Corn!

As promised on the WOYWW 144 on my Patchwork Apples blog, I have made sweetcorn - fresh on the cob. It's not brilliant, but it's okay-ish. It's not so much of a disaster that I can't show here what I did...

Okay, first I stole a much unused tea-strainer from the kitchen drawer, and then rifled through my stash of polymer clay to find some yellow (mixed with a bit of  leftovers from when I made bananas)

I rolled it into a ball after warming and preparing the clay, took a piece and pushed it into the inside of the tea-strainer - just a tiny bit. I pressed down onto the bit that had squeezed through onto the outside with my finger - just to meld the little lumps together a little. Then I pressed the clay through a little bit more.

I cut off the clay on the outside - carefully - with a blade and set it aside whilst I found some spare light-coloured clay and rolled that out into a thin worm shape. I cut off about 3/4" of the worm to use as the centre of the corn.

All I had to do then was carefully wrap the yellow clay around my worm... Hey Presto! you have a cob of corn. If you're going to add leaves you can leave the join a little messy - it won't show. If you're going to have the sweetcorn as it is, you'll have to tidy up the join, and cut off the bottom.

Okay... here's where the harder bit comes in. You'll need some medium-green clay, and about half as much of a darker green and a white with a little bit of yellow added. OR... just look at a cob of corn and see what colours you think you'll need for the leaves. Layer the colours together neatly.

Now roll out the layers, cut it up and layer these up - you're just making these striped layers thinner and thinner.

I used the widest choice on a pasta machine (mine is a '7') to roll out the layers. Slice the layers and stack them up together to make a brick, and squeeze them lightly together to seal any seams and joins. Then pop it into the freezer for about ten minutes.

When it's taken out of the freezer you'll need to lay it down and VERY CAREFULLY slice mega-thin pieces off of it... these will be the leaves with the stripes going from top to bottom of the cob. The circled piece of polymer clay shows the better shape to shave off.

Now all you have to do is wrap the shavings around the cob like leaves and bake in the oven (following manufacturers instructions)