Plastic Candy

Completed Sylvanian Post Office (finally!) and other misc stuff

2012-01-19T00:39:00.000+10:30

Wow, it's been a really long time since I updated. I've been in a funk lately, I have no motivation to get anything done. Not having regular hours and feeling lonely can get you down. Oh well, we'll see what the new year brings, I've applied to a few places and we'll see if I land anything more permanent. At the moment I'm not starving or unable to pay bills, and can afford luxuries, so I'm really in a much, much better place than a lot of people. I should be grateful.

Anyway, let's get on to the post office update! Yes, after so long, I've finally completed refurbishing the building. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so here they are. Apologies for the crappy pics and lighting.

This is the thing that took ages for me to finish.

It suffered from a combination of indecision and procrastination. I couldn't decide what to fill the shelves with or how to arrange things to look nice. I originally envisaged little baskets to hold the postcards, but my miniature basket making was fail. For a long time I just spread out the postcards overlapping each other on the top shelf. This thing from Rainy Blues saved me and helped me make that little tray. I encourage anyone who's interested in making little mini boxes and accessories to visit the site, it's awesome. I've got a few different sets of writing paper there too, but they're all hiding under the top sheet :P

Nearly hidden on the right wall we have a poster. The original post office came with a couple of posters so I figure this one should have at least one too.

I love this poster! It's so cute. It's a printout of a real vintage post office poster. While I'm not sure it really fits the overall decor of the post office, I like it enough I don't care. Broken kitty is here to stay!

Now for the inhabitants of this little post office.

Samuel Stamp is the postmaster of this little post office. He stays indoors, doing important Postmastery things. It's nice and warm inside, out of all that rain, sleet and snow that Postman Pete has to bike through. On rainy days he likes to sit with a nice cup of hot chocolate and think of all the rain he's not out in.

This is Postman Pete Petite.

He delivers the mail on his trusty bike. Through rain, sleet or snow and braving hordes of angry dogs, he'll make sure that model of a five tentacled squid with hilarious tentacle movement action you bought on ebay gets to you. Or die trying. He's THAT dedicated guys.This postman is actually the JP version which doesn't come with a bike, unlike the UK version, so I repainted a Bobby Roberts bike I got in a lot. The parcel actually fits in the police bike basket, whereas the UK postman bike has a basket that's too small for the parcel the set comes with.

Time to take care of the customers.

Anyway, this ends the post office update. Now I just need to finish all the other buildings I'm currently working on. Eeep.

I've also been working on some Valentine heart cookies. I'm hoping to get these to the dollhouse shop at Strathalbyn in time for them to sell. If I manage to finish on time this will be my first sale. Or trade. Because they have some stuff I'd be willing to trade for...

I love craft sand. It simulates sugar so well, and looks so good on the cookies IMHO. Craft sand proved to be a PIA to find online when I was looking. Everything was either huge bags for wedding decorations or cost more than I wanted to pay. Eventually I found a local seller who was selling sand art kits with included an assortment of tiny little bags of sand. Jackpot! The amounts of sand in those little bags were just the right amount I needed for small projects and will probably last me quite a while. I'm just sad there was no black sand in the set he gave me though.

This cookie project is also the first time I plucked up enough courage (yeah, I'm afraid of everything so sometimes it takes me ages to try something because I feel so apprehensive of failure) to try using mini piping bags to do the piping work instead of using a pin like I had been doing before. The pin in the photo is just for scale this time! Anyway, I find using the piping bag easier than the pin. My biggest problem is shaky hands that make the piping work look lumpy and uneven. Practice, practice, practice!

Btw, after taking that picture I accidentally put my thumb on that cookie and messed it up.

Horror game stuff ahead:

I've been playing a PSP visual novel type game called Corpse Party. It's a really good and very, very creepy game. Just looking at it, you wouldn't think that it'd be capable of being creepy. It uses 2D sprites and backgrounds and anime style artwork. The creep factor is really in the great sound work (voice acting, sound effects) and the descriptions of various things a in the room your character is in. You can't really see most of what is described to you, but I think it enhances the horror factor by forcing you to use your imagination.

The general storyline goes like this: A group of students are telling ghost stories after school, and then decide to perform a ritual that will ensure their friendship for years to come. There is a sudden earthquake and they wake up in Heavenly Host Elementary, a school that had been destroyed years ago. Now they have to find a way out, and figure out why they are here.

My description really doesn't do the game justice. All I recommend is picking this up and playing it through if you like horror and are prepared to do a lot of reading. Be warned though, this game is not about usual gameplay, but about atmosphere. Also, if you play this game, you must do so with a good set of headphones to get the full effect. The sound work is really integral to the mood of the game. Voices of the dead will speak to you from nowhere, sounding like they are right there in the same room as you, laughter and cries will flow from one side of your headphones to the other, like something invisible just passed you. Yeah, I'm not really good at this description thing. Anyway, I love this game and I'm about to start the last chapter.*hearts*

Zombie Teddy, RL Woes

2011-11-21T00:40:00.001+10:30

I made this for my husband for our anniversary about a month ago. I made him an experimental teddy bear phone charm a while back out of air dry clay and it kind fell apart after one day. He'd been asking me for a replacement ever since. He likes zombies, so Zombie Teddy was born. And I gave up on the air dry clay, this one's made of polymer clay.

Zombie Teddy was a lot easier to make than the miniature food I've been focusing on. I don't have to worry about washing my hands every single time I touch something non-clay just to keep all the little specks of dust out of the clay I'm working on, and I don't have to worry about getting the exact shade of colour either. As it is, this bear came out darker than I expected after baking and darker still after painting.

General reception of Zombie Teddy has been really positive. My hubby loves it and surprisingly, the old ladies at the local church craft center thought it was cute too. I've received a couple of requests from friends to make them some zombie animals and I'll post them up here when I'm done. I also need to get started on the second round of bread and foodstuffs for Pinky, the amount of stuff I sent is no where near enough to fully kit out a bakery. Some ideas are more cookies--decorated ones this time, darker breads to contrast the light coloured ones I sent, and maybe a couple of cakes for the cake window. A few tarts would be good too. Cupcakes would be great, but I'm afraid to attempt them, haha. Those dents down the sides are daunting :p. If only I could cheat by finding something small enough to make cupcake molds out off. Nothing's satisfied me so far!

I'm currently feeling quite down about my job. This relief teacher thing is not going well. I chose it because after volunteering in a few Australian high school classes, I realised how different they were from Bruneian classes and I kinda freaked a bit. I thought that by being a relief teacher I would gain some experience and more confidence in working with these kids. The problem with being a relief teacher is that I don't get enough work. Currently, most of the relief work is being given to the permanent relief teachers who are attached to schools. I've had a teacher try to request me for his Indonesian class, but had to come back and tell me that that position had been given to a permanent relief teacher (they get first dibs). Another job I had lined up for next Wednesday has been cancelled because the meeting the class teacher was supposed to go to had been postponed. It's really quite depressing having two of your jobs cancelled in a row. I doubt I'll get anymore this term, but I'm still hoping. I've applied to the only permanent relief teacher job opening available locally and I'm waiting to hear back from them. I'm not feeling very optimistic about my chances, being a new, inexperienced teacher and all. Blah.

Birthday stuff and melon pan turtles

2011-10-13T23:51:00.000+10:30

My right hand hurts so I'm not going to type much. I had my birthday at the end of September and it was a wonderful day. I went out for lunch with the knitting group, got a few unexpected gifts and had pasta with my husband at home later that night. My husband had asked me what I wanted for my birthday so I picked out a few Sylvanian items. We ordered late so they actually arrived exactly a week after my birthday. He went and surprised me with the Watermill Bakery on the day itself, because he's sweet like that. I had been staring at the bakery at the local toyshop for months, but never got it because I already had another bakery. A couple of my closest friends from Brunei sent me the Toymaker set because they thought it was just right for someone who made toys. And my brother-in-law unexpectedly gave me a couple of the baby carry cases. <3

Another two friends pooled together and got me a Lalaloopsy doll. How awesome is that? It's something that I think is cute but would never have gotten on my own. They're expensive here and I'm already spending all my spare money on other things :P

I got my first teaching paycheck today too :D. Yay!

I've also been working on some sample packets of mini food for the Sylvanian Families forums. I thought that would be a good way to get over feeling iffy about the quality of my product. I've been working on Turtle melon bread, you'd think something that looks so simple would take a lot less than 10 hours to make... I'm sure it took at least that long because I went through a few Midsomer Murders eps and a good chunk of the American version of Life on Mars while working on those turtles. Speaking of Life on Mars, I love that show. It's a pity it never got renewed for a second season. I'll have to pick up the British version at some point because it looks like they actually finished the series and had a sequel besides. I just hope the characters are as fun as the ones in the American version. I love Lt Gene Hunt!

Anyway back to the turtles; I decided to brush some green pastel over the 'shells' because I saw some very cute green melon bread turtles on the net. The colour ended up too bright so I brushed some yellow ochre over the green, which made it look less radioactive.

Some WIP pics:

Tailless, unbaked turtles. They all have tails now, but they're still unbaked. I like to make a whole heap of things before putting them in the oven. Unfortunately that opens up unbaked items to risk of damage. One of my turtles ended up with an unexpected gouge on the top of its head.

I'm also working on decorating that gingerbread house. Not entirely sure how to proceed from here, but I'll figure something out.

I also spend most of my hobby time last night trying to make a kiwi cane. This was my second attempt. The last time I tried I ended up with something that had some very big seeds among all the small ones. I ended up having some parts with no seeds this time. I squashed the cane and tried again, and this was the result:

GAH. The wonky lines! The wonky seeds! Ultra Fail. Squish and retry tomorrow.

Finished bread, Sylvanian babies

2011-09-26T22:28:00.002+09:30

I've finished the first round of bread for Okasaneko and myself.

We'll each get half of these.

These loaves would also look rather familiar to some. That's because I made similar ones a while back while I was experimenting. I really need to expand my range of bread, I don't want to be making the same ones over and over again.

I do think the cuts on the short loaves are too deep, but nothing I can do about it now. At least this time I got the baguette scaled properly.

:P Still need to cover it with some matte varnish though. Next I'll make some melon pan turtles and look up some other types of bread to make, I don't think what I've done so far is nearly enough to fill the shelves. Plus the more variety the better!

I've also included some pics of a Sylvanian figurine next to the bread, and some in a bakery window.

The windows still look rather bare, so I need to make more goodies to fill it up!

Speaking of Sylvanians, I got this set a few weeks back, and it's one of the most adorable things ever!

It was also an excuse to get that three tier bunk bed, which has darker coloured bedding in this release (it has pastel tones in the regular release). I'm still not really sure where to put this set though. Maybe I should make a very simple little room out of styrofoam and wood for this? :P

I used my accumulated points on BeHappy's site to buy this, which meant that I ended up not having to pay for shipping. I probably would not have gotten it otherwise. I think at AUD36.49, BeHappy offers the best price for this set online. I've not seen cheaper anywhere else. On ebay it's available from various sellers from around AUD51 - 61, not including shipping (ouch).

Anyway, here's a pic of some adorable baby critters:

Phone covers and misc updates

2011-09-19T23:08:00.000+09:30

So much for updating twice a week... :p
Anyway I want to blog about these lovely phone covers from Okasaneko.

She sent them as a gift and I have to say I absolutely love them. I had thought I would like the black one better from her pictures, but I've ended up falling hard for the pink one.

Look at it! It's so cute and pink! I've loved pink as a young girl (what young girl doesn't like pink? All the 3-4 year old girls at the kindergarten I volunteer at seem obsessed with the colour) and tried to switch to liking the 'cooler' black as a teen--to the point where I got some rather ill advised thick black framed glasses that I thought would make me look cool but ended up making me look like a grandmother instead... Now I'm back to admitting that I really do love pink, especially pastel pink.

That's not to say I don't like the black cover, I think it's pretty awesome as well. It's great having two phone covers I can switch back and forth with. Thanks very much again Pinky!

I've also picked up something very useful last week:

It's that green grass-like matting that you find on produce shelves in the supermarket. I was able to pick up several rolls that were being thrown away. They're a little dirty, and in one of the mats the dirt is so fine that I haven't been able to remove it completely. These are really great for my display shelves. Since I don't like just displaying items by themselves, I'm working on a number of dioramas on my bookshelves to display my stuff.

The green makes excellent grass, a lot better than the green felt I've been using. You can see a bit of it at the top of the pic.

I don't have very good pictures of my shelves, I need to set up a better light source. The grass is only the beginning, I'm planning to add flowers, a blue 'sky' backdrop, fences and maybe a couple of bushes or trees. I took some other pictures for this post but they didn't come out very well, so I'm going to redo them over the weekend. I will probably not have time till then.

I'm currently playing Fallout 3, and it's really fun. I actually started playing last year and never really went past Megaton, which is like, one of the first areas you get to. I restarted again recently with a brand new character and I've been hooked. The world in all its ruin is an awesome place to explore, it's full of fifties inspired surroundings and the old fashioned music somehow really suits the post-apocalyptic feel of the game. Love it. Too much, because my right hand hurts now. The picture is a Rad-Away ad because I can't find my screenshots. :/

I also want to say that I just got a call from the local primary school for a relief teaching job on Thursday. YAY! Finally! I've been volunteering in schools for quite a long time, hoping to get noticed and get a call to come in. I'm a bit nervous about this assignment, and the nervousness will continue to grow as it gets nearer to the day. I got an assignment to do four hours in a kindergarten last week and I couldn't sleep the night before. :/ And I've been volunteering at that kindy every week for the last 1.5 years! I know all the kids and the routines! I don't know anything about the primary school's routines because I've never volunteered there. >_<I hope I do well. Can I have some prayers and good wishes? :D I hope that once I start really working for the schools I'll get more calls, especially next term (there's only two weeks left into this term). I'm going to go bother the other schools sometime this week to see if they have anything lined up for next term which I can hopefully do.

