I bought this Fimo like 9 years ago, and never really got very far with it. I've been watching a lot of NerdECrafter lately (and picking up way too many of her mannerisms, especially the "stop messin' ma stuff!"), and Tiny really wanted me to make a faerie garden, so inspired by this video, I thought I'd have another go with the Fimo, and see if I could make something passable.
I had two major problems:
- The Fimo was 9 years old, and had long since hardened and become impossible to use
- I have a gas oven, not an electrical one, and getting the oven to stay at 110° is not so easy (last time I made anything with Fimo, it had scorch marks around the edges)
How to Recondition a Hardened Block of Fimo
You may have seen several tutorials telling you to add vegetable or baby oil to Fimo to soften it.
NO NO NO NO!
That's for Sculpey. Sculpey is oil-based, so this will work for Sculpey. Apparently, Fimo is water-based. I can't remember where I learnt this, but the tutorial I saw about 6 years ago said Sculpey needs oil, Fimo needs water.
Edit: I found it.
So you need a resealable plastic bag, a hammer, a craft knife and a spray bottle of water. Cut up your block of Fimo into small chunks. Place them in the bag, then give it a few squirts of water. Then hammer the hell out of that crap. Take it out, knead it a bit (this will be very messy, you might want to wear gloves), form into a ball, then place back into the bag, and repeat the whole thing, slowly adding more water if needed, and bashing away until all the lumps are gone.
This method does work, and as proof, I think I actually didn't do too bad a job!
Besides the proportions being wrong (the bench is for humans, the bridge is for faeries and I don't know what scale the trees are), I'm happy with what I was able to make. This was my first ever attempt at making a landscape with polymer clay, or doing any kind of sculpture at all, so it was very much a steep learning curve. I did even run out of green, because I mixed it up with the brown when cutting off the edges, then realised I had nothing to make the tree tops with!
Luckily, I had cyan and yellow left, so I made up a new batch of green with that.
For the trees and bushes, I actually made the basic shapes out of foil, and then rolled out a layer of green to cover them with. Nerdecrafter uses liquid Sculpey to join the pieces to each other; I don't have the equivalent for Fimo. So for the tree trunks I made a small hole in the grass, and placed them in before baking. The bench, bridge, tree tops and bushes were baked as separate pieces, then glued on with UHU Power once cooled. I used bits of painted cocktail sticks to make the legs of the bench, and silicone glue to make the water, since I don't have resin, it's too expensive. The downside to that is it's almost impossible to get a smooth surface, plus as it's still cloudy, you can't see that I put sand at the bottom of the pond. But other than that, for a first attempt, it's actually not bad.
I did take me ages to get all the little bits of clay off my skin and nails though. Really, you should wear gloves when reconditioning your clay!