Some current projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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!

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

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

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

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 :)