Papier-mâché clay vases

We love creating projects with papier-mâché clay because it's a pretty cheap material to make, dries really hard and is so versatile. You can check out some of our past projects in this blog article. This time we made up-cycled vases using a selection of plastic bottles as the base, then adding card and aluminum foil structures to make interesting shapes. The great thing about these vases is that, because the base is made from a plastic bottle, you can actually put water in them!

If you want to delve deeper into papier-mâché clay, I recommend checking out Ultimate Papier-mâché >>>

MATERIALS:

Papier-mâché clay recipe:

1 1/4 Cup of soaked paper pulp with some of the water squeezed out
1 Cup of dry wall joint compound
3/4 Cup PVA glue
1 Cup flour

Other materials we used in these projects:

Plastic bottles
Cardboard
Masking tape
Aluminum foil
Craft knife and scissors
Acrylic paints and brushes
Permanent markers or paint pens (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

Making the clay:

To make the papier-mâché clay, first rip the paper you are using and soak in water. Absorbent paper like news print or toilet paper is easiest but you can use other paper, you will just meed to soak it for longer.

Once you paper is fully soaked and the fibers have broken down, drain the mixture and squeeze out about half of the water. This isn't very exact, I recommend checking out this video for a more detailed explanation.

Put the paper pulp, dry wall compound and PVA glue into a bowl and mix. You can either mix with your hand or use a stick blender. Gradually add the cup of flour until you reach the right consistency. A softer consistency is good for spreading thinly over surfaces, ticker is best if you want to sculpt more textured surfaces.

Now your clay is ready to use. You can store it in an air tight container in the fridge for over a week.

Making the vase bases:

Gather a selection of different shape plastic bottles and trim off the lids using a craft knife or scissors. Next, create interesting shapes for your vases using scrunched up aluminum foil or cardboard, attaching everything to the bottle body using masking tape. Get creative and come up with your own funky vase designs!

To create the cardboard vase, we sandwiched a plastic bottle between the cardboard structure as shown below.

Mix the papier-mâché clay using the recipe above and begin applying a 3-4mm layer all over your vase structures. Don't worry about getting it perfect, you can touch up any bumpy patches later. If the vase becomes tricky to hold, you can do it in 2 stages, letting one layer dry and then adding more clay.

Once your vases are covered, let them dry in a warm place. This can take up to a day, sometimes more if the weather is cold. Once dry, you can touch up and patchy or bumpy parts by adding a little lore clay and letting them dry again.

Once dry, you can make the surface smoother using course sand paper. Rub you vases all over until you remove any rough parts.

Now it's time to decorate your vases. Using acrylic paints, create fun designs. You can take inspiration from historical Greek vases or go for a more contemporary style. Once the paint has dried, you can add details using permanent markers or acrylic paint pens.