happy with the mold. 

            I'll be making a few extras each of the porcelain and the red clay dragons with the Kickstarter inscription on them as back-ups, and any that are left over after everyone has received theirs will be available for sale on my Etsy shop at the price they were on the Kickstarter. (You can find the link to my Etsy shop at the top right side of this page.) 

            I'm also considering using the mold to make some thinner dragons that are translucent. I think they would be very nice hung in a window or used as an ornament where the glow of the light through the porcelain would be visible. (The red clay will not be translucent, unfortunately, so these would only be available in porcelain.) These will take a bit more time and effort to make, as they will be very delicate before firing. The nice thing about the mold is that it allows me to avoid handling the clay very much, which makes it a lot easier to make the pendants so thin.