Bibliotheca: Polymer Clay Sweets Jewelry

Surprise! I've been accepted as a Bibliotheca blog circle member. Bibliotheca, created by the lovely lolitas at Bay Area Kei, is a way that bloggers can get in touch with readers and create a thriving community with meaningful, informative posts that other platforms just aren't designed for. Please be sure to check out everyone's hard work!

This month's theme is DIY, so I'm going to share some (mostly sweets-themed) polymer clay jewelry I've made recently, as well as my materials and process. First, though, let's dive into the history of sweets jewelry. Just note, a lot of my information is from Japanese Wikipedia, so it may not be perfectly accurate. 

Sweets jewelry isn't as integral to the lolita image as some may think. In fact, although lolitas have had our strawberries from the beginning (like this ponytail holder from Heart E in 1993), baked goods, whipped cream, and ice cream were later to join the party. Q-pot, the famous sweets jewelry brand, was founded in 2002, and created their website and physical shop in 2004. By 2006, the Lolita Handbook on Livejournal listed eight different shops for sweets jewelry. Major brands finally caught on by 2008, at the beginning of the OTT sweet wave, with the release of series like AP's Wonder Cookie.  In the western comm after 2005, tutorials on fake mini sweets were common, mostly focusing on decoden-style techniques. Unfortunately, basically every link from the Lolita Handbook is broken now, so you'll have to trust me on this. 

The word decoden (JP: デコ電) is a combination of deco (as in decora or decorate) and denwa (the Japanese word for phone). Decoden originally just meant phone charms, but as a quick search will tell you, has expanded to include phone cases, decoden-appropriate clays (usually water based and air-dry) that emulate cake and whipped cream, flatback resin charms, and jewelry in the decoden style. 

As an aspiring lolita, I barely had the money for Bodyline; I didn't want to waste my hard-earned summer camp counselor money on a whole new craft. However, I did have oven-curable polymer clay (left over from my 8th birthday and some cosplays) and jewelry-making knowledge (from helping my mom and a chain maille class when I was 12). Armed with those, I have since worked out my own process.This isn't a tutorial, so I won't go into full detail, but I usually create a foil core for larger pieces, add a wire loop for necklaces and danglies, form the polymer clay on top (I only care about the color if I'm not planning on painting it), sculpt the basic shape with a quilting pin until I'm frustrated, bake it, paint with acrylics, seal it with either spray sealant or clear nail polish (because I am a monster) and glue anything that needs gluing with E6000. My favorite things to sculpt are mushrooms, and one of my favorite everyday pairs of earrings is actually a tiny pair of homemade mini Amanita muscaria, commonly known as fly agaric.

Recently, a friend of a friend complimented these mushroom earrings, so I decided to make her and her girlfriend some matching pairs. I had the clay out anyway, so I also made cookie earrings, a cookie ring, a little cherry pie pendant, strawberry earrings, and a chocolate-covered strawberry necklace. The mushrooms and the chocolate of the strawberry were painted, but everything else is just careful clay mixing, with a little gold acrylic for that toasty egg-washed look on the pie. 

Here are the results! Apologies for the low res,  I nabbed everything from a discord chat I sent to my friend.

All the polymer clay creations together

The mushrooms that started it all

The mushrooms are a bit difficult, especially the ones on hooks, because going in with a needle to add the gills deforms the shape really easily. While painting, it's difficult to get the white scales on the cap distinct, irregularly shaped, and placed realistically; though I usually paint with a small cheap brush, I go in with the head of a pin to do the mushroom cap. I also let the white acrylic dry a little before painting so that it gets a thicker, 3D texture.

Just the cookies

The cookies were really spur-of-the-moment, but I love how they came out! The hardest part was keeping the 'dough' warm and smooth while making sure the 'chocolate' didn't mush or blend in. To solve this, I added the 'chocolate' at the end and used a thin layer of 'dough' color on the chunks that I wanted to look half-submerged.

All the fruity items

I started with the strawberry earrings on the right, but I ended up doing the left strawberries for my mom as well. The pie was originally going to have a lattice crust, but it kept falling apart, so I opted for a solid crust with leaf decorations instead.  Each cherry in the pie and strawberry seed in the earrings and large berry was individually sculpted and placed; these were all fairly time-consuming. 

Close up on the strawberry pendant

The chocolate strawberry was mostly a way to use up some of the brown, red, and green clays I had already mixed, but I've worn it as a necklace out in the wild and people really seemed to like it!I had a lot of fun mixing the different gradations of red for the unripe part of the strawberry.

Although I'm not sure how much lolita wear I'll actually get out of these, there's something nostalgic about making your own lolita-appropriate accessories. All the berry items go with my Meta Gingham Cherry skirt, and the others can accent solid pieces. Accessories are much smaller than dresses, so a lolita can never have too many! I feel like many newbies might carry a false sense of stigma around handmade items, but it's truly within the spirit of the fashion to create your own one-of-a-kind style. Plus, jewelry is one of the few items that's actually cheaper for skilled crafters to DIY than to buy.

I'd like to give special thank you to Bibliotheca for allowing me the opportunity to be in their newsletter. Please go take a look if you haven't already. And, as always, thank you for reading!