Polymer Clay Gift Tags For Valentine’s Day

Missing your Conversation Hearts this year?  They’re in short supply!  You can make up for it by checking out these fun polymer clay gift tags for Valentines day, made up to look just like conversation hearts!  (If you’re more into jewelry, may I suggest another similar project, my polymer clay conversation heart charm bracelet). Fun, fitting for the season… plus no calories…  win win!

These are perfect for the little gifts you give for Valentine’s Day, or would be really cute ornaments if you do a Valentine’s Day tree!

What you will need:

• Polymer clay in “conversation heart” colors.  I have a lot of colors of clay, so while a few of my colors weren’t quite right, I blended lighter and darker colors as needed to come up with the “right” colors.  If you do a lot of clay projects this is a great one since it hardly takes any clay at all.
• Roller, wax paper (for keeping your area clean) and a small heart-shaped cutter
• Stamps – I often use my metal stamps on clay, but I wanted something slightly larger so I used my tiny alphabet rubber stamps which are about 1/4?.  If you need to buy stamps, rubber stamps are usually less expensive.
• Optional acrylic paint for darkening your letters
• Toothpick for making your holes

In case this is the first project you’ve checked out with polymer clay, let me tell you a few things about working with it.  It’s very easy and clay is inexpensive so you are likely to have a lot of fun with it.  But there are a few precautions to take.  As far as your clay supplies (rollers, cutters, and baking sheets) – you can keep costs down even further by using kitchen utensils from thrift stores or yard sales, since it works up very much like cookie dough and those tools work great, HOWEVER – clay IS NOT FOOD SAFE so you should never use *your actual kitchen utensils* for working with unbaked clay.  If you decide to use a cookie cutter for a clay project, it’s now officially a clay cutter.  You can’t mix your kitchen supplies and clay supplies!

All I did was roll my clay out to 1/4? thick on wax paper to protect my table, cut out hearts, and stamp each with my message. Then, use a toothpick to make a hole for adding it to a package.  (If you don’t want to waste your excess clay, yesterday’s charms are a perfect project to make while you’re making this one!)

Then, just bake them according to the package directions.  This should take about 30 minutes. When they are cooled, you can darken the letters with a bit of acrylic paint, if you want!  It adds a nice touch to make them look more like the candies!  I dabbed it on (it’s okay if it gets a little messy), and used a dampened paper towel to wipe off any excess surface paint.

Just make sure you wipe it off right away because as it dries it’s increasingly more difficult to get paint off the top without accidentally removing it from the letters.

And that’s it!  As soon as they are dry, you can use them!  So have you started any Valentine’s Day crafts yet? ;)