My boyfriend and me are saving money for a wellness weekend. Whenever we make some extra money, he tells me to put it in the "pool" for the wellness weekend. So I decided to make a "real pool" to put our saved money in.

It's actually very simple to make and it looks really nice! It took me about 1h to make it (inclusive baking time of the polymer clay).

Step 1: Material

All you need is a metal box (like an old cookie box or something) and polymer clay.

I took FIMO which is a brand of polymer clay. You can shape it and mix colors like with putty, but after making the shapes you can put it in the oven, bake it and then its hard. The nice thing about it is, that it's not changing size during baking, so usually it won't form cracks or anything like that.

Step 2: Cover the (tin) Box

First, spread the polymer clay to a thickness of about 2 mm (a bit less than 0.1 inches). I took white FIMO for the borders of the pool, to give it a tile-like look. For the water, take blue FIMO. I took a piece which was a bit smaller than the area of the box, so i could stretch the FIMO a bit and adjust its size perfectly.

Now you can start to make the surface of the water a bit wavy, so it looks more natural.

Step 3: Make the "whirl" on the Pool -> Foamy Water

To give the whirlpool its typical foamy look, I took a few thin white FIMO snakes and put them on the water surface. Then I "melted" the rolls into the water surface. For this, I used my finger and carefully rubbed it into the blue FIMO unterneath. Gives quite a nice look I think!

Step 4: Add the Feet

I mixed white, brown and red FIMO to get some kind of skin colored FIMO. At the beginning it looks like these colors are never gonna mix, but after a while of patient mixing it will work!

Make sure to prepare enough "skin", you will also need some for the heads and the arm of the guys later on.

Shape four feet out of the mixed FIMO. I made to small and to large feet, to represent the size difference of our feet in real life :). Then postition the feet onto the water on one side of the box. Once you're happy with the postition, you can smoothen the transition between the feet and the water. But you might want to wait with that step until the heads are positioned too.

Step 5: Add the Rest and Bake It!

The last step is to form the heads and add some characteristic features of the people you want to represent. Like typical hairstyle, beard, glasses, ...

After that I also made a hugging arm from my boyfriend around me. I think it looks quite cute. Here you could also add a tatoo or something to further identify your little guys.

Then put it in the oven and bake it according to the instructions on the packaging of the polymer clay. After baking my whirlpool looked exactly like before.

Put money into the box and use it!

And yeah: the polymer clay seems to stick on the metal box.... It just works!! I was actually surprized too, since I never saw anything similar before, so it was just an experiment.