Okay, so I did decide to go ahead and post specifically about making these little guys.
I'm not sure/don't remember what got me on the idea of having dipped strawberries in the bakery, I guess I was just looking for/thinking about other things beside the cakes and cupcakes that the bakery could be offering and somehow decided that it just had to be dipped strawberries. Around the same time I watched a youtube video where someone made some 1:12 scale strawberries and it seemed to go pretty easily so I thought sure I can do that 75% smaller...... lol {keep in mind here that I don't really know what I'm doing so much working with clay, I'm just kind of figuring it out as I go along} after looking at a bunch of different images of real life dipped strawberries I realized that they typically still have stem on them (duh, to make it easier to dip and eat them) so I thought okay, I can use wire for the stem and also use it to hold the berries as I make them. I still wasn't sure if there was anyway these were going to turn out at all, and/or how difficult they were going to be to make, but I bought some red clay and figured I'd give it a go. When I was looking for the smallest gauge wire I could find, I realized I already had 26 gauge green floral wire, and I couldn't find anything really smaller than 26 gauge anyway so I decided to go with that.
So to start I rolled a teeny tiny ball out of a sliver of clay and pressed the end of a piece of floral wire into it and then pressing the other side of the ball to a soft point (when necessary, a lot of time just holding it while I pressed the wire into it formed it pretty well). Then I laid them out on some parchment paper to bake.
I did realize at about this point that I wasn't sure how the coating on the floral wire would hold up in the oven, if it would melt or anything, but I went ahead and gave it a try (really hoping it would work since it is already green and everything). It ended up being fine. Granted the clay doesn't bake at a very high temperature and they were only in there for 15 minutes, so I have no idea how it would work under different circumstances. Hotter or longer might be a problem.
After they came out of the oven and cooled off a bit, I moved on to adding the leaves. I knew they needed to be pretty thin paper, but I thought tissue paper would be too thin so I colored both sides of a little piece of notebook paper with a green sharpie to use. Then I cut tiny little slivers, dipped the end in glue and stuck them around the stem of the strawberries.
At first I was holding each one until the glue dried, but then after the first one I realized that a foam ball with one side flattened (which I actually for some reason already had even lol) would hold them nicely while they dried
Once the glue on the leaves was dry I just dipped them in a tiny bit of brown or white paint using the extra long stem to hold them, and once the paint was dry (I laid them flat this time to dry so it didn't drip down the top of the strawberries or something) just clipped the wire to stem length with a pair of nail clippers and glued them into a pan.
So overall, what I thought was going to be a really difficult project that I wasn't even sure was going to work ended up being pretty easy (okay the leaves were pretty tedious to do, but not overly difficult) and turned out well. I do think they may be ever so slightly bigger than they probably should be for this scale, but I don't think I could have made them any smaller, especially, the leaves, and I have seen some HUGE real life dipped strawberries so I think these are fine :)
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