The Shoe Bunny Giveaway

2011-09-19T21:13:00.000+09:30

The Shoe Bunny is having an awesome giveaway over at her blog. I found out about it quite late, that's why I'm only posting about it now. There's still a day left and details are here:http://theshoebunny.blogspot.com/2011/08/100-followers-giveaway.html

Bread and Badgers

2011-09-04T02:17:00.003+09:30

Hugh: Daddy, I'm bored. Are we there yet? Where are we going anyway?

Benjamin: There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing.
Is it raining?
Is it snowing?
Is a hurricane a blowing?

Hugh: Dad...

Benjamin:Not a speck of light is showing
so the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of hell a glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes! The danger must be growing--

Hugh: DADDY! Stop being scary! We're not even near the river!

Bramble: Pfft, crazy badgers.
---

I've been working on some bread, both for my bakery and for Okasaneko. It's giving me a good practice so far. I'm also hoping that this project will start to give me enough incentive to get off my ass and start making things more often. I've wanted to make things for friends for a while now, but I've always procrastinated too much. Bad, bad, bad Pei. Bad. Here are the loaves that I've made; they're really basic items from Betsy's tutorial that I've made before, with a few modifications to the way the cuts on the short loaves look.

Since I've made these before and know the colour mixes you'd think it would taken less time than almost three hours to just make the basic shape and texture the bread! I think sometimes that I'm too picky and I keep redoing the bread if the cuts don't look right. They still don't look 100% right, but I think I should leave it as it is lest I knead more dust into them... Ugh dust! The bane of any clay miniaturist!

My previous project has not gone so well. I lack piping skills and these are the result.

Look at all those horrible smears! I kept wiping the icing off the cupcakes because they were the wrong size, off center or the swirl I was trying to do didn't work out. Modelling paste is so messy to wipe off. I think I only got one good one out of all of these. On the bright side, I like my new modelling paste a lot more than my old paste. It's not translucent for one and definitely more icing-like. I'll try to do a comparison tomorrow.

I haven't done anything to the orange slices and I've only given the cake a few coats of varnish. I've been trying to figure out the best way to decorate it--the way I had meant to do it looks kinda strange. As for the biscuits...

The cats didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but with a little more practice and a few more experiments I hope to have some really cute critters soon. I went with brown acrylic paint for the biscuits, but paint is so thin that you can still see all the texturing. The biscuits look more like they are really half chocolate biscuits than cream-coloured biscuits dipped in chocolate.

Walking the Dog

2011-08-25T23:01:00.004+09:30

Harold: Look at what I just got!

Barbara: You know, this situation seems a little odd for some reason.

Daisy: Yeah...

Harold: What? Nah, look at him! Isn't he just a cutie? Well, maybe he's a little bug eyed. His name is Mr. Puggles!

Mr. Puggles: Wuff! *drools*

Daisy: It's not really Mr. Puggles. Never mind, I think you two make a lovely pair. Take good care of him!

Harold: Okay! :D
---

I've already posted these pictures up on Flickr and the Sylvanian Families forums but I thought I'd stick them here as well to make up for my appalling lack of blogging activity. I've really neglected this blog this year, and I really want to get it up and updating on a more regular basis. I've decided to try to update at least once a week from now on.

I love how well the leash and dog fits scale-wise with Sylvanians. I wish Re-Ment still made flocked animals *sigh*. All of their recent ones have been carved, solid plastic. I think the fuzziness of the flocked creatures makes them extra cute!

WIP items and stuff

2011-08-09T00:04:00.004+09:30

I finally photographed some of my RE-Ment. (FYI: RE-Ment is a brand of Japanese mass produced miniatures, so I didn't make these!) I originally took this for the local country show but at the last minute decided not to enter. I didn't think it was good enough to be worth the effort and cost of entering, then paying to go into the show grounds and waiting till the end of the show to collect the photo. So pic goes on Flickr and this blog. It's been a while since I just photographed random toys and it was really quite enjoyable. I really need to start photographing more toys again; set ups are such fun!

This is another thing I was going to enter in the show but didn't.

It was going to be an orange themed tea setting. I was rushing to finish it because the deadline for the show entries was much earlier than I expected, but in the end decided not to enter for the reason above, and also the fact that finishing it on time was stressing me out (I'm not good at making clay items fast) and I had more important things I needed to finish (teaching materials prep).

The yellow cake is supposed to be an orange cheesecake, and the yellow didn't come out as deep as I wanted unfortunately. Maybe it'll be better as a lemon cheesecake? There are also white spots on it; I think they may be air bubbles. :( I made another one before this which has an orange top but I really don't like it.

I plan give the round biscuits and that pile of orange slices a 'dipped in chocolate' look. Right not I'm undecided whether to use acrylic paint or to use liquid clay. The star biscuits will either get a chocolate chip in the middle or something red. Maybe a nut instead? See first la.

I wanted to give those cupcakes a swirl of icing on the top and decided to try the air dry clay + PVA glue trick I found on Atelier Dolie. It didn't work so well for me. Once I think I added too much water and the piped icing wouldn't hold its shape and sank down into a shapeless blob. Next time I tried with less water and it just wouldn't come out of my icing tip. I think that this technique might be more suited to the larger tips used in Sweets Deco than my tiny PME 42C tip.

If anyone has any tips on what to use for piping cream, please let me know. Right now I'm just going to go back to using Josonja's Texture Paste until I can find a better alternative. Tiff of One Dessert Please recommends using Mont Marte Modelling Paste, and I'm going to see if I can find it locally. Hopefully it's a more brilliant white than the off white of my current paste.

I must talk about the little cat shaped cookies in the pic. I used this paper punch for the shape.

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I'm going to have to put a piece of tape over it because the black ink smudges. :( I first saw that punch on Snowfern's blog and immediately fell in love. I mean, what's there not to love--it's a cat with a giant head! Sooooo cuteeee!!! I didn't have much hope of finding it, especially living where I do and I had never seen it on ebay.

I found it on Etsy. I wubs my kitty cat punch <3 Now if I can find the others in this series...the stars and the bunny are too adorable...

I think I've become totally addicted to mini paper punches.

I made this gingerbread house a while back, but never got around to decorating it.

Now I've picked it up again and I'm still wondering what to put on there. Maybe Ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif'll make it orange themed like everything else I have haha. And the pieces on the side is the chimney. I was rolling it between my fingers and trying to decide how to decorate it when it fell to pieces. Guess cheap superglue is not necessarily the best thing to be using. :P

Oh yeah, I got the plans for the house from Pine Studio, which has many great tutorials. Next time, I'll make my own plans. I like to link to my tutorial sources, I hope it's useful to others reading this blog. :)

Cakes and cupcakes

2011-08-05T15:15:00.004+09:30

I actually made these about two weeks ago but haven't been able to get good pictures. I still haven't but I'm kinda fed up now so I'm just sticking with these pictures.

A chocolate cake with strawberries and whipped cream and a black forest cake. I'm not happy with the strawberries, I think they don't look realistic enough. Another problem I'm having is with the piped cream bits on the black forest cake. I used acrylic texture paste as I felt that liquid polymer clay was too sticky and while the texture paste held the piped cream shape wonderfully the colour was wrong. I used liquid clay to ice the rest of the cake and the piped cream bits are more of an off white. I'm going to try a trick I learned from another blog with some air dry clay and pva glue next, so we'll see how it goes. I've tried piping with this air dry clay before but only used water and it wouldn't stick to anything! I'm hoping that glue trick will work.

Another thing that bothers me is the cherries. They don't look real at all to me, and I think that partly that has to do with how round they are :P I'll put some indentations next time where the stalks are supposed to go. I bet that'll also help with the whole tiny balls rolling off and everywhere when I tried to get them in the oven.

I also made cupcakes for the first time.

I need to find something that will make a cupcake mold with those indentations to emulate cupcake cases. I used the end of a sushi soy sauce bottle, those cute ones that are shaped like fish. It was the only thing I had that satisfied me size wise. I also need more piping practice, I can't tell you how many times I wiped off the icing from those things! Or how much texture paste I wasted.I also ended up smearing texture paste all over the cupcake in the process btw.

Also, I took this pic for this thread: http://bsfforum.runboard.com/t2411

Orange treats and more resin updates

2011-07-15T20:20:00.006+09:30

Rosetti: Ooo, the desserts Bronte is making for the book club meet. Well, she has her back turned and I'm sure she won't miss a teeny little bite!

Bronte: I can hear you.

I haven't taken photos of my toys for such a long time. It feel great to set up a scene and take pictures of my Sylvanians again! I thought I'd use some of the new things I'd made too.

Here's a clearer picture:

I had been experimenting with orange canes so most of the things I've made recently have been orange themed. :P

The items in the top row are Valencian orange tarts, bottom left is an orange polenta cake drizzled with syrup and some kind of orange pudding.

I used resin for the syrup and it leaked down the cake and pudding enough to glue them to the tile I had. I managed to pull them off, luckily. Next time I'll try using gallery glass type paint. I'm not really pleased with the orange polenta cake, it looked far more pretty in my head!

Plates are Re-Ment and Megahouse.

Now, on to some resin updates:

The batch I was waiting for in the last update ended up being extremely disappointing. I did not mix the resin as thoroughly as it needed and my jam jars came out sticky and squishy. The top even came off of one when I was pulling it out of the mold. Also, some of the bottles came out deformed again.

I made up another batch and all save for one jar had some kind of major deformity. Ugh. Plus the colour was too light for strawberry jam.

This is the one perfect jar. Well, it looks lopsided in the picture, but it isn't, really.

I am slowly building up a nice collection of deformed jam jars.

Orange tarts, post office stuff, etc

2011-07-06T02:42:00.004+09:30

I thought I'd update the blog with what I've been doing lately. My original plan was to successfully complete my projects before updating (or nearly complete) but that just seems to have left the blog a bit dead. I should start taking more toy photos too...

I've been playing around with making orange canes lately. Very basic cane, and the first thing I ever tried to cane. I was following Angie Scarr's method but I didn't like the sharp edges that it would give. I used Zuleykha's tutorial to achieve that more rounded edge.

The left was my first attempt, unfortunately it ended up looking like the slices came from an unripe orange. Too much rind. That'll teach me for thinking that a thicker rind would look better! My second attempt is on the right.

I decided to make some Valencian orange tarts with the slices. I needed to use them for something, and those tarts looked like they would use up lots of oranges! (Especially the cane I didn't like)

I am still having trouble with making tart bases that I am satisfied with. These don't really look all that realistic to me.

After putting it off for so long (because for some reason I am afraid of starting strange and new things), I've finally made a shelf and noticeboard for my Sylvanian post office. I made the shelf out of balsa wood. It's the first time I've ever worked with wood, and I'm quite pleased with the attempt! Balsa wood may be really soft and not really the best thing to be making furniture out off, but it was easy to cut. :P The noticeboard is made of matchsticks, some cork paper peeled off the back of a painted tile I found at a jumble sale and a bit of card stock. I am actually quite pleased with the results! Asides from the accidental glue stains caused by gluing shelf parts backwards and general carelessness that is.

I've also finally come up with some resin molds that I am reasonable satisfied with. It doesn't look it but it took a long time to make this mold! I'll do a full update http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifpost once the jars have been cured.

My circular Kemper cutters arrived yesterday!

I'm so happy. I finally broke down and ordered them because my own crappy homemade cutters just didn't cut it (haw haw). I ordered some from Prairie Craft as all the sources I found for them in Australia have been quite expensive.

Resin experiments

2011-06-27T13:15:00.003+09:30

I've been experimenting with casting using a two part resin called Glass Coat. It's odourless which is great because I tend to work with resin indoors, in front of the computer. I'm using Oyumaru as my molding material and seeing how my molds turned out, I guess it's a good thing this material is cheap and reusable. :p

The object of my experiments is a miniature Sylvanian Families jam jar. Its default colour is a horrible solid grey (grey strawberry jam and marmalade? Bleah, that's some really off jam.) and painting the jars resulted in failure. I decided that I wanted a translucent look to my jars so casting copies in resin it was.

On the left is the original jar and the the two on the left are test casts I made to see how translucent the resin was. Looked pretty good to me despite the numerous bubbles in them. I just have to not stir so hard.

I made another mold and put the Oyumaru into a small plastic container before pushing the jam jars into it. I wanted a kind of uniform shape, rather like the one in this tutorial (She used silicone though).

I dripped some red acrylic paint in the resin mixture to dye it. The acrylic just would not dissolve properly, no matter how many times I stirred and poked at the individual lumps of paint. They just divided into lots of smaller lumps. I eventually ended up with a reasonably red batch of resin, but with many tiny flecks of paint throughout. The paint also ended up making the jars opaque after they cured.

Trying to remove the cured jars from the mold presented me with its own set of problems. Looks like Oyumaru is no where near as flexible as silicone. After many minutes of futilely trying to bend the thing I had to cut the molds open. Well, no prob, I can just make more molds right? It's not that har--

Oh. The molding material did not fill in the small area between the top of the lid and the bottle properly. Also, the edges of the lip seemed to be prone to catching bubbles which made dents after curing.

