hey everyone it's Riley in this video I'm going to be showing you
a really cool way to make hamster hideouts and accessories and that's with paper mache clay
so paper mache clay is a basically a clay form of paper mache and it's 100% customizable and
moldable to whatever shape you want it's also really easy to make as well as it uses
materials that basically everybody already has on hand so let's get into the video
first I'm going to show you how to make the paper clay and it's really simple all you've got to do is
pour boiling water over paper shreddings I got mine out of the shredder make sure to completely
saturate the paper and let that soak for about 20 minutes until it becomes very very mushy
then you want to drain as much water as you can out of this mixture and really be sure to squeeze
all the water out I mixed this up with a hand mixer to really break up the paper bits and
create paper pulp then I added in flour a rough measurement is 1 part flour to 3 parts paper
I also added in some salt to keep the mixture from molding or anything like that
and I added in some glue I added about a half cup here but you might have to
add more depending on how much paper clay you are making then I mixed that
all up again and with a few minor recipe adjustments this is what I ended up with
so it all depends on what you're going to make but here are a few cardboard structures that I made
to put my paper clay over I made four mushrooms and one
log and I just layered the paper clay over these structures until I reached the desired shape
I would recommend creating a sort of cardboard skeleton to put your paper clay over because paper
clay is not the easiest thing to mold when you're not placing it directly over something if that
makes sense so it's just going to be a lot more sturdy if you've got a sort of skeleton underneath
your paper clay and it's just going to make whatever you're making a whole lot easier to form
as I was forming all of my items out of paper clay they all felt pretty heavy because there
was still a lot of water in the clay so I had lots of trouble with um the mushrooms
falling over because they were unbalanced and stuff it was kind of frustrating
so I was actually surprised to find that when the paper clay dried it dried very very
light so feel free to layer on the paper clay it's not going to be that heavy once it's all dried
so like I mentioned earlier right here I am making a log out of paper clay
I decided to do this because I don't have any cork logs I don't know where to shop for them
um and I don't really want to buy them off Amazon because in general cork logs are fairly expensive
and Amazon I just don't know how large of a cork log that i'm getting and I really don't want to
chance that um so I decided to make this sort of mock cork log I don't know it looks nice enough
it's not really a cork log since I painted moss on it at the end so I guess it's just a mock log
I don't know whatever I think it looks nice enough in my opinion so yeah
so here are the items once I had finished forming
them and all together they took about four days to dry fully
so I read online that paper clay could be sanded and the internet did not lie I tried it out and
it actually works really well it didn't make a super significant difference as you can tell here
but if you've got the tools I think it's worth a try
so now that all the items that I made were dry and I had sanded the mushrooms I went ahead to
painting so enjoy this painting time lapse I also want to say that the paint that i'm using
is safe it's 100% non-toxic and water-based well I don't know how something would be
99% non-toxic but anyways it's safe so if a hamster chews on it they're gonna be fine
after painting here's the finished product of the log I really like how it turned out
as well as I like the texture of it and the moss I painted on it I think it gives it a cool touch
off camera I went ahead and painted the inside of this log
as well as I painted the inside with mod podge just to seal the paint and everything
here are the first two mushrooms I painted and I painted these with mod podge as well off camera
the same thing goes for these two mushrooms my personal favorite is the one on the left
here's just a view of my hamster items in the cage it was really fun making my own
custom hamster accessories and I would totally do this again if I was putting
together a cage theme or something like that I hope you enjoyed the video thank
you so much for watching and of course if you make this DIY let me know down in the comments