Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherries

My friend Amy (aka Alogue) wants me to make some more Christmas cookies. Only this time she requested a specific KIND. They're a shortbread or sugar cookies with a bit of maraschino cherry on it. Well in order to do that I felt I had to make some cherries. This is a first for me, but the mechanics of it seemed simple enough!

Since I wasn't sure if my translucent red would make a sufficiently 'cherry' color, I decided to experiment. I mixed some cherry red with some translucent red, and some cherry red with some translucent white.

And got virtually the same result.

To get an evenly sized thickness, I pushed the clay through a metal nozzle tip from a cake decorating set and slices to roughly uniform sizes.

I did about a dozen of the tiny ones before I decided I'd make some larger ones too. I rolled them and poked them with my ball-ended needle to get the right look to them.

I think this was after they came out of the oven. There's some thin green clay strips for the stems (and for sprinkles for other projects). I also rolled a cherry just from translucent red clay (which, incidentally, is pretty much the color of glazed cherries... V_V) and some from purple and red clay... and then a plum - which turned out pretty good! - from the leftovers.

I think the end result was pretty good, don't you? I didn't stem them all, but I did do a few...

Just a little gloss and those cherries will be perfect.