I bought a pack of oil paints and while there were still some tiny specks of undissolved paint, there weren't as big or numerous as the acrylic ones. I put too much paint in so it still looked rather opaque in the end. I tried a slightly different method of molding, but that didn't work out so well. The two halves are unequal in size. Detail was captured beautifully though!

These below are my second latest batch. My latest batch looks pretty similar actually, so I'm not going to photograph them. The tops have come out nicely, but I'm having trouble keeping the bottom half even. The trick with the top is to press the material hard with your fingers into the detailed regions. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well with the bottom as pockets of air tend to form or the material bulges out in unwanted places and distort the mold.

I have an idea on what to do next so we'll see how that goes.

Caldari Kestrel Papercraft

2011-05-28T01:59:00.004+09:30

Wow, I can't believe I haven't posted in a month! It honestly doesn't feel like that long. And I've removed the chat box. Too many spammers keep posting there. Sorry Puppy!

I haven't been focusing on my clay and building modifications lately. Instead, I've been working on a Caldari Kestrel papercraft for the hubby.

This template was definitely not created with the intention of releasing it to the public, I don't think. It feels more like a model that was unfolded in Pepakura Designer and had minimal edits done to it. The creator released the template on the EVE forums anyway, after he posted pictures of his awesome ships.

This template has 33 pages, filled with tiny fiddly bits. X_X The project has turned out to be a lot more time consuming than I had expected. A LOT.

Well, I'm slowly getting there. I think I have about 6 pages of parts left to cuthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif out (I hope) and then after that there will be all the folding and the figuring out of how to fit each fiddly bit onto the other fiddly bits. I'm glad Pepakura Viewer tells you where everything goes!

Post office sign and awning applied

2011-04-26T16:41:00.002+09:30

I quite like it. Not perfect, but eh. :)

Now I need to make a post card rack, village notice board, letter sorting rack, scanning and fixing the two post office books that came with the building and the welcome mat. It would be nice if I could get a set of scales for the back too.

I think I'll make the post card and letter sorting racks out of some balsa wood I have. I don't have any piece of Sylvanian furniture that will do the trick, unfortunately. I hope I can find some cork paper for the notice board, but if I can't I'll just print out a cork board texture. Not really looking forward to redesigning the two books, I'm a little fed up with messing about in Photoshop for now. As for the welcome mat, I'll just cheat and print that one out instead of looking all over for a mini one. We'll see how that works out.

Post office sign and awning updates

2011-04-25T18:56:00.004+09:30

This post will be more of a work process journal than anything, just in case I need to refer to it again. I am by no means proficient at photoshop so this is just me fumbling around till everything looks ok.

I scanned in the original awning of the post office with the intent of tracing it in order to make a template.

Unfortunately the edges were quite uneven as I found out. It might be because of the wear and tear on it (it's an old second hand one after all) or because it was really that uneven anyway, and the patterns on it just served to hide it. The unevenness was really obvious in my traced template so I gave up tracing a few waves in. I wasn't so hot at tracing either, so I figured that some of the unevenness could be chalked down to me.

I ended up just selecting the white outside area, inverting the selection and then filling the gap with the colour I wanted. Nope, still uneven. And I still had to trace too, if I wanted to put gold edging on the wavy bit.

Yeah, not so great. I ended up just drawing my own edges and learnt how to draw wavy lines with the pen tool. I drew that thing on the upper left of the picture below and just copied and pasted it over and over until I had the edge I wanted. Then I filled in the gaps with colour.

I've decided to use 'Sylvania Post Office' on the sign after asking around in the Sylvanian forums. 'The Post Office' was just too strange, despite being what was written on the original sign. I've also set the gradient to 'reflected' instead of 'radial' so there isn't that single spot of light in the middle of the sign. It had the effect of lightening the red too, which I'm happy with. Both the sign and the awning have been run through the texturiser but it's not really visible in these resized pics.

All I have to do now is print it and see if it looks any good on the building. I'm hoping it does. I don't really want to have to redo anything.

Redesigning post office signs, Volcaloid, A Game of Thrones blabbering

2011-04-22T01:01:00.009+09:30

In between bouts of brainrotting reading junk on internet forums I've been working on redesigning the Sylvanian post office sign while listening to various Volcaloid songs. I actually quite like some of them. I guess the whole 'robot voice' thing doesn't get to me as much because the songs are in Japanese. The English Volcaloids are quite hard for me to listen to. My current favourite is the retelling of The Little Mermaid story sung by Luka. It's so soft and sweet, and evokes the air of tragedy that the original tale has. I like her voice so much more than Miku's, it's not as 'cutesy' and high pitched. Although I do like 'World is Mine' by Miku. Also, the ASK covers! Love em! His voice is so sexy XD~

Ahem. About that post office sign. This is the original:

I scanned it and traced the outline to use as a template. All I've really been doing after that is looking up various tutorials and downloading brushes. Here are my attempts--the ones I saved anyway.

The first one was what I came up with before thinking to look for tuts. It didn't look very much better than the original. The others are the products of various tutorials and as you can see, some of the tutorials didn't work out so well for me. The fourth one is currently the closest to what I'm after, but there's still more work to be done before I print out a final version. I'm thinking of a golden border or at least something to fill in the empty spaces on the sides but I don't want it to look too ornate and overdone. I used this tutorial here.

I recently watched the first ep of A Game of Thrones.

I've been a fan of the books for a few years (Especially A Storm of Swords!). So far I absolutely love the casting! The actors and actresses have done an awesome job at portraying their respective characters so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season! And love the pups. So big, fat and cute. Sean Bean didn't actually match up to my mental image of Ned Stark when I first saw the teaser pics--his face looked too chubby. But he manages to pull off the character really well so no complaints there!

And I totally had an internal *SQUEEE* fangirl moment when I saw the Wall. Castle Black, YAAAAAAAAY!

I had an unfortunate moment where I forgot all about the existence of the Godswood and all I could think off when I saw this shot of Winterfell that the big red thing on the side looked like a giant toadstool.

I really hope GRRM finishes his book and releases it by the promised date. Too many fans already believe that the fifth book is never going to happen.

Post office update pics and paper punches

2011-04-14T00:51:00.004+09:30

I've recently finished the post office shingles. (Done while marathoning Ghost Whisperer season 3 :p Watching that Bloody Mary episode alone in the middle of the night gave me a case of the heebie jeebies. Gah, mirrors! =_=)

I used sandpaper spray painted red and then inexpertly 'weathered' with acrylics. I'm not really sure of the look to be honest, but it sure looks a heck of a lot better with the shingles weathered a bit. It now looks less like paper chicken feathers. I don't know, the unpainted shingles reminded me of chicken feathers for some reason.

I'm now working on the sign and the awning. I've scanned in the original sign and traced it in photoshop. I'm trying to go for a vintage style sign, something with a bit of a Victorian flavour, maybe? I'm having a hard time coming up with something that looks nice, to be honest. Most of what I'm doing now is researching vintage shop signs and looking for photoshop tutorials that will help me do what I want. What I've done at the moment doesn't look any better than the old sign.

On to other news:

I bought these on ebay a week ago and they've just arrived! I've not felt so excited about a purchase for a while XD. They are just lovely. I thought I was going to get a number of repeats of the ones I already have, but upon closer inspection, the punches are actually quite different, they just have the same theme as the others. The new teddy bear punch in particular has wider paws and is larger.

The ebay listing for this set stated that they were about 10 years old, but they look brand new. Some of the punches are a little stiff, but loosen up after a few presses. I tested the bunny punch on some paper and it wasn't always easy to get it to punch through. It works fine on clay though, which is fine by me as that's all I wanted these punches for anyway. Look forward to seeing more cookies! Though, in a 1:12 scale these will be rather large cookies. They'll probably look good enough with Sylvanians though.

I'm really pleased the set included a mini circle shaped punch. I've been looking for a small circular punch for ages! I'm going to start making cupcake liners again, the last ones I did (for the Totoro cream puffs) I drew circles with a felt tipped pen cap and cut them out manually.

And just so they're not left out, here are the punches I got when I was in Brunei (except for the green double punch, I got that in Adelaide). They're what I've been using to make the cookies in my previous posts. I had to put some clear sticky tape across the top as the designs smear when you use the punches, as found out from that girl person punch. Not the best quality overall, but they do what I want.

Project progress updates

2011-04-06T22:08:00.005+09:30

I've been working on the cookies, and mushing up clay to make icing is hand killing work. I hope that the liquid clay will keep well in the small ziploc bags I'm using to store them. I don't really want to have to squish up new clay every time I want some icing. I think I watched an entire episode of Midsomer Murders while making brown icing.

I'm currently using sticky tape to hold down the cookies. It's much easier to work on them now--they were hard to hold down with my fingernails (I did that when I was brushing chalk pastel onto them).

I'm having a few problems with my clay, it seems to bubble when I bake them so my icing ends up a little lumpy. Asking at the CDHM forums seem to indicate it may be the result of the brand of clay I'm using? Oh well, it's not really noticeable, especially after the designs are put on so I'm just going to continue with the Ozzle + Fimo mix I'm currently using.

I also need to clean up that star. I was trying to make curly designs like on that butter fly, but couldn't make it and changed halfway to slightly curved lines meeting in the middle instead, hence the smudges.

Today, I iced some chocolate covered teddy bear cookies. I put them in a little container and put that into my bag to take home to bake, since I didn't have an oven where I was. Somehow the bag got put on its side and the poor teddy ended up getting mooshed against the container lol. One got stuck upside down on the back of the one in front. At least it'll be easy to clean the design off and start again.

Also, I'm making progress with my Sylvanian post office! I wanted a little building that was brown and had some wood-like texture to it. I love the wallpaper, it looks perfect for the post office! Not too strong a design with an overall creamy colour. I just wish it had been offered at a higher resolution though, you can see the pixelation if you look up close.

Now I'm working on the roof shingles, redesigning the sign and the awning. After that I'm thinking of a little shelf or table where things like writing paper and postcards can be put for sale, a village bulletin board and a letter sorting shelf. I'm also considering moving a set of scales to the window where the packages are. I'm also thinking that I should gloss up the floors more, because floorboards are ususally glossy, right? :p and maybe even the rest of the building itself.

Some current projects

2011-03-25T20:46:00.001+10:30

I'm currently working on some mini clay cookies. These took longer than I expected, most of it was due to me being too picky and texturing and colouring both sides of the cookies, despite the fact I was planning to ice over the fronts. Tiny clay pieces are a pain to hold still while you colour them!

I used my new mini paper punches for these. I love them! I can't get things like these locally, I got them when I went back to Brunei. So cheap too, about SGD 1.80 each! I want to move back to Brunei =A=;;; Or at least back to a city. I am 100% a city girl!

Here's the other project I'm working on:

I'm repainting a little Sylvanian shop building. It's the post office I posted about a few months back. I have about four buildings of this type and I'm aiming to create a little Sylvanian main street on a shelf. I'm going to repaint each one in different colours.

Blog neglect

2011-03-22T19:29:00.002+10:30

I've been neglecting this blog and my flickr for way too long. I have a number of projects and life events going on simultaneously and haven't been doing as much as I should. I have big plans for all the second hand, bargain bin and bootleg toy buildings I've picked up! I've picked up enough buildings that I've actually run out of shelf space... -_- I'm trying to organise my shelves so I can display most of what I have. I many have to get a new shelf but that means rearranging the room to make more space. I have a very, very small hobby room. It's half of a full sized room that had a wall put up to divide it. Well, at least I have a hobby/reading room! Anyway, don't know how long I will take to complete any of the projects I have but we'll see.

Pics of furnished house

2011-03-06T02:02:00.003+10:30

After a long hiatus, I've finally uploaded pics of the wallpapered and furnished house. It's furnished with a mixture of Sylvanian and Re-Ment furniture. This post is mostly copied verbatim from the Sylvanian Families forum.

The little attic area. The shelf will be filled with books once I get around to repainting and redoing the covers of the default books. Maybe I'll even make my own. :P I want this to be a cozy little reading area. :)

The bedroom. It looks a little empty in the middle, I think it could do with a little rug or something.

I'm mostly satisfied with the kitchen, except I think the wallpaper looks a little weird. I may change that later.

Here's the hallway, please excuse the dust! I've dusted it but the dust shows up anyway. I think the hallway needs a little something, maybe a shoe rack or an umbrella stand.

This is where the cafe area will be, I still need to make a bakery case and a counter top for it.

That's all for now!

Back in Oz

2011-02-20T18:43:00.003+10:30

Back from vacation! I haven't posted here yet because I'm still in the process of unpacking and tidying up all the stuff I got. I'll be taking pictures of my wallpapered and furnished dollhouse in the next few days.

Brawling Bears

2011-01-22T20:02:00.003+10:30

I was pretty disappointed by the Cooking with Teddy Re-Ment set (too few items, items bigger than I like) until I found out I could pose the teddies like this. Rawr! Teddy punch out!

Strawberry slices and raspberries

2011-01-21T22:57:00.004+10:30

I made my first strawberry cane! (the matchstick in the photo is for size reference--I think I shall use a ruler next time) It came out a lot better than I thought it would, especially with the way the cane was looking when I reduced it (all thick ugly white lines). I did end up wasting a lot of clay trying to get the Skinner blend (the graduating red -> white colour effect) right though. I kept getting white streaks in my blends. I had to dig out all the white clay that kept getting caught in my pasta machine after each roll through.

I also made raspberries for the first time ever! I've found a couple of tutorials on the net for making raspberries, but neither worked for me due to the lack of materials. Eventually, I just pressed red microbeads into a small lump of red clay and poked a hole in it to simulate a raspberry. I think it ended up looking quite okay, but if any one has any tips on creating mini raspberries without the use of casting silicone or liquid air dry clay, let me know!

