Homemade Clay Keepsake – Tiny Fingers and Tiny Toes

People often receive a kit for making plaster casts of their baby's hands and feet. The kits look so cute themselves that I suspect many of them remain unopened on the shelf. I wasn't given a kit (cue violins) so did some research into making my own imprints using some polymer clay I had sitting around.

When Thomas was 9 weeks old I grabbed a spare 20 minute slot in his feeding / changing / sleeping schedule to make these handprint and footprint moulds.

I took a basic salt dough recipe and threw in some wallpaper paste and sizing. I’m sorry I can’t be more precise but with my baby addled brain I was just happy to be creating something again (creating a baby WAS pretty special but you don’t get to play around with the mixture much).

I divided the mixture into 4 even sized patties.

Thomas then placed his tiny little hands and feet carefully and willingly into each patty, ha ha, until a clean and deep imprint was formed. Then I washed everything that came in contact with the mixture – hands, feet, eyebrows, nostrils etc (mine not Thomas’s).

Into the oven with the moulds to dry out at a really low temperature for a really long time. Then I left them in the sun for a couple of weeks until I was sure that they were really dry. The final consistency was almost crisp on the outside but oddly elastic too. I had been worried that they might crack if they dried too quickly which is why I took a long term approach to drying them.

When a 30 minute slot came available (afternoon nap cancellation) I got stuck into a packet of Sculpey and kneaded and kneaded and kneaded until it was soft enough to push into the moulds. I trimmed the excess Sculpey from the edges and removed the hands and feet from their moulds to place in the oven for curing.

Finally, months later, I painted around the outline of the hands and feet in white acrylic paint. One day, some time before Thomas leaves home, I would like to mount them and frame them and put them on the wall. 

Voila!

P.S. – the salt dough moulds look quite good themselves. Not sure how well they will last, as they never seemed to completely cure and the wallpaper paste didn’t contain an anti-mold agent (definitely pro-mould though – pleased with how well they worked).