Walking the Dog

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

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.



http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
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

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

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.

Caldari Kestrel Papercraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!