Now, to make a kiwi cane that isn't full of fail like the last one...

The Proposal

2011-01-15T15:08:00.002+10:30

Bronte has just met the man of her dreams and she's not about to let him get away!

Bronte: Here's a flower. I like you. There I said it, now you have to marry me or I'll die of shame.

Rosetti: Er... This is kind of sudden...

---

First time trying out a Lomo style effect on the photo. I think it's a bit too dark, but it doesn't look too bad to me. :) It's really the first time I've done anything with a photo asides from cropping and resizing and maybe small touch ups. I used this tutorial.

I also posted up a hedgehog and vole comparison on the Sylvanian Families forums. They're the same mold, but a different shade of brown. The voles are like little bald hedgehogs lol.

I actually hadn't realized they were voles, I had thought they were brown moles. Flair should have added at least a tail to the voles to differentiate them from the moles and to make them more accurate!

Catrionasfailed posted a picture of a water vole on the forums and I think that this is what Flair was going for. All the other voles looked more like mice.

New minor repaints and a new layout

2011-01-13T19:19:00.002+10:30

I didn't like the colour of the original Sylvanian books. They are a solid grey, rather like the cans in my previous post. So I repainted them. The result is not as even as I would have liked, but they do look better! And they look nicer in person as opposed to close up. You can't see all the flaws so clearly then!

Painted the tops of the bottles too. Again, lumpy painting.

Also changed the blog lay out to this one. It's more crowded, but I like it better. There are no problems with the sidebar headings Like I'd been having with the previous layout.

Various small mods

2011-01-05T21:08:00.005+10:30

Woo! First post of 2011! XD (I actually wrote 2010 and had to go back and edit it =A=)

This post is almost a duplicate of a small mods thread I just posted on the Sylvanian Families message board. It just contains more blah blahing here. I thought I'd show my Sylvanian mods on my blog too!

I got a PC Bobby Roberts bike with a secondhand post office building I bought and decided to repaint it and turn it into a postman's bike. I'm quite happy with the way the colour scheme's worked out, but it's still a bit sticky now. I originally tried to paint the spokes on the tyres with silver acrylics, but it looked so uneven and clumpy in the end that I took off all the paint and some of the black tyre paint as well. That was unexpected, as I thought that black was the default colour of the plastic. Turns out the plastic is the same default colour as the original body of the bike--blue. I spray painted the tyres chrome and then painted on the black by hand with some enamel Tamiya paint that William gave me. The fumes...

Before:

After:

I also spray painted the cans that came with my Sylvanian Village bakery chrome as I didn't like the default dull grey colour. The scratches on the top are from me trying to sand the seam lines down. Didn't work very well... I think I'd been using sandpaper that was too coarse on it. Well, lesson learnt!

Before:

After:

I also painted the tops of these bottles from the reissued green vanity. Originally they were one solid colour. Solid colours tend to make things look more plasticky and cheap IMHO.

Eos the Steampunk Pullip

2010-12-22T01:41:00.010+10:30

The Steampunk Pullip I won in the Pinky St Gothic-Noir-Steampunk contest (warning: image heavy) is here! Well, actually she arrived about a week ago, but I hadn't been able to take photos due to the weather. It was unexpectedly fast shipping from Hawaii!

The box was so pretty and pristine I didn't want to damage it, but with so many of the doll accessories taped so strongly to the insides, I ended up tearing parts of the interior in order to get them out. Boo...

She's a limited edition of 2000 (that means she's really not all that limited :P) and the little slip of paper in her box informed me that I got no. 1181/2000.

My first Pullip ever! I've seen Pullips all over the internet and never really thought I'd own one. For one thing, I could never afford one (due to spending all my monies elsewhere cough *Sylvanians*cough*Pinky St*cough*clay* and the Pullip aesthetic never really appealed to me. I mean, I thought some of them looked very nice but I was thinking I'd get a blank obitsu head and body to customise and make my own doll with at some point instead of getting into Pullips.

Then Eos arrived, and I'm absolutely amazed by how ethereal her face up looks in person. I'd picked her mainly because her face up looked pretty in the pictures, but it's even more amazing in person. Now I'm tempted by other Pullips. I like Shinku... and a number of others...

Her steampunk gear is amazing too. She has a gun and a staff. The staff seems to be part iron rod and part shower head. The gun has faucets on it too. I love that attention to detail, it implies that everything's been bashed together from junk found in the trash heap into something useful.

All the clothing is extremely detailed, when I was taking off her clothes so I could wash and condition her hair, I kept looking for the velcro fastening her clothes, like with barbie clothes. She had no velcro, it was all nicely done metal clasps and hooks. She also comes with a pair of black gloves and some elbow guards, but they're not pictured as I don't like the gloves and the elbow guards don't look very good without them.

She also comes with a hat studded with random bits and bobs, an eye piece and wings. I don't actually like the way her wings fit onto Eos, it sticks straight out from her back. I would have preferred something that spread out more to the sides.

As lovely as this doll is, it suffers from some quality issues. Eos is notorious for having a bad, frizzy wig and having bits fall off her stock. Her wings are fragile and easily breakable, and her left arm tends to pop off.

I've washed and conditioned the wig for about two hours, but her hair's starting to get stiff and frizzy again. I think I may have to condition it some more. Or get her a new wig. This South Australian dry weather probably doesn't help much.

This is the bit that I'm quite annoyed about--after deboxing the Pullip and not having stock bits fall off her, I thought my dolly had escaped that particular fate. Then parts started to fall off her eye piece on the second day. Well, I'd been warned to expect that, so no biggie, I glued them back. Then I noticed this:

Two of the screw on thingys had disappeared!!! The bit at the top is what it's supposed to look like. I hadn't even noticed that they'd disappeared, so I have no idea when they dropped off. I don't even know if they were even there in the first place! I've looked everywhere for them and I'd only taken Eos to my room and the lounge room when I noticed they were missing, and they are no where to be seen.

I wonder if Groove can send replacement parts? I have no idea how to contact them though... :( I may have to just find something else to put on there.

I still think Eos is a gorgeous doll and I'm happy to have her though :) I'm also kinda tempted by the rest of the steampunk gang...

Another post office building

2010-12-14T23:51:00.003+10:30

This little thing just arrived today! I Ordered it from Sylvanian Heaven some weeks ago. I may have overpaid again -_- Anyway, I'm actually pretty happy with this one. The condition of the items in it were much, much better than I thought they'd be. I even found a surprise stack of mini postcards and letters in the mailbox!

This post office is definitely in a far better condition than the previous post office I got from them. I think I paid about the same price too -_-;; The downside is, while I'm perfectly willing to wreak nasty experimental modifications upon the other one, I'm a bit reluctant to touch this one. Guh...

Here's how the other post office looks like now. I've stripped off all the paper and stickers and am considering the best way to make roof shingles.

One of the window parts is missing from it, and some enterprising previous owner had decided to glue the remaining window part to the middle of the frame. =A=;;

I've yanked it out and am now trying to figure out the best thing to do for the window. Should I leave it as it is? Should I try and cast another window piece? Welp, I'll have to mull over it a bit.

I like these little buildings because they're small and take up so little space. I can make a little street of shops with these :D. I have another two on the way, and I think I'll stop with that. Won't have enough space on the shelf for more. I also really like the fact that the roofs come off, it'll be great for photographing the insides!

[Entering whinge mode]

In other non-toy related news, I feel so 'meh'. I've just realised that Christmas is next week. I don't want to celebrate it. I don't enjoy the santa reindeer etc atmosphere and I don't like the food. It's all alien. I want to go home, back to Brunei or Malaysia. I want to be fit again, with nice shady hills to climb and exercise on instead of these windy plains that are either too cold or too bright and sunny. There's no ozone layer here. No trees to shade me on my walking route either. I want to have friends I can go kai kai with, and have friends I can stay up all night watching reality tv and other crap with.

I have too many things I want to do now, and no motivation. My lack of motivation has to do in part with the fact that I don't know where to start. I keep feeling like I should be doing something else when I do something. There are things I want to do for other people, and many more that I want and need to do for myself. Should I start making my family's paper Christmas gifts? Or should I finally read that driving rules booklet that I've been putting off for so long? I'll need to drive in February. Hopefully. If I manage to get a job. I hate cars, gigantic trucks and highways. They scare me.

Bah...

[end whinging]

Speaking of wins...

2010-12-05T21:29:00.009+10:30

I also won Okasaneko's 3rd Blog Anniversary Giveaway a few weeks ago. Okasaneko's a collector from the Philippines, and definitely a nice lady! Her son, Alphonse, is in hospital now for dengue fever and it's a tough time for him and his family. I've been reading updates on her blog and following her fb and praying for him to get better.

Here's a pic of the 25th Anniversary Baby Pair I got from Okasaneko:

So cute! My hubby says the little squirrel looks rather hairy chinned. The light marking around its mouth doesn't really help, it makes the baby look like it has beard stubble.

I also got some more Sylvanian stuff from the almighty intarwebs. Here's one of them, a 2nd hand post office from Sylvanian Heaven. I probably over paid for this, but I really wanted the building. I'm trying to create a street of shops and stuff on the shelf in my hobby room. Also, this means that my postman bear now has a place to live.

I'm going to repaint it, the bike, make some shelves and anything else that's needed. After taking this picture, I ripped off the paper on the roof, and I'm going to do that to the awning too. Nyohohoho!

I won the Pinky St Contest!

2010-12-03T01:21:00.007+10:30

Wow, I actually won the Pinky St Contest (link is really pic heavy and contains all the entries btw). My entry is no. 9, Wings aka The Flying Doohickey Contest. I really hadn't expected to win. I got really lightheaded when I saw the results...:P I really expected entry no. 11, The Printing Supply Thief to win, because I thought it was cool, had a clever story and the props were great!

I admit that I hadn't finished editing my entry in Photoshop to the extent that I was satisfied with it, but by then it was already 5 mins to the deadline... I did spend massive amounts of time and energy on the entry though, creating the props and looking for suitable textures and pictures to create backdrops with, etc. Even ended up with back pain from hunching over things for so long... but it was worth it! XD

I learned a few things from this contest. I learned that if you try to create nearly all the props and backdrops from scratch, it really takes a lot longer than you think it will take. A LOT LONGER. Like, if I think it'll take me X amount of time to finish, it'll really take X x5 amount of time or something silly. I've also learned that I'm apparently good at bashing up random objects out of paper and styrofoam if I stop thinking and let my hands do the work.

Anyway, enough rambling, here's the prize!

Steampunk Pullip Eos

She's gorgeously steampunk XD She's also apparently a limited edition release of about 2000, I think. And she retails on Pullip Style for USD 145, and even more on ebay. Whoa, I hadn't realised she was quite THAT expensive. Eos will be my first Pullip ever. I could never afford Pullips (mostly because I spend all my money on Sylvanian Families and Pinky St junk).

I'm so full of glee now that the shock has worn off and I also feel quite embarrassed and undeserving actually ^^;; *runs around in circles squeeing anyway*

Bread experiments

2010-11-29T01:35:00.010+10:30

I made some bread over the past few days to replace the awful, awful looking baked goods that came with my Sylvanian Village Bakery. I'm not sure I've been entirely successful. I don't really like the look of my bread, but I think that the short loaves in the middle with the little cuts in them look okay. I still haven't been able to make my bread look as realistic as I like. Also, on the right are my attempts at the 'flour dusted loaf'. Er... yeah... not quite a success yet. But I'll keep trying!

My baguettes are also too fat for their height. I admit, I really don't know bread. I grew up just eating supermarket white bread, and the occasional pandan flavoured loaf. Bread just wasn't a big part of my home food life. It wasn't until I came to Australia last year that I saw a bakery with flour dusted loaves. Maybe there were some in Brunei too, but I never really paid much attention, heh. To me bakeries were all about the curry puffs and yam basket pastries.

My chalk pastel tends to rub off the things I make. I had to seal the bread with varnish to make sure nothing would come off and stain the paper on my bakery shelves. I have no idea why, chalk pastel is supposed to bake into the clay and not come off. Someone suggested maybe it was cheap pastels? I don't think so though, because I know of two prominent artists who use the same brands of pastels that I do. I'm starting to wonder if my oven thermometer's lying to me and my oven's still not hot enough. -_- Aiyeeee... I guess for now I'll continue varnishing my minis. At least the pastel can't come off after that.

I posted a review of my Sylvanian School Master's set on the Sylvanian Families forums.

One of my favourite sets! I'm glad I managed to get it from the second round of BeHappy's budget items offer. I'd missed it during the first round.

My favourite items have got to be these:

I mean look at them! Mini flasks and test tubes *squees* I'm going to have to cast the test tubes in resin to see if I can make some with coloured 'chemicals' inside them.

My next favourite item is the chalk box with the individual pieces of chalk.

They fit perfectly on the blackboard of my little mini school XD That bottle on the far right is apparently a bunsen burner. I would have included it in the picture of the test tubes if I had realised. I thought it was ink or correction fluid or something.

More loot

2010-11-16T23:21:00.006+10:30

I'm greedy...

I bought some more toys when BeHappy added more things to their budget corner. Some of these are kinda rare, and to get them at the price I did, I'm really happy. These would have cost a lot more had I paid full price or ebay prices on them. I've been opening them slowly, a few ever other day so I don't get overwhelmed and it feels like I'm getting a present every few days XD It's an awesome feeling.

