In April I made a cake topper for my brother-in-law’s birthday party while my wife made the cake. Here is the step by step on how I did it:

It starts with making a wire armature; I made this one out of a clothes hanger. Luckily this is all the armature that the worm required; making armatures for human figures is much more complex.

Then you cover it with aluminum foil until it is about 80% of the bulk you need it to be.

I’m sculpting the worm with a polymer clay called Sculpey, which runs about $10/lb. You layer it over your wire and foil armature no thicker than 1/4 inch and then bake it in the oven at something like 275 degrees for 20 minutes. I learned about this from my friend Dave 20 years ago. After you bake it, then you can cut, grind, sand,  score, and even layer on more Sculpey and bake it again.

Here is a closeup of the freshly sculpted and unbaked Sculpey.

Here I have globbed on the initial blobs that will make up the worm’s face.

And here are all of the blobs smooshed into a rough face. Note the score marks on the eyes so that I can smooth on more Sculpey for the eyes once it has been baked the first time.

The worm was baked, then eyes and eyelids sculpted on.

Here I have smoothed down the rough edges of the grooves in the worm’s body with a tiny file, and cut in more smaller grooves with a dental tool.

Now I have added all of the fat rolls on the worm’s neck. This was a little difficult, making layer after layer one at a time and not smooshing the underlying layers.

After the last bake it was time to paint. I thinned down some gray acrylic and brushed/dribbled it into all of the little nooks and crannies to make them stand out more.

I painted the rest of the worm with acrylic, then superglued some snips of fancy yarn on for his hair.

Finally I finished the pupils with a Sharpie marker, then sprayed the entire thing with clear acrylic sealer, and cut a strip of felt off for the scarf.

Here is the final on top of the awesome cake that Heather made. In total it took me probably about 8-12 hours.