Finished bread, Sylvanian babies

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:

Bread and Badgers

 
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.

Bread experiments

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.

1:3 turtle experiment

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.

Toys, toys, toys!

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.

Bread and Baskets

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!