I'm glad I got that kitchen set on the upper left. I'd been having some problems fitting my existing kitchens in the house I repainted, and this new kitchen fitted perfectly. :) I wouldn't have bought that kitchen if it hadn't been on sale. I already have too many kitchens -_-

My husband also bought me the Sylvanian Village Bakery, something I've wanted since I first saw it a few years ago. We got it NRFB from within Australia and at below retail price, so I'm really happy. It's even more awesome than I thought it would be! I was so giddy with glee when I unboxed it. Granted, it does have its flaws, but I love it just the same.

Now that the Pinky St contest is over, I'll have more time for my other projects. I'm going to give the bakery a slight over haul and hopefully touch it up enough for it to look more realistic. I've already started remodelling some of the smaller items from the bakery like the cans, which were a bland matte plasticky gray. I just spray painted it chrome. I'm working on that jam jars now which have the same plasticky problem.

I haven't been in the best of moods lately, and one of the reasons is that a Sylvanian I bought recently turned out to be damaged. I didn't want to talk about this publicly as I didn't want to bring bad publicity to the seller as it really isn't their fault, but after thinking about it I doubt I'd do much if any damage at all.

I bought a Sylvanian dog teacher set which came with a little mini school house and a dog teacher figurine. There were three of them at the seller's shop and they were listed at a discount because of damaged packaging. You're allowed to choose exactly which box you want. Just my luck, I chose the one where the figurine had somehow had parts of its flocking melted off onto the packaging surrounding it. I think exposure to light and reactions with the plastic packaging did it. :(

I contacted the sellers about it and they were good enough to offer me a similar figurine as compensation. This figure is the maron dog mother, and they suggested that I could swap out the the dress she comes in for the dog teacher's clothing as the figures were 'the same'.

The figures are not the same though, the dog teacher is a darker colour, has a thinner head and is slightly smaller than the mother. Not very huge differences and many people wouldn't even notice, to be honest, but the differences would bother me, I think.

Also I already have an extra maron mother dog--I bought that the first time I got stuff from them. I've decided to ask them if I could get another different figure from their budget corner instead.

My dog teacher with accessories from another set that I'm gonna review in a few days. The damage is on the back and on the other side of his face.

I'm looking for ways to disguise the damage on the dog's face now, I was considering bandages :P

Okasaneko's Blog Giveaway

2010-11-07T14:58:00.006+10:30

This post is for Okasaneko Chronicles's Blog Giveaway for the blog's 3rd anniversary. I've been reading her blog for the past few weeks, and it's cute, insightful and inspirational. I'm not really good at describing this, so why don't you head over and see for yourself :)

Loot :P

2010-11-03T22:48:00.003+10:30

I had intended on updating earlier, and now it's November :/ I've wallpapered the house, but I'm not really satisfied with the way it looks and am considering re-papering the kitchen. Wallpapering is amazingly time consuming. Making the initial templates with strips of paper, then using those to make sturdier templates with card stock. After that trimming the cutout wallpaper pieces in order to make them fit better. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but I haven't thought of it yet...

The dollhouse project is on hold while I prepare for the Pinky St contest. I hope I get my entry done on time :s Deadline's the 11th.Too much procrastination from this person.

Anyway I wanted to blog about my recent acquisitions :D

My hubby got me some Re-Ment for my birthday from Angolz. I will never choose that site to shop from again. =_= Their customer service is HORRIBLE. They take days to answer enquiries or tell you something is out of stock, list things that are unavailable as being available, and then fail to give the correct refund amount back, and neglect to adjust shipping as required. They still owe the hubby $5 but he's sick of chasing them around so he's letting it go. Angolz is dodgy as hell.

I'm going to have to take better more detailed photos of the sets after the Pinky contest :P

I got the European Grandma and Cooking with Teddy sets! I'm really happy with the European Grandma set, it's awesome! I love all the little utensils, pots, cans and plates. My only complaint is that some of the items may be a little on the large side.

The Teddy set disappointed me a little. There seems to be less items per set, and some of the items on the bears are not removable.

I got a pile of Sylvanian stuff from the budget corner of BeHappy. This area of the store stocks items that have had their boxes damaged, items missing or the product itself damaged in some way at a discounted price. Some of the discounts are really good, and I chuck the boxes most of the time anyway. I didn't get everything I wanted, but I got quite a good chunk anyway.

The customer service at BeHappy's really good, they answer emails really fast and are polite and friendly. They are even sending me another Sylvanian polar bear because they sent me the wrong one. Honestly, I hadn't even noticed. They were identical damaged sets, and only the damaged spots were different. I love BeHappy!

All this stuff is making me feel really, really spoiled and greedy =_= I feel rather guilty for spending this much money and for asking for such an expensive present, even though the hubby says it's okay... :/ Actually, I feel best when I'm modifying or creating something and it turns out good. There's nothing like the satisfaction of completing a project and seeing the thing you've envisioned in your mind in good solid reality. I also don't feel so bad about the money I've spent when it's for a project. I feel like I'm really putting the money to good use. Just collecting makes me feel rather guilty. Looks like I'm gonna have to modify some of the things I just bought! JI wish I could find second hand cheap Sylvanian doll houses in Lincoln. Like in the op shop or in a garage sale or something. That would be awesome.

Repaint done!

2010-10-11T17:05:00.009+10:30

The main repainting portion of the house is done! I spent a good chunk of last night bashing the walls into the floor wit ha tent peg (I couldn't find a hammer). The roof is currently loosely balanced on the top of the house as I want to create wallpaper templates for the top floor of the house first.

Top

Side

Inside
It's really quite messy inside, with all the paint sloppily outside of the protruding bits. Good thing wallpaper will cover it up.

It's also really quite dark. The hubby and I were talking about putting some led lights in there eventually.

I'm really pleased with the way it came out. It actually almost looks like wood! The overall colour scheme came out rather on the dark side, but eh. I'm wondering if I should have left the railings white or painted them a lighter colour.

There are still lots of things to be done, wallpapering, creating a bakery case, food, counter, mini tables (I really should have bougth those mini popsticks I saw in Adelaide), umbrellas, a pond, some shrubbery... And maybe I'll repaint that veggie patch bootleg that came with the house. And those Sylvanian books! I need to paint those too!

Remodelling a bootleg and wip phone charms

2010-10-10T02:54:00.003+10:30

I've been in the process of remodeling a bootleg Sylvanian house on and off for about a year now. It's a bootleg of the JP Red Roofed House. I'm hoping to eventually make the bottom floor into a little cafe with an outdoor area and with living quarters on the upper floor.

It comes as a kit you have to put together yourself, which makes it much easier if you want to repaint it.

So far, I've repainted the floor, roof and doors with spray paint.

I've forgotten to take a proper picture of all the walls together so that'll have to wait till tomorrow.

I've repainted the walls with acrylics and attempted to create some sort of faux wood texture :P Not really sure what kind of wood it would be though, it was more a combination of whatever browns I managed to get my hands on. The building looked to me like it would be some sort of log cabin, so that was the effect I was aiming for.

I've since put on a clear coat of varnish over the pieces and hope to be able to put the house together and fix up any odds and ends tomorrow.

I actually like bootlegged furniture more sometimes, I can mess around with them without caring about potentially destroying them... And they're cheap. I'm hoping to do similar customisations to the new cheapo original but damaged awesome bargain stock of Sylvanian stuff I recently bought XD I can't wait till it arrives!

Lastly, some WIP turtle melon pan phone charms I'm making and hoping to sell on etsy once I manage to produce enough variety of stock to my satisfaction.

I have to come up with a nice, short and memorable etsy store name. I'm thinking of something to do with little slices of happiness or something, if that even makes any sense.

Totoro puffs and house pieces

2010-09-28T12:58:00.003+09:30

I made these in August. I took so many pictures of them and was never satisfied with any. These are miniature Totoro cream puffs based on these life sized ones: http://www.shiro-hige.com/ Each Totoro is about 1cm tall. Ai Li says I should make them slightly cross eyed rather than staring up and to the side.

Bits of the Sylvanian bootleg house repaint I've been working on for nearly a year now. So far it's coming along nicely.

1:3 turtle experiment

2010-09-11T23:39:00.004+09:30

This is my first venture into the world of 1:3 scaled items. This melon bread turtle was made with the assumption that real melon bread might be 12cm across. I have no idea how big melon bread is, really... Learnt a few things and ran into some problems while making this. I've always worked on a tile, but I've found it easier to measure things using a cutting board. My desk lamp didn't reflect light into my eyes as much either, with the more matte surface of the cutting board. Unfortunately I had to go back to using the tile as green colour from the cutting board stuck to the clay :( I guess it's what I get for using one I bought from the cheap shop. I originally bought that last year to cut out papercraft models on. Maybe one of my more expensive bigger boards won't stain the clay...

You can see in the pic where the chalk pastels have rubbed off the clay :( I thought that once you baked the colour into the clay, it wouldn't come off. I did test it out by rubbing the head and none of the colour seemed to come off, but after I put the turtle into the paper bag, the colour rubbed off in there!

Anyway, I gave the turtle to a girl I met at Link n' Learn. She has a 1:3 BJD. Woot.

Racketeer--I mean Recettear

2010-08-25T23:27:00.004+09:30

I downloaded a demo for an indie Japanese game called Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale a few days ago. I just had to blog about it, I so loved the premise.

You are a young girl named Recette. Your father has run off somewhere, and has left you with a huge debt you have no means to repay. So what can you do? Turn your house into an item shop! You know, one of those ones that are everywhere in jrpgs. It's bound to be lucrative, what with hordes of adventurers rushing into danger all the time. Together with your fairy debt collector, you work to rack up enough profit to pay back your father's debt on time. Miss a payment and you might find your house foreclosed upon and end up having to live in a cardboard box!

There are two parts to the game, one half revolves around buying and selling items (at a profit of course, the more profit the better!) to various townsfolk and adventurers

The other bit involves hiring some adventurers to go dungeon crawling together with to find more awesome items to sell at an awesomer profit. The more you progress through the game, the more options you unlock.

Finally! A game that appeals to my money hoarding instincts! I've always enjoyed racking up $$$ in jrpgs, there's something so satisfying about seeing those numbers go up and up. It's also interesting to play a game from the perspective of an item shopkeeper, a persona that essentially not even a background character in most games, but a kind of game prop.

As much as I love the premise, I find the main character's personality immensely tiresome. I also don't like the tutorials, they assume you don't have a working brain. The good thing about all this is that you can press the escape button to skip tutorials and entire in-game events. Yay!

Oyumaru review and lousy toaster ovens

2010-08-23T23:20:00.012+09:30

Here's the Oyumaru write up that was supposed to be here two weeks ago ^^;;

Oyumaru is a cheap, reusable molding material from Japan. (Now that Ai Li's said it, the sticks remind me of agar-agar and I wanna chew on them...) I bought a 7 stick pack for USD3.50 from ebay seller hinodewashi. Each stick is roughly 1.5cm wide and 6cm long.

I decided to start out using the orange stick because I don't like orange and thus wouldn't feel as bad about using one of those cute, chewy looking sticks :p. The Oyumaru feels a bit rubbery and is somewhat flexible.

I wanted to make a cupcake mold, so I used the end of this pen.

To become pliable, the Oyumaru needs to be placed in boiling water, so into the pot! It's recommended in the instructions that it sits in a temperature of 80 degrees celsius for 3 mins.The material went soft fairly quickly and I pulled it out with a pair of skewers.

As you can see, it's really soft and malleable in this picture. The material itself is not at all hot out of the boiling water, just warm. Be sure to shake off all the water from the piece though, THAT is hot. I didn't and burned my fingers :( The material goes stiff quickly out of water, so you have to work fast.

Making a mold of the pen end. Don't mind the homemade pop stick tools :P I just wanted my mold to be more even is all.

Ta-dah! A nice shiny new cupcake mold! Wait, there's something weird in the middle. Pif, I forgot to plug up that hole in the pen. Since Oyumaru is reusable, the material did not go to waste. I simply threw it back into the hot water again and repeated the process.

Here are some finished molds. The molds are not very flexible, but if you dust some talc powder or cornstarch into it, you clay should pop out all right. There might be some distortion during the process though.

I've not tried this material with resin but I will when I gather up enough courage to stop putting it off :/

Despite its limitations, Oyumaru seems like an okay molding material. It works if you're too poor or cheap (like me) to buy silicone and are willing to work around its limitations. I do like that I can reuse it if I made mistakes but the biggest downside for me is that baking with it is probably unadvisable, considering it turns all gooey and soft in hot water... I might try a workaround by boiling smaller clay pieces in it till they're hard enough to pop out of the mold without distortion and then baking them.

I'll definitely give silicone a go one day when I have more money :P

---

Toaster oven rant:

I've found out that my toaster oven is a lousy piece of crap. I put my shiny new oven thermometer in it and it shows me that my oven likes to heat up and up and continue heating up. I even turned the toaster oven dial to like 50 degrees, but the temperature kept rising after it hit the 50 degree mark. I turned off the oven after the temperature hit 140. Well, this explains why I burn my stuff and why people talk about baking things like those cookies I made earlier for 20 mins or so, where my test cookies burned after I left them in for more than 50 SECONDS.

I've also found out after doing some research that if the temperature is too high, the outside cooks faster than the inside, and may even burn while the clay inside remains raw. This can cause the plasticizers from the raw clay to eventually leech into the outer clay layer and cause it to break down eventually. Also I've noticed that lemon canes cooked in that higher heat tended to be more brittle than ones baked at the right temperatures.

Since I don't want to spend money to get another oven at the moment, I've been sitting in front of the oven and turning the oven off when the thermometer hits 140 degrees and turning it on again when it falls to 130.

