I love making miniature sugar cookies, and these tiny owls and penguins were particularly fun to sculpt. Here are some studio shots of the process, so you can see how polymer clay goes from blob to cute.

First off, the cookie shapes are pressed against sandpaper for a bit of texture before being brushed with artist chalk pastels to give them a baked appearance.

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I like to bake the cookies briefly before icing them, because they’re so much easier to handle that way. The icing is done in stages; for example, in the penguins below, I started by icing the white belly and face areas, then I baked the cookies and went back with black icing. This ensures that the two colors don’t bleed and intermix.

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Finally, the cookies were glued to metal hairpins to create the finished pieces. Want a pair of your own? I have one set of each left: owl hair pins and penguin hair pins.

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Want to make your own cookies? Learn how in this miniature  cookie making tutorial, which includes step-by-step instructions for everything from iced sugar cookies and jam thumbprints to fortune cookies and macarons.

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