Make Your Own Silicone Molds

As you may remember from this post, my very first fake baking craft was to make faux chocolates using cut up hot glue sticks and a silicone baking mold. Thrilled with the outcome I began looking for more molds and continued on with the glue sticks until I discovered that you can use clay in your silicone molds as well - which is so much easier and less expensive than glue!

I carried on using a variety of molds found at Walmart and on Amazon until I pretty much exhausted my options for the common, every day type baking molds. Wanting to start molding more specific and detailed pieces - like chocolate chip cookies or pretzels - I started searching Etsy for custom molds. I found them all right as Etsy has quite the availability, but boy can they get expensive! I've seen them listed from anywhere from $5 to more than $25 and that's just for a small, single cookie mold. Add on shipping and things can get expensive pretty quickly.

And then..... Someone in one of my Facebook crafting groups posted about how she made her own silicone molds. Whaaaaaaaaat?!?!?!?!?!

A quick online search for making your own silicone molds showed me soooo many tutorials for different ways of making your own silicone molds. I decided that the easiest way looked to be with a silicone putty kit, and made the molds responsible for the artificial cookies in the photo above. Yep, those are clay! 😎

Read on to see how you can create some for yourself:

**********

Disclosure - This post may contain affiliate links. If a purchase is made through an affiliate link then (at no additional cost to you) I will receive a commission. You can read more about affiliate links here

Supplies

For my mold making project I used Easy Mold Silicone Putty, which you can find on Amazon or at Hobby Lobby for around $20. Because I was making cookie molds, I went to Dollar Tree and purchases a whole array of cookies, basically anything that I thought had a nice shape or texture 😍

Note: While I used cookies for my molding project, you certainly don't have to stop there. These kits can be used for jewelry, dollhouse accessories, fishing lures, actual real baked goods, etc, etc, etc. You are only limited by your imagination!

Mold Mix

Here is what the mold mix looks like out of the package.

It comes in two containers, A & B, and is only activated once mixed together.

Measuring & Mixing

Once you are ready to mix you will want to take equal parts of each container in the amount that is going to combine to be just a bit bigger than the item that you are molding. Once mixed, the silicone is activated and begins to react. You only have about three minutes of working time (including mixing) before the mold begins to set. Therefore it is important it only mix exactly what you are working with (one mold at a time) and work quickly to mix the substance and then press in your item.

Preparing the Mold

Mix your two components by folding and kneading them in your hand until you have one solidly colored ball (all purple, no white streaks). Once I had my ball of silicone, I placed it on a bit of parchment paper and then covered it with another before using a rolling pin to flatten it out. Remember, work quickly!

Troubleshooting

So the first cookie that I did (an Oreo type sandwich cookie) I pressed down hard and the cookie cracked on both the top and bottom. The reason I pressed so hard is because I wanted this mold to be deeper and reflect the shape of both cookie pieces as well as the cookie filling. The problem here is that any crack in the portion of the cookie that is touching the mold will create the look of a crack in the mold. Every single cookie that you create with that mold will then have the look of a crack as well 😕

Oops! And to make things a little trickier, silicone putty is not like clay, you can't just reform it and repress your item. Because the setting time is so fast, the mold was already hardening at this point and had to be tossed out. Still, even with two such mistakes I was able to make a total of 12 cookie molds from my one package of putty.

Side Note: I was molding the entirety of the sandwich cookie, but You could certainly mold only one side if you wanted. I've see some crafters make clay molds of two cookie halves and then use spackle as filling. Even so, you will still need to be careful of cracking.

Gently Press

So here is how I learned to avoid cracking my cookies- The next time that I had my flattened ball of putty ready, I gently pressed a cookie on to the top of it and stopped pushing...

Pull the Sides

...and picked up the putty from the parchment and carefully pulled the putty around the cookie. So instead of pressing (and potentially cracking) your cookie into the putty, you are moving the putty around the cookie. As long as I held the sides of the putty up and around the cookie, the putty quickly set into place.

Created Molds

Here are my molds ready to go. You can see that depending on the outcome that I wanted, some molds are relatively flat while others (like the sandwich cookies) have taller sides. This is all personal preference here and can be altered as you wish. Also notice that while the interior of the molds look great, the exteriors are a bit messy. Because of the quick setting time, I focused on getting the working part of the molds the way that I wanted rather than worrying about the aesthetic of the molds themselves. I have no idea how those Etsy sellers get their molds to look so beautiful...maybe that's where some of those higher prices come in, eh? 😄

Filled With Clay

To create my cookies, I first used the rest of the Crayola Air Dry Clay that I had on hand. I've used this brand many times and it has always worked wonderfully. Once that was gone I opened up a box of Hobby Lobby Air Dry Clay for the first time. It worked just as well and costs about half as much, though it does have a bit of an odor. I also noticed that while the Crayola brand is labeled 'Non-Toxic' the Hobby Lobby brand had no such label, so you might not want to use this brand with smaller children.

Fresh From the Freezer

The reason that I love silicone molds so much is that because their flexibility makes the removal of my crafting items so easy. Even so, sometimes it can be tricky to get clay out of a silicone mold without smushing the design. Because of this I like to put my clay filled molds into the freezer a bit to let them harden. Once frozen the clay pops right out without damage. It also thaws quickly so if you want to work the clay a little bit more outside of the mold, you still have the opportunity.

A Full Worktable

Once the clay had fully dried you can paint and decorate as you wish. Drying time is going to depend on how large your piece is, but at least plan for overnight. After painting I like to let my pieces sit overnight again just to be safe.

**********

Here are the types of cookies that I made and the (Apple Barrel brand) paints that I used: