Fall votive Makin's Clay tutorial

Hello my dear crafty friends and welcome to my October Fall votive tutorial made for you  with Makin's Clay products.
First I need to say that I meant to make a clay covered fall bangle. I opened the bangle and it was so tiny to wear that I decided to go to Plan B and to use the wooden base as my glass candle votive holder. And yes, Plan B actually worked.
So here is my tutorial for you and I hope that you will always keep Plan B in your crafty mind.

Step by step tutorial:
1. Use your Makin's Clay  Ultimate Clay Extruder and mix a pretty big piece of Makin's Clay in Natural, Light Adobe and Merlot colors and a basic medium size round hole disc. Don't try to make the roll very pretty as we are going to flatten it and the to paint over it.

2. Cover the wooden bare bangle with the extruded clay all around. On some point I was out of Merlot clay and I just covered with a lighter color. Again, the actual color is not seen on the finished project.
Here is a bangle I used:

 And this is how the bangle looks after the full clay coverage:

2. Use Makin's Clay Ultimate Clay Machine  to roll three piece of clay in Yellow and Peach colors using setting 5 and let the clay pieces to dry as we are going to die cut them later. 

3. Make Olive clay leave using Makin's Clay Leaves push mold and let them dry.

4. And this is a step with a new technique I never saw before.
I tried to die cut the dry clay sheet with the very delicate die and it was a mess.
So I decided to make an experiment and to die cut it with two layers and Bingo! It worked.
So let me show you the technique of die cutting clay sheet with a very delicate die.
First make a cut and do not even try to  pull the cut shape out of the die.

 Put the die with the first clay layer in it over the second sheet of dry clay and now die cut  both layers.

And now the big surprise: you can take the clay cut out of the die and it has two gorgeous layers!

OK, you also need to clean the die and this is another story.

So here are just a few more leaves I made with the same technique:

5. Paint the votive and  all the die cut and mold leaves with a mix of gel medium based paint. I used Art Anthology paints, but any gel medium based paint will work.
First I painted the base with two colors of paint and you can already see the yellow glass votive inside the bangle. I was very happy to find one that was a perfect fit for the bangle size.

And now paint all leaves with more colors:

6. Let the paint dry and arrange the leaves of both kinds over the clay base using Beacon's Adhesives 3 in 1 glue. As  you can see the leaves cluster is  not  flat and there are layers of leaves glued one over another.

And the other side of the cluster:

And the  entire votive with the candle inside:

 And that's how nice it looks on my vintage things table:

Makin's Clay products used:
Makin's Air Dry Polymer clay in Natural, Light Adobe, Olive, Yellow, Peach and Merlot
ULTIMATE CLAY MACHINE®
ULTIMATE CLAY EXTRUDER®
Cutting mat large
Push molds- Leaves