DIY Hand Stamped Ring Dish: Easy Craft Project Guide

Making over an entire room and showing big, dramatic before-and-after pictures is great and probably one of our favorite things, but there’s also a whole lot of joy in the little DIYs scattered around the home that make you happy every time you walk by. I have a feeling this little DIY hand stamped ring dish will fall under that category.

They turned out so cute considering it was my first time attempting any kind of clay sculpting, and helped me take my mind off of the absolute craziness of the TWO CONSECUTIVE HURRICANES coming our way in southern Louisiana. It’s fine. THIS IS FINE.

In all seriousness, this DIY hand stamped ring dish has endless possibilities once you add in the letter stamps, and I’m already dreaming up the Christmas ornaments, engagement gifts, place cards and the personalized sugar cookies I could make.

Ring dish Tools & Materials

• Oven bake clay (I got mine at Michaels and used a white and a silver color)
• Letter stamps (I bought these at Michaels, too, but found this better version on Amazon that has numbers and other symbols)
• Gold Sharpie

How we did it

So this depends on how big of a tray you’re trying to make, but out of two of the small packs of the white and one of the silver that are linked above, I was able to make three DIY hand stamped ring dishes.

Take a half pack of the white clay and start rolling it out by hand on a smooth surface (I used our kitchen counter) into a long snake shape, then do the same with a section of the silver clay. I just eyeballed how much of the silver I used and had a different amount for each ring dish so the marbling would look unique.

Oh, and start preheating the oven to whatever temperature your clay says to cook at.

Swirl them together

Once you’ve got your clay snakes, hold them side-by-side and twist them together, then smoosh them into a ball.

It’s going to look like a mess at this point and probably be hard to combine, but keep rolling it out on your smooth surface until it’s a ball without any cracks and you like the marbling look.

If you’re not liking the marbled look yet, try stretching the clay ball out and reshaping it like you would with pizza dough, or splitting it in two and re-combining it.

It’s taking shape

Once you’ve got the nice, smooth clay ball, use your thumbs to press down the center and start shaping your tray. This is very freehand and will depend on your own style for how big or small you want it, how evenly shaped and how thick the edges are.

I did two that were smaller with a thicker, smooth edge and one that was a bigger overall tray with smaller, pinched edges.

Just make sure that the base part of your tray isn’t too flimsy and thin, or when you go to stamp it, it’ll go through the whole piece.

Time to stamp

By now you’ve got a few ring dishes ready to go. Place them out on some parchment paper or foil on a baking sheet and start stampin’. It was difficult for me to stamp the letters in a straight line but I guess that’s part of the imperfect look of hand stamping.

Make sure you stamp deep enough into the clay, but not so deep that the square base of the stamp gets imprinted. Learned that one the hard way!

If you do mess up, though, it’s easy just to use your finger to smooth it over and start again.

Bake the trays

Bake the ring dishes for as long as your clay instructions say to, for me it was about 30 minutes.
I accidentally preheated my oven to 375 degrees instead of 275 degrees, so I waited for it to cool a little before putting my dishes in. Evidently I didn’t wait long enough, because one of them came out like a bright yellow color and the other two are a light pink color so the only thing I can think of is that the temperature must’ve been off.

Luckily I actually like the pink color so that was a happy accident.

Moral of the story is, double check your temperature first and then once they’re done, let the trays cool completely before moving onto the gold accents.

Color them in

If you’re going for the same look as me, grab your gold Sharpie and carefully color in the indents of your hand stamped words. This took a couple of runs over each letter to get them fully covered and dark enough.

Then run the Sharpie around the edges of the whole ring dish a few times until it’s a thickness you like and it has that golf leaf kind of look. (You can see in these photos that my fingerprints got baked into it on the edges, whoops! Lesson for next time to make sure everything is super smooth before baking).

And you’re done!

This is such a quick and easy DIY, and is surprisingly stress-relieving to mold some clay. I think I might try the ring dish again soon and add some cracked pepper into the clay for a fancy speckled look, or maybe I’ll try taping it off and color blocking the finished product.

If you make a DIY hand stamped ring dish for yourself, send us a pic or tag us on Instagram – we’d love to see what you made! And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more DIYs.