Orange treats and more resin updates

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

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

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.