Anyway, enough oven rants. I'll be posting up photos of my Totoro cream puffs soon, hopefully tomorrow. I've been trying to get a decent picture of them for days >_<

New stuff!

2010-08-06T16:50:00.008+09:30

I received my nice shiny new PME 42C icing tip in the mail a few days ago. I also bought a couple of others, the teeny round tip in Adelaide and the bigger star tip at a newsagent's. (Of all the things to sell at what is essentially a stationery/book/magazine shop...)

I experimented with the tips and acrylic texture paste a few nights ago and I'm pleased with the tips. They make such pretty patterns! I'm less impressed by my piping skills though. I definitely need more practice. What I wasn't prepared for when using the tips was the absolute mess the texture paste made. I had to use my finger to squeeze out the paste from the piping tips, and if I didn't put enough paste in, nothing would come out, but if I put more, the paste would come out of the top of the tips as well as the bottom when I applied pressure :/ I wish there was some way I could pipe the paste using the tips and a syringe, I find it easier to control the amount of pressure using a syringe, and it'd probably be less messy too...

I also got some new crafting supplies. I'd been looking for a cheap source of microbeads in online, but haven't really found any that satisfied me. On the way back from Adelaide, I found a $3 bag of mixed beads in Go-lo, which is a kind of dollar shop franchise. The smallest beads are about 1mm, yay! No idea if they're glass or plastic though...

I found the stars in another dollar store franchise,and the teeny little stars are about 2mm across. They're like glitter, they stick to everything!

The stuff on the right is fake sugar and fake ice from etsy seller, MiniatureSweet. I figure the sugar would look just about right if I tried to make those yummy danish butter cookies *drools*

Also from MiniatureSweet, I got a bunch of plates, glasses, cutlery and paper doilies. The fruit canes were free gifts. They are all too big for 1:12 scale, and the glasses and bowls are too big even for 1:6. Well, that'll teach me for looking at the sale description and going "That's about right!" without checking the sizes on a ruler.

I got some Oyumaru molding material. I bought it because it looked like it could be a cheaper alternative to silicone. It's a Japanese reusable mold making material, and I'll do a write up about it once I have a chance to try it out. Hopefully within these few days. I also got a cute cupcake eraser as a free gift from the seller :D

And I finally ordered an oven thermometer online after searching all over town for one without success. And wouldn't you know it, the day the thermometer arrives, I find another, smaller one in the local kitchen shop. I'm sure it wasn't there the last few times I checked!

Choc chip cookies!

2010-07-15T18:06:00.004+09:30

I made these cookies using Betsy Niederer's tutorial on the CDHM forums. It was pretty straightforward and simple, but whoa! So time consuming! I don't know if it's because I made as many cookies as I did or if it was because I insisted on colouring the bottoms as well. My back complained a lot last night.

I managed to burn three of the cookies when trying to figure out how long to pop them in the oven for. I finally settled on 40 seconds in the end. I think I need an oven thermometer. :< I have no idea how accurate my little toaster oven is.

The tea set is the Megahouse Forest Tea set that I got from Labuan :D I've recently realised how few plates and things like that I have... I love Re-Ment and Megahouse plates and tea sets <3 Need to get some more...at some point in the future...a distant point... :(

I think I'll try to make miniatures in playscale or something close to it. Scales confuse me because I'm usually not sure how big the original item's supposed to be in the first place.

Anyway, next project: gingerbread house!

And if you're wondering what happened to the pie i was working on, I made a lemon meringue that I'm not satisfied with so I stashed it away in a box.

Failed experiments

2010-06-30T16:46:00.005+09:30

What I've been up to for the past few weeks: lots of clay experimentation failure :P

From the left: Over cooked lemon canes, a failed attempt at making a bowl (I had made a few more, but I threw those away) an over cooked cake, something that was supposed to be a plate and a pie crust I can't get out of the bottle cap mold.The over baking is due to a misconception of what thickness meant.

Me: Bake for 10mins per cm of thickness. Well, long = same as thick! :D *burns clay and feels dumb*

I've since managed to cook my canes right, and I now know how to slice them without distorting the cane XD I just have to cook it first and then slice it before it cools down completely. Some people refrigerate or freeze their canes, but I've found that it doesn't work for me.

Clay is such a time consuming hobby. And a money consuming one. -_- Always seems to need some other kind of tool to achieve desired effect. Ball tools, brushes, chalk pastels, paint, acrylic texture paste, syringes, pasta machine, molding silicone, two part resin, miniature dishes, etc etc. I ain't rich enough to get all of that! My hands are sore from rolling clay that has become hard due to the cold weather. Ugh, I want a pasta machine...

I've also been working on painting my other dollhouse. It's coming along, slowly!

Toys, toys, toys!

2010-06-04T22:47:00.008+09:30

I remember liking miniatures even as a little kid. I remember one birthday, my ma bought me this awesome present. I picked it out myself from 1st Emporium--it was this pink shelf with little alcoves in it and within them were various miniature grocery store products: a box of Ritz crackers, a blue detergent bottle, cans of food, a couple of hamburgers. It came with a shopping basket and a cash register too. I used to have so much fun with that, back when I was still young enough to play pretend and enjoy it. It felt really good. For a space of time, I was transported to another world, a world where pretty dolls had wonderful adventures on the landscape of the carpet, where rumpled blankets were mountains with caves and little Polly Pocket fairies danced and lived in the flowers in the vase. Oi, so nostalgic ar...

I still love toys, but I can't do the whole pretend thing anymore. One of the sad things about being an adult, I guess. In a way, that felt rather like how reading feels, the total absorption into another world that a really good book gives you. Maybe that's why I like reading so much haha. Mrs Manik (sec school teacher) did say I tended to live in the clouds. Being adult does have its perks though: I can now make my own toys and have them not really suck! (well, that's relative) As a child, the things I made or drew never really looked quite like what I had in mind. At least now I have the ability to take it a step closer to that perfect mental image. Maybe one day I'll reach it. But for now I need to practise, practise, practise! (Why is blogger saying 'practise' is wrong?)

Anyway what am I rambling about all this for? I'm not even sure it makes any sense -_-;

Bah, some pictures:

Willow Cottontail spilling a basket of apples. I made the apples. This picture was taken for the sole reason of showing off my apples. They were originally green, but I brushed the outside with some red chalk pastel powder.

Looks like Bikkie Bear doesn't have to eat Waffle anymore.

This is not a really good picture for the apples, but you can see what they'll look like under the skin. Willow's holding an apple with the skin peeled away. You can take any one of the apples I made and cut them and it'll be white underneath. I've always thought that technique of making polymer clay fruit as being really neat.

Finally, some experimental bread I made. I made the 'dough' too yellow so Thomas says it looks like pumpkin bread his mum used to make. On the left side, the bread's been given a dusting of talc powder to simulate flour. Didn't come out too well, maybe I need to use less powder next time? Overall, not perfect but a far cry from my first bread attempts:

The yellow thing at the top is my very first and the one next to it was my second and the ones below, my third.

Polymer clay is awesome.

The continued adventures of Biscuit and Waffle

2010-04-09T23:06:00.002+09:30

Waffle Cat loves flowers! On his little trip he's been able to amass quite a number much to Biscuit Bear's disgust.

Biscuit: We're lost and I'm starving. I'm sick of lugging this heavy cart around. I want food NOW.

Waffle: :3

Waffle Cat and Biscuit Bear go for a ride

2010-04-02T21:53:00.003+10:30

Biscuit: We're lost. We'll starve. I'm going to have to eat you to survive you know.

Waffle: :3

Back with a few pics

2010-04-01T00:29:00.006+10:30

Little Biscuit bear walks home from school. In chest high grass. Because his mother doesn't love him enough.

I got this little Sylvanian from Woolworth's. They're selling Sylvanian babies there, at almost AUD10 a pop. I got this one on special so it was about $8 instead, but still, quite expensive. But those toys are so tempting! The other babies call out to me from their place in the aisle!

I've just realized that I've not posted anything on flickr for about 8 months. O_______________________O It really didn't feel like it was that long! I've missed posting pics on flickr, so expect to see more!

I've also finished sorting out my toys for the most part, so I can get back to crafting and photographing my stuff again, finally. Speaking of photography, I've entered a Re-Ment contest on the Re-Ment Fanclub Blog. I found out about the contest 30 mins before the deadline -.-. I am not proud of my 25 min photo...

Re-Ment's also released some great new minis while I was in my "Ignore the Toy World" mode. Not too many though, most of them have been blah Disney tie-ins or key chains. (Ai Li, you'd probably like this one though.) But I love the new Hinamatsuri set! I wish I was working =_=. I want money for toys dangnamit!

Grocery shopping

2009-08-16T21:18:00.006+09:30

The contest is over, and here are the winning entries. I don't like the entry that got 1st. I saw the pic of the second prize winner on flickr, and it looks significantly better over there, not all blurred and stuff. I think of the two, the 2nd prize winner has the nicer pic.

Anyway, Ai Li's insane textmate session resulted in a blindboxed Re-Ment prize that she gave to me ^-^ Thank you Ai Li!

After picking up the prize and shopping a little (I spent the most money ;_;), we ended up doing this:

L to R: Me, Mur and Ai Li

Mur: I come bearing Bizkits! And an empty bottle! :D
Pei: Why do you have a cat in there that is giving us the finger?!
Ai Li: ... haiz...

Everyone: Hi, Amal!
Amal: Hiii! Oooo, what's that, lemme see...CHOCS! :D

Mur: :D
Amal: :)
Pei: >:o
Ai Li: :|
Cat: _|_

The voting page is up

2009-08-05T06:00:00.005+09:30

Well, it's been up since the 3rd actually. Anyway, here's the link to the voting page, feel free to vote for which ever you like! May the best pic win. I know my entry is too pink for some tastes (it nearly sent my bf into diabetic shock, it's the one with the Pinky St and the red tv), so I don't expect to win anything.

Also, cuteminis.com's method of voting is really open to abuse. All you need to do is create several new emails for yourself and you could put yourself in the lead. And I see a rather suspicious number of votes for one particular entry. Could be just my jealousness talking.

There is a rather large disparity between the prizes, the first prize is a miniature toy combo pack worth RM150 and a cuteminis voucher worth RM100, while the runner up gets a cuteminis voucher of only RM80. Seriously, what's up with that?

Strawberry House

2009-08-02T02:12:00.003+09:30

I entered these pics to the cuteminis.com photography competition. I hope I made it before the deadline. The house is a repaint of a Willow Hall Conservatory bootleg. This thing's actually been an on and off project for nearly a year--it's pretty hard to paint since all the pieces are glued in place and you can't pull it apart without breaking it. I've also made a huge ton of mistakes (bubbles, paint runs, you name it and I've made it) since this is the first thing I ever tried repainting. That means more time consuming paint removal and redoing.

This house was also not meant for the pinky doll in it. The Sylvanian bear I wanted to put in was unfortunately too dirty and I didn't have time to clean it.

Anyway, here're the pics. Don't die from the pink overload :P

Scenes from the house

2009-07-23T21:16:00.003+09:30

Butler Cat trains one of the girls as a maid. The road to good cooking is a tough one!

Aya: Don't take pictures! Grrr... GET OUT! *throws soap*

Modding Pinkies

2009-07-14T18:53:00.002+09:30

I've stripped the paint off and primed Evangelion Asuka's summer outfit. I've also stripped the paint off Yoshiko's head and tried to carve her mouth open. I don't like Yoshiko's face mold, so now she's mod fodder. I need sandpaper.

Bread and Baskets

2009-06-26T19:04:00.003+09:30

Here are some baguettes I made with polymer clay and painted with acrylics. The tutorial actually called for using chalk pastels to brush the colour on, but Brunei doesn't have cheap chalk pastels apparently. The only place that sells them is Active Art, and those were like $3 or $4 when I went there last time.

I was also lazy so I just used the dark brown paint out of the bottle and the bread now looks slightly overcooked, but I'm pretty pleased with they way they came out, especially when compared to my past attempts.

Here's a comparision of the baguettes with the first loaves I made when I was just starting out. The baguettes are basically Bread Attempt #3.

I've also 'repainted' the Sylvanian Families basket holding my oranges. I wanted to make itlook less plasticky. I had only intended to dry brush it but I apparently suck at dry brushing. I have mixed feelings with the result. Should I strip the paint and redo it?

Also, bonus pic: Re-Ment flowers!

First try--polymer clay oranges

2009-06-25T19:06:00.004+09:30

Dug out my clay and made some clay oranges last night. The idea was to make oranges that would look like oranges on the inside as well. Here you can see the clay before it's been baked. The clay is rolled out into canes first then cut and molded into balls. I've made the orange skin too thin so I have a few oddly coloured ones.

Here's the end result: Misshapen orange slices and too orange oranges. Let's just say this has been a learning experience :) I'll do better next time, but I'm pretty sick of oranges right now.

This is the main reason I decided to make oranges. On the left is a Sylvanian Families basket with Sylvanian oranges and a lemon (?). It's all one ugly piece of badly painted and moulded plastic. The right features my too orange oranges taking over.

Repainted dining table and chairs

2009-06-19T23:24:00.002+09:30

I got this at Giant last year. Fake Sylvanian Families dining table and chairs! The colour is really just atrocious.

Primed and masked and ready to be painted! The primer's actually gray but it loks kinda brown in the pic.

And done! They've been painted with black and red spray paints and given a glossy finish. Seats painted with cheapo acrylics. Still need to seal and touch up those parts.

