Partain Jessica - The polymer clay cookbook: tiny food jewelry to whip up and wear

As sisters, we first discovered polymer clay as kids, and havent been able to put it down since. Combine our love of clay with a healthy obsession with food, and naturally we pour our creativity into cooking up miniature polymer clay food jewelry. We love thinking about our favorite foods and how to replicate them as realistic miniatures. Most of all, we love sharing our passion for food, and watching people dangle a cupcake around their neckor waffles from their ears!

Food isnt just about the tasteits about memories, emotions, and people. We all have favorite foods that evoke ties to special times and places in our lives. Who can eat watermelon without remembering twilight summer picnics? Or pretzels without thinking about long afternoons at the ballpark? We particularly love gingerbread cookies, not only because of their delicious flavor, but because they bring us back to childhood days spent carefully decorating each one to look like a member of our family. To celebrate food is, we think, to celebrate life.

Weve designed this book as a cookbook for the beginning miniature chef, and just like a regular cookbook, we begin with the basics. The main ingredient of our food miniatures is polymer clay, an incredibly versatile and inexpensive medium that is easy to find in craft stores. With a little imagination and ingenuity, you can sculpt polymer clay to look like just about any food you can imagine. Youll get a full primer on basic sculpting techniques, and since creating wearable miniature food is a unique undertaking, youll also learn basic jewelry-making techniques to transform the miniatures into finished jewelry.

The majority of the book is comprised of recipes for making tiny polymer clay foods, divided into five chapters: Fresh Fruit, Morning Favorites, Savory Entrees, Sweet-Tooth Delights and Other Treats, and Holiday Goodies. The recipes progress from easy to more complex, and each chapter builds on previous concepts while gradually introducing new techniques. Each recipe lists the ingredients needed, with actual size illustrations of the clay so you can quickly and easily hold up a ball to the page to see how much you need. Many recipes also include suggestions for alternative flavors or colors, so you can customize the tiny foods to reflect your real favorites. We strongly encourage you to create pizza with the toppings you like and whip up your favorite flavor cupcake! In keeping with the cookbook theme, each chapter also has a real food recipe (yes, one you can actually eat) for a favorite dish we thought you might enjoy.

We hope you have a lot of fun creating and wearing these projectsand enjoying the memories they bring. Bon appetit!