Repaint done!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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