A while back, I decided I wanted to try sculpting small morel mushrooms.  I thought they would make really neat jewelry.  I did pretty well on one size, but when I tried a smaller version, it turned out much more difficult.  Here is a photo of the larger version.  (You can click the photos to get larger versions.)

Since I had such trouble with the small ones, I thought it would be a great idea to have some sort of texture sheet that I could press them in to get the holes.  The best thing I could think of was to use course salt.  Actually, someone gave me the idea.  And it seemed like a good one!  But, it just didn’t work out the way I had hoped.  It was not a lost venture, though, as it still turned out a good texture sheet.  Just not for what I had intended.

The first thing I learned is that “course salt” on the package does not always mean “course” salt.

Here, I took some scrap polymer clay, pressed salt into it, and then added some liquid clay, so the salt would stay put. The upper piece has the small pieces, and the lower has larger pieces that I picked out.

This is what they looked like after baking.

So, even though I’ll have to make my mushrooms the hard way, this experiment did turn out a pretty cool texture!