Maid Yuki and some new Pinkies

2009-06-17T21:13:00.004+09:30

This is for Oxba, who requested Maid Yuki. Here, have some cake too!

I got some new Pinkies from Chong Hock the other day--the Sky Crawlers Pinkies (strange choice of anime to Pinky-fy) and the last of the Range Murata Pinkies.
From lef to right: Kannagi Suito, Kannami Yuichi and Caine.

After some mixing and matching of parts

I quite like that combo on Caine (R). Makes her look like a little dictator. I think Yuichi looks good too, sort of like a little business man. No briefcase alas, so he had to make do with the repainted luggage case from the back of the red pinky car.

Coffee and Desert

2009-06-16T20:31:00.002+09:30

Cakes and coffee for desert and the butler's left his cart unattended. I wonder if he'd notice if I took a muffin?

Hmm, Oxba, you'll have to wait for the Yuki pics. I'm not satisfied with the way they came out.

Beach!

2009-06-03T02:58:00.006+09:30

My course mates probably think I'm some kind of freak now, taking toys on photoshoots during a picnic :x Sandflies are also a horrible blight upon the earth. I got 23-24 bites at Muara beach last week, and the ones I got in December haven't disappeared yet. Ugh. Anyway, this time we went to Tutong and the beach there really has no sand flies. Seems to have less wild life though, we didn't manage to see or catch as many lil crabs.

Anyway, the results of said photoshoot:

Here we have Ohara sporting Agito's front hair (the paint on which is rubbing off, much to my chagrin) and modelling Asuka's sundress.Should have gotten the morning glory in the photo as well.

I nearly lost the greenish-white popsicle. After bringing the pinky back to the picnic area I realized she wasn't holding the green one anymore. Cue O_o. Good thing I found it a little while after, half buried in the sand... Also, when I got home I found that the bottles of drinks in the bg, the some of the paint had been scraped off the package ;_; It seems pretty easy to scrape off the paint now and I'm wondering if it has to do with the trip to the seaside or whether it has always been like this... The pinky holdig the ice cream is Wild Arms Rebecca.

Crab hole!

Ker-thud

Without hat

Watching the sea

Edit: haha, my flickr badge now looks like it has a few little yellow UFO's on it.

Series 9 teaser

2009-05-30T19:13:00.003+09:30

Well, finally Vance has put up teaser pics for their next series! According to Suemomo of Plasticpop, the new series girls will be released in August.

Pinky Street is also gettin their own website, seperate from the Vance main site.

I'm rather excited for the twin pony tail pieces. There just have not been enough girls with hair like that!

:9

2009-05-24T19:09:00.001+09:30

Hungry and unscrupulous enough to kidnap the Puddleford ducklings for the pot.

Mayura is hungry

2009-05-22T22:53:00.002+09:30

Mayura looking for dinner.

Miiko: Why are you looking at me like that? Stop it! It's creepy...

I got Range Murata's Mayura pinky from Chong Hock XD. I've put her in Mikuru's maid uniform and swopped her hair with the alternate colour ver. of the sitting Yukata Pinky. Her eyepatch is from the Agito Airgear pinky and the knife and plate are from Sylvanian Families

New Pinkies huhuhuhu :D

2009-05-20T20:54:00.002+09:30

I blew quite a bit of $$$ today on toys. Finally, a local place that sells these lil gals! Too bad they only focused on the girls with anime and game tie ins though, none of the regular girls were available. Eh, those'll probably be the only ones that sell...

Here's Mikuru from the Haruhi series. I haven't taken photos of the other girls yet, perhaps tomorrow when there's good light.

Giant ladybugs are swarming, and Mikuru is stuck--how do I start this car?

Mikuru: Maybe this button? Ah no, that's the radio. DX

Late nights, early mornings

2009-05-06T04:55:00.002+09:30

Currently printing all my lesson plans so I cna meet Sue tomorrow. Haha, serves me right for not printing themout earlier.

Also, I hope new Pinky St will be announced soon :s I hope they're not going to shut down and stop production due to the economic woes and the decline in both quality and popularity of the figurines. Ah well, all things come to an end someday, even cute things.

Still. Boo.
I'll probably move on to Sylvanian Families or Obitsu if that happens though. Hahaha.

Chun Li has Eye Shadow

2009-04-03T20:39:00.003+10:30

TP sucks. I feel like an idiot most of the time and a bloody whiner the rest. I'm so disorganised and I dread what Sue will say when I meet her to get my evaluation on Monday. I also feel like a student abuser.

In other news: Chun Li has eye shadow.

Teach everyday till you die 2

2009-03-31T21:05:00.002+10:30

April and May are now "Pei will not sleep" months. TP sucks your soul out and turns your hair white.

My photography skills are lacking...

2009-03-27T20:44:00.002+10:30

Rui repaint ver with Re-Ment puppy. I want try my hand at repainting and customising some Pinky St figures, any one have spare parts they wanna sell? :P

Strawberry Tea

2009-03-22T20:51:00.005+10:30

I hate teaching. I want to be a writer. But I suck at writing. I don't know how to write. :s

I don't actually like any of the photos I took today.

Sacchin and Sacchin repaint release. I guess they could be twins or something :P

Table and chairs from Sylvanian Families, Green leaf plate from Megahouse, everything else from Re-Ment. I like Re-Ment.

The tea inside the cup is removable.

Hmm, this picture reminds me that I have to paint the little flowers on the table white or somekind of creamy colour. Brown is too plain, and the picture of the table on the original packaging had white flowers...

Phew

2009-03-10T23:59:00.003+10:30

Awful memory is right. Turns out I hadn't lost any of my students' work like I thought I did, half the class just left them on the wrong table, that's why I hadn't received anything. :/

Wanted to take more photos today as it was nice and bright but decided a nap was more interesting.

In other news, there are too many toys I want and too little money to buy them with. At the moment I want this table and chair set so I can repaint it.

Image taken from here.

I love low-quality or broken toys that I can fix up. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and I feel that customising something makes it truly mine, something that no one else has. Well, if anyone has old Sylvanian Families or just general doll house furniture, tell me :P I may decide to buy it off you if it's the right size.

I also took the personality test linked in Muaz's blog, and it's eerily accurate. Except for the first bit. And the being reasonable and giving good advice part :P You can try out the test here.

---
Your view on yourself:
You are intelligent, honest and sweet. You are friendly to everybody and don't like conflict. Because you're so cheerful and fun people are naturally attracted to you and like to talk to you.

The type of girlfriend/boyfriend you are looking for:
You are a true romantic. When you are in love, you will do anything and everything to keep your love true.
Your readiness to commit to a relationship:

You prefer to get to know a person very well before deciding whether you will commit to the relationship.

The seriousness of your love:
You are very serious about relationships and aren't interested in wasting time with people you don't really like. If you meet the right person, you will fall deeply and beautifully in love.

Your views on education
Education is very important in life. You want to study hard and learn as much as you can.

The right job for you:
You have plenty of dream jobs but have little chance of doing any of them if you don't focus on something in particular. You need to choose something and go for it to be happy and achieve success.

How do you view success:
You are afraid of failure and scared to have a go at the career you would like to have in case you don't succeed. Don't give up when you haven't yet even started! Be courageous.

What are you most afraid of:
You are afraid of things that you cannot control. Sometimes you show your anger to cover up how you feel.

Who is your true self:
You are mature, reasonable, honest and give good advice. People ask for your comments on all sorts of different issues. Sometimes you might find yourself in a dilemma when trapped with a problem, which your heart rather than your head needs to solve.

More ladybugs

2009-03-09T20:25:00.005+10:30

Ladybug, ladybug, ladybug invasion~

Aya: What the heck...they all came after I baked these ladybug cookies! Hey, you two on the leaf--these cookies are mine! *looks up* Oi, you! Stop mucking around and help me get rid of them!

I am an awful teacher

2009-03-08T03:43:00.002+10:30

I think I may have lost some, if not half of 4A's essays. Either that or half the class didn't pass them up. The problem is, I can't remember a lot of things. Also, my HOD found two of the essays I accidentally left in admin while signing out or in. She also told me this fact when I was talking to my CT. Terrible. I am slowly any good impressions I may have made on them due to a combination of my own laziness and carelessness. And my awful, awful memory. I cant remember things very well :(

Urgh, what am I going to do? I really hope I haven't lost any of 4A's essays *cries*

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home

2009-03-06T21:38:00.006+10:30

This is actualy a miniature sugar bowl from Megahouse's Forest Teaset miniatures series. The top bug is a removable cap. It comes wth two tiny plastic sugar lumps! This was the only photo that came out okay in today's photoshoot. All the ones featuring to full tea set were pretty unsatisfactory.

A little background: The Forest Teaset is Megahouse's last miniatures set--they decided it was not profitable enough. Too bad really, they make so few sets and they always get sold out really fast. Their sets are wonderful looking, quite on par with Re-Ment's miniatures.

Thursday was one of those days...

2009-03-06T18:05:00.003+10:30

...where almost everything that could go wrong did. First thing that happened wasa that Greg booked the projector for use during the last two perods just before I could. He told me that he might not need it and to see im during break to confirm. Bugger. My whole lesson was based on a video on my laptop.

The next thing that happned involved relieving a teacher who was sick. Now, I don't mind helping her out, but due to my horrible lack of preparation I was desperately trying to finish some of the stuff I had to do for my lessons after break. One of these things was taping newspapers together to cover up 4A's curtainless classroom so I could use the projector.

Oh well, I decided to finish what I needed to do in 3J, the class I was to relieve for her. In my infinite wisdom decided to let this class have a 'free' period where they did not have to do anything as long as they did not make too much noise. Some of the boys decided to sit on the ground at the back of the class. I didn't tell them to get up, because, hey, they were just chatting, right? No harm done if they just wanted to sit on the disgusting floor and chat right? Wrong. The principal came in and asked me if I had asked them to sit on the floor. Er... no (I just hadn't told them to get up) She then to the boys out of the class and scolded them for what seemed like a good 10 minutes. Uh boy...

I also found out that the newspaper coverings I had made were too small for the windows. And that there were 8 windows in each class, not 4. I spent the relief class using up all the newspapers I had to make the coverings bigger. I couldn't finish my lesson plans either.

After break was the start of 4E's periods. I orignally wanted to finish modelling essay preparatory work for them in the first half hour and leave the next half hour for them to start their essays. I ended up modelling for the next 40 minutes or so and helping most of the students do their essay preparatory work for the rest of the period. I think only one or two of them actually started any real writing. Also, 5 boys came in 15 minutes late. I did not know what to do with these people. :(

Class management is going down the drain. I could get along with the class during the first few periods, and then my CT decided he could leave me alone with them nstead of watching from the back. That was the day I got quite cross with them. Uh boy, big mistake. One of the boys told me that I was cute when I was angry. I think getting angry with them actually accelerated their bad behaviour. Now they are always loud, noisy, they sing in class (what is it with noisy kids and singing?) and rap out tunes on the tables. Sometimes I have to scream at the top of my voice just to be heard. Then they tell me to calm down. I think a different strategy may be in order for this lot...

After this class was 4A, the class I wanted to use the projector in. Greg had given me the go ahead with the projector during break. Yay, right? when I got to class, I realized there was no electricity. I ended up asking all 27 of my students to gather around the laptop to watch the clip instead. Good thing I have a big screen.

After school, my eyes leaked in front of my 4E CT. *face palms* Shiiiit.

Oh well, I guess it could be worse. It probably will get worse, but meh, one day at a time. A good chunk of it was my fault anyway, at least I know some things can be prevented next time.

Teach everyday till you die

2009-03-02T23:23:00.003+10:30

TP = repeated cycles of exhaustion and freaking out

I don't have time to do anything else anymore, the other half of my dollhouse is lying in pieces in a box. I also wanted to drybrush the wicker furniture to make it a tad more realistic and less toyish, but I'm afraid I'll ruin it. That shit was expensive yo. Meh, not like I have time now anyway.

New Pinky House Pics

2009-02-24T21:54:00.004+10:30

I've sort of finished half the house. There are a few things missing still, like the front door and a proper ceiling instead of that ugly thing where you can see all the lines. And curtains. Haven't got time to sew proper curtains. Anyway here are the pics:

The living room.

Yuki: "Care for a spot of tea?"

Radish with a gardening mag. One of her hobbies is gardening :D

Radish's back

Becks reading to Rui in the bedroom. Probably some dry history text. It's not shown here but Rui's expression doesn't look too happy. All the books in the shelf have "Sylvania" written on the covers. I aim to change that eventually.

View of the bedroom + bathroom. Wish I could show a higher res version of the pic but the width of the blog is on the small side for that.

I hate teaching so much.

2009-02-24T01:23:00.003+10:30

I hate teaching. I don't enjoy it at all. I had thought I might in the past, because when I tutored kids, there were at times, flashes of time where I did enjoy it (although, overall I really hate tutoring too). Well, now here I am, and hating every second. I hate children, I hate interacting with them and feeling their judgemental eyes on me. The though of having to do this for the rest of my life is positively appalling.

I hate this world and I am just so sick of it.

In other news, I finished half of my dollhouse or kinda--the door and the ceilings aren't done but that half has been wallpapered with scrapbook paper. I meant to take pictures today but it bloody rained after being so freaking hot on the field. Rain means that it's cloudy, and clouds mean that there isn't as much light as I would have liked. I rely on natural light for my pics as I don't have any lamps so no pictures today.

freaks

2009-02-13T20:33:00.004+10:30

Warrrgh Sue!!! I don't know how to teach writing, reading or summarizing!!!

