I have talked about this for YEARS and bagged up the dryer lint for about a year – until a couple of weeks ago I thought-no time like the present-so that meant spending half a day on the internet researching dryer lint clay recipes and looking for examples of dryer lint clay sculptures. I wasn’t completely satisfied with what I came across—but I picked a formula and got an old pot out and cooked some lint and wheat flower and water down to a gloppy clayish-paper-mache-ish glop. Then I invited a friend over and we sat down to sculpt COOL Halloween figures out of dryer lint. We thought that our subject matter was suitably gross and in keeping with the medium.
The first thing we discovered was that we needed a separate infrastructure—this stuff was WAY too heavy and wouldn’t hold a form. So with the help of some wire, some corks, nails, twist paper and indispensable masking tape, we created some forms and then proceeded to gob the dryer lint clay said forms and attempt to shape them into our desired end products. I wanted to make a cute black cat sitting on a jackolantern-a figure similar to one my friend had picked up at TJ Maxx’s. I couldn’t figure out a way to sculpt the two items together-given my lame and limited infrastructure tools, so I created each item separately. We put each sculpture on a piece of cardboard and set them out in the sun to dry. In a few days I transferred the items to a pizza screen to facilitate the drying process and turned a fan on the sculptures to help speed up the drying. My cat resembled some sort of dead, bloated animal. Everything was a disgusting grayish mottled color and you could see hairs-animal and human, sticking out of the clay.
After about 2 weeks the figures were dry. I sprayed them with a clear coat to help seal the dryer lint and then we painted the figures with acrylics. I used wood glue to put the cat and pumpkin together.
