Credit: Andrea Bauer

As a kid, Taylor Zitman wasn’t particularly good at drawing. “I always had really vivid ideas and a really big imagination,” she says, but “it was frustrating that it could never come out in 2-D form.”

So her mom bought her some clay.

Zitman, who’s now 22, started sculpting at eight; by 15 she was selling her creations to local boutiques. Now Zitman hawks her sculptures, which she molds from a polymer craft clay like Sculpey, on Etsy.

In addition to seasonal decorations—demand increases around Halloween and Christmas—Zitman also creates figures to top wedding cakes. Some orders are simple—little replicas of the bride and groom, down to the jewelry and makeup.

The most unique? “They wanted themselves, the bride and groom, in human form. But then they wanted members from their wedding party as zombies climbing up the cake. And the two people, the bride and the groom, they have a chain saw and a baseball bat.”

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