Here have some Pinkies:
The thing Sakura's holding's supposed to be toast from the Rei Eva set btw. Doesn't look very much like toast from this angle... Should have taken a pic from another angle.

Rei: Wait... are you eating my toast?
Sakura: Um... I like toast.

I got my camera back! XD

2009-02-04T03:03:00.004+10:30

Got my camera back earlier than I thought I would. I left it in my aunt's house at Miri. Thought I'd have to wait at least 3-4 weeks for someone who's going to Miri to bring it back.

House update:

Estimate is at 80% done. I still need to seal it with an overcoat so paint doesn't come off so easily, touch up bits and redo others. I also have to measure the place for wallpaper. And man, do the painted pieces give out fumes. ugh. I hope it dies down eventually.

Blargh, I dont want to go to TP later. Stupid TP. I bet the students will stomp on me and Sue will go wargh at my lesson plans.

Gong Xi Fa Chai! XD

2009-01-26T03:42:00.003+10:30

Yay, Happy New Year! IT's cow year now!

My mother cooked a lot of stuff for CNY eve dinner. Too bad there were only 4 of us this year, we used to have more people. But one relative retired and left Brunei, a cousin got married and another went overseas to study. Their parents are still here but they decided to go on a trip this year, so it's only my immediate family and I for dinner. So quiet this year...

In no particular order: stir fried veggies, prawns in oyster sauce, noodles cooked with meat and shitake mushrooms, Chinese sausage cooked with leek and fried egg, something I don't know the name of, a thick, sticky soup made up of shitake mushrooms, eggs, and carrots, fried chicken, mushroom stuffed with meat served with brocolli and red peppers, hard boiled eggs fried with tofu and spring onions and homemade soybean milk XD I was so bloated after tha :9.

Next is house updates:
These are all for my big house. My little house is on hiatus until I can get some pink paint. Anyway, the big house is easier to paint, since it's in pieces and all.

I've painted the walls, and all that's needed is paint for the windows.

Here are the floors. I want to create a stone like texture for the grey parts. I tried Saturday night, but I'm no good at it ;_; It sucked big time. Looks like I'll have to wipe that off and try again *sigh*

Radish explores a rock pool

2009-01-23T04:27:00.004+10:30

Thanks for emailing me the Radish pics Ai Li!

I took Radish out to Tasek Lama on Tuesday for a photoshoot. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera's memory card. I borrowed Ai Li's camera and took a few shots of Radish in a rock pool, but they all came out blurry except this one. I suck at taking pics with Ai Li's camera ;_;

I've also made more progress on both my big and little house, and the little one is very almost complete. But there's still some more tedious covering and spraying to do before it's finally done. In comparision, progress on the big house is moving very quickly. I've sprayed the floors with a combination of black, red and brown and I'm pretty pleased with the effect. The brown paint I got from the one modelling supplies shop I know of today and man, it was costly! $9 for a really teeny weeny can! (pics later).

I also got rained on after exiting the shop due to a miscommunication between Mur and I. I entered the shop through the backdoor, and by the time I got the paint, it had started to rain very heavily and the backdoor was locked. From his car, I thought Mur was signalling for me to go out and around the building to the car, but what he meant was really for me to wait for him out front. I ended up circling the entire building in the heavy downpour. X(

I was also looking for another can of pink paint. Too bad Hotmart's upper levels were closed due to the blackout.

Cowboy Bepop Hollywood Movie

2009-01-22T03:59:00.003+10:30

Keanu Reeves is planning to play Sipke Spiegel in the planned Hollywood live action Cowboy Bepop movie. BWAHAHAHAHA!

More info from an interview with Mr. Reeves here.

In other news, all I've been doing today is prime and cover parts of the big house up with tape. I'd been meaning to touch up the pink house with acrylics, but that freaking tape covering is taking so long. I'm doing one of the last pieces and I've been at it since 7 or 8 and it's 1:30 now!

Also, a bird crapped on one of my primed pieces.

My Pinkies seem to be doing more work than me

2009-01-20T03:55:00.009+10:30

There was too much rain and strong wind today to so much of anything except take pictures of pinkies. So here they are! I named the WF2008 Pinky Beck, as her head is actually of the same mold as the Wild Arms Rebecca Pinky (Beck, Becky, get it? lol :V), just with diffently painted eyes. Anyway, here are Moe and Beck, getting ready to do more painting! Beck, of course having dragged the clueless Moe into this.

Moe: "Why am I here?"
Beck: "To help me paint this house, of course!"
Moe: "Erm, yeah...right. Whatever..."

Moe: "I think you're using the wrong paint."
Beck: "Aww, crap..."

Beck: "Doo di doo doo doo~"

With the interior done (for now) Beck moves on to the outside. Moe is nowhere to be seen.

Beck: "Behold my mighty brush! I don't need anyone else! With this I can accomplish anything!"

And let's just leave Beck to paint the rest of the house by herself.

Below is all that I managed to do today, because of the aforementioned wind and rain (shakes fist at weather). I only primed the floor of my large house. It's a bootleg of the Sylvanian Families Willow Hall without working lights.

Not shown here is the piece I thought was dry and put on newspaper. So I managed to get newspaper stuck to my stuff AGAIN. Ugh, live and learn...

Pinky Painting

2009-01-17T21:33:00.014+10:30

Mur sent me home after finding out Shakespearian Studies class was cancelled (and after we did some misc. school stuff which included me getting a new green form and losing $2 in the process) and I resumed work on my house. Little WF2008 Pinky decided to help me out XD. Haven't named her yet, but then I'm not really in the habit of naming my Pinkies. Only a few lucky ones :P

I had to reprime and respray a few parts, and after finishing the thing, I took off the covering paper and tape:

I think it looks good, but there are a few areas to correct. Like where the tape took off some of the paint:

And where I accidentally put the not-entirely-dried bottom front of the house on some newspaper with dried pink paint on it...

Haiz, more things to do before the house is finally finished...

QuikClean Nail polish remover!

2009-01-17T04:17:00.005+10:30

This item here is a lifesaver. Yesterday afternoon I opened a brand new sealed can of white paint. The nozzle was leaky, but I still sprayed my doll house with it and left it to dry. The result was a too thick coat of paint that dried with cracks. X( My normal paint thinner dissolves plastic because of the acetone, so that was out. I found this nail polish remover in Hua Ho, Kiulap. Non-acetone, it contains isoprophyl alcohol instead and it doesn't dissolve the plastic! XD

Here's my house after using 1/2 the bottle and a good amount of cotton swabs.

Inside:

Front:

Side:

I'm going to put more primer on and respray those parts tomorrow, provided I wake up on time. Ugh, in other news, I lost my green form. Arrrgh, I hope I don't get fined T_T

I spent too much time on this...

2009-01-16T05:08:00.000+10:30

I should be sleeping. But I decided to stay up and put a new layout on the blog instead. Taken from a site credited on the right, I edited a few things. Nothing much. This is really just a test post to see if my posts show up properly.

Random stuff and Leekeworld's Contest

2009-01-15T02:00:00.000+10:30

Here're a couple of things that I found that might be of interest.
First up, a toy that apparently uses brain waves to manipulate a ball in a tower. Not surprisingly, it's a Star Wars themed toy (a "Force" trainer). Jedi mind tricks ahoy.

Next up, is Sir Terry Pratchett. That's right, he's been knighted.

Leekeworld's a BJD company and they're holding a drawing contest. Yay! I'll enter even though I highly doubt I'll win anything, what with all the competition out there. Plus colour pencils don't look as good as paints or CG, and dont seem to transfer well onto the computer. Or I really don't know how to colour and scan/edit ._.

Anyway, here're the contest rules. No idea what exactly the prize is going to be, however.

Monthly Event One.
JAN 19th to FEB 22nd – DollLeeke's-illust contest
-. Application : Mail -> webmaster@Leekeworld.com
( Illusts draw about DollLeeke anyway you like! )
- Application form :
(1) a name/Website ID/mail/telephone number/Type of Illust's DollLeeke
(2) Detailed explanation about Illust draw.
(3) Appended file : 1 page or more
- Winner of the prize's Illust is going to use in Leekeworld's Products.
- We are going to give 3 winners of the prize for DollLeeke.
(4) Winners are informed in the notice on FEB 27th.

Babblebrook bunnies

2009-01-13T04:46:00.000+10:30

Credit for the pictures goes to Wendy of sylvanian-families.net

See those bunnies on the left? I have the brother and sister figures, secondhand. Those are the mother and father figurines. They are listed as being in excellent condition, and cost 5USD. It's a bargain, I think normally, Sylvanians for for about 12USD each.I have no money. I am sad. And the figures have been sold when I went to look at them again today ;_; Oh well, I hope to find other bargains eventually...

I love the grey bears as well. They're the Timbertop bear grandparents. I kinda want them as well... Looks like I want everything, heh. They cost about $8 each, and are still on the market.

I haven't done anything with my house today, I went out to see the doctor for the dizzy spells I'd been having recently. Apparenty I need better sleeping patterns? :/ Well, that cost me $24 to find out. I think it's that much because the doc gave me medicine for my cough as well.

An update just because

2009-01-11T04:36:00.000+10:30

I've forgotten to take any pictures. And I'm too lazy to do so now. My house is looking more complete, but suffering from colour bleeds where I was careless. Some of the paper covering the bits I didn't want pink got wet (again, carelessness--I left it in the rain) and stuck to the paint. I've removed some if it with water, but there're stains on it now. Looks like I'll have to repaint those areas. Argh, this house is taking too long to paint. The area where I do my spraying is disgusting now. Full of bird poo. Ugh.

I want more toys. This little set here is just so cute, I desire it. It would fit my future bakery/bed and breakfast house <3

The set was made as one of the extras for the Sylvanian Families Chocolate Rabbit Restaurant released last year. It combines a kind of outdoor style restaurant with a house. I don't really like this new restaurant, I prefer the Kitchen Restaurant released in 2005. The Kitchen Restaurant looks rather like a diner and you can stack a cottage (sold seperately) on top of it to make a taller building. They rereleased the Kitchen Restaurant last year in limited quantities, for some reason.

(Images of the Kitchen Restaurant stolen from the Tama Boutique)

Here are some of the other sets released for the Chocolate Rabbit Restaurant (the cake stand above is actually one of them). Even though I don't like the Chocolate Rabbit restaurant, I adore the supplementary sets.

These pictures come from the official Japanese Sylvanian site)
Bread

Stew stand

There are even stew inserts that can fit both into the laddle and the bowl! This means it's a mighty big laddle though...

Food set--This one is just too cute! I definitely want this one. Bear pancakes *drools*

Doughnut stand--this one's cute (like all the others) but is not paricularly big on my want list.

Sylvanian Families also released a limited cat family last year. I've slowly fallen in love with these little critters. They're different from normal families in that they're mixed. Most Sylvanians have critters that look alike save for size, but this family's gone and married outside the clan :p I guess this means they're the only ones not comitting incest?

2 Years!

2009-01-10T02:57:00.000+10:30

Oh, wow, it's been two years since I last posted here. I think I'll turn this thing into a blog about my toy obsession. I'll just need to get off my ass and actually post pictures. Blogs without pictures are pretty boring, I think. Well, that'll have to come tomorrow, I need to recharge my camera's batteries first.

Currently, I'm repainting a bootleg Sylvanian Families house. The Willow Hall Conservatory, in fact. It's going to be pink and white instead of the original colour scheme, which is pretty similar to the original building minus all the cool wooden texturing. The house will then be filled with Re-Ment's Strawberry House furniture as well as a strawberry cupboard from Re-Ment's Eggs, Beans and Berries set. I somehow managed to get the Strawberry House's secret set in my box set so that means I don't get the strawberry plant regular set (set #6). I was not too happy about that because I didn't really like the secret set, but oh well, it's not so bad. Now I just gotta find the regular strawberry plant set...

I originally bought a bootleg Sylvanian house for my Pinky St dolls. When I got it however, I noticed it was too bare--it needed furniture. So I went and got some expensive, genuine Sylvanian families furniture for the house. Then I realized just how cute and well made the originals were. Love, man love. Now my pocket is crying, and I have more real Sylvanian furniture and a few figures and craving yet more. Why things gotta be so expensive. I wanna be rich!

A similar thing happened with Re-Ment. Got a few for the Pinkies, never intended to get more, saw them, saw online pictures and fell in love. I wish MegaHouse was still making miniatures. Their stuff is really cute too. Especially the Panda Candy Shop. Arrgh, I really want that. But ?I have no moneeeeeey. *whine* Anyone want to commission drawings from me? Heheheh...

2007-02-26T05:48:00.000+10:30

Moved from Xanga. Basically, I couldn't be bothered to post anything at all for a year and decided to start up a new blog today. Bad things are afoot down under. Bad things. Why does it all have to happen at once? Odd. Never seen bad things like the past year and this year before. Yet I am still outside for the moment. And a little bit inside. Sick in my stomach, icy grip around my heart. Feel like a wail but it is not strong enough. Curling up would be nice. Crying doesn't solve anything, really. What to do? If I could fix it for you I would, you know I would. But I can't, so what to do? Drinking is silly. But I can see why you do. Sleep is much better. But you are not me. I wonder if it's possible to sleep for a few days straight with sleeping pills? Or would that be too dangerous? Sleep for a couple of days, see if there is any improvement in the situation. If not, well, all you can do is move on with it. Sleeping forever isn't an option. But it hurts, it feels bad. Nothing can be done. Just trudge through it. Eventually the sludge will fall off, eventually, the light will get brighter again. Stab of fear. What if things dont get better? what to do? Nothing. Nothing can do.

Bah. Stupid snail on the wall.