Apricot Tarts and Mango Blueberry Pastry

In my excitement and rush to get all these packed up, I honestly forgot to take all the process making pictures of these items for a doll event in Malaysia. Since I hold a full-time job, crafting is very much limited to the rare (and free) weekend I have and some of the evenings and nights. I hate working at night under the glare of the lamp - maybe its time to switch to a better lamp. :(

One of the items made for the event are these apricot tarts and mango-blueberry pastry.

                                    

Kind of standard fare! First, the prototypes are made using Tamiya Epoxy Putty. I used some small plastic slides to mold the putty on it and shape into two 1:6 scale pastry cases - a round case and a square case.
You can purchase Tamiya Epoxy Putty (Quick Type) at any local Tamiya goods store or get it online at the Hobby Search shop at http://www.1999.co.jp/eng/ . This was the same method I learnt from Tanaka Tomo's book (better known as Nunu's House) which he also used the same product to mold prototypes for 1:12 items. The epoxy dries after 3-4 hours - so you have some time to cut and sculpt your prototype. Use a plastic slide to mold your epoxy on as its extremely sticky on skin and hard to mold between fingers. Use a metal pick and penknife to pick and pull the putty and roughen up the top and sides.

Mold a ball of mixed silicone putty over the dried prototype. After around 10 minutes, the silicone putty (in pale blue) should be hardened. You can pop them off the prototype easily - if you are worried that your silicone putty may stick to your prototype,  put baby oil or mold release oil over the prototype before molding the silicone over it. Make sure you have enough silicone putty to cover - sometimes too thin a layer might tear it.

I used Resix clay mixed with ochre clay for the pastry cases. You can see them in the front of the photograph below after they are colored with pressed pastels from the Tamiya Baking Master set. Since I was in a rush to complete it - I didn't take many process pictures. Here's the finished product! Each pastry measures 1cm by 1cm, and suitable as a pastry or tart for a YoSD / 1:6 ball-jointed doll or a mini-tart for larger dolls.

 

Apart from tarts, the packages sent along with my friend to Malaysia included tiny cakes and doughnuts and the view of my messy workspace while packing away :\

 

In addition, I folded up Pocky boxes and Kit-Kat in different sizes. And my MSD Juri looks happy with them (too bad, girl - these are gifts for another friend!). 

The end for now! Juri says have a great weekend ahead. :)

Miniature Wagashi Box

I started on the miniature Japanese sweets or wagashi (和菓子) box project last night. The designs are made from traditional wafuu (和風) designs, which are usually of Japanese flowers like the sakura or chrysanthemum, or patterns like arrows and waves.

The box looks easy to fold at first -- even with a modified template but when it comes to cutting through the nooks and corners to make the double-folded sides, I thought I was going to be blind! :)

The purple set is the first finished box. On it are the words - 如月彩さくらもち (Febraury Colours Sakura-mochi) Patterns are all modifed and printed using CS Photoshop. I didn't make any process pictures as I was just too eager to get the box done. Maybe I'll do a process set for the next box in magenta (you can see the templates in the background.)

I think the box is around 2.5cm by 1.5cm for the inner box. Approximately a 1:12 wagashi box.

Filled it up with some of the candied fruit I made a few days ago. I think this definitely needs very tiny wagashi to be placed in it.

I will probably be making more of these boxes with different designs next week. And maybe some little wagashi to place inside.

Misu Donuts and Strawberry Blonde Hair

Completed the Misu Donuts (fun parody of Mister Donut) project with just a box to fold and some more paper bags to go. These are roughly 1:4 size donuts but I seemed to have gotten the scale of the folded bags wrong -- but anyway, that can be easily corrected.

Here's some more on the tray with a penny for scale.

Julia dons strawberry blonde wavelets today and appears to be waiting for someone to share her Misu Donuts with!

Miniature Boxes, Again!

While still in the craze of making miniature boxes -- I found some more templates through Google Japan and the daunting Japanese blog ranking sites and with a few apt keywords. Today's boxes includes : a cake-box with curved handles and a see-through window, and a tray for you to put your cake on, a roll-cake box, an old-fashioned cookie box with a paper liner and  my familiar upright cake-box with a new design.

I caved in and bought myself a proper cutting mat with self-healing properties from Spotlight instead of using the tattered $2 one that I gotten from Daiso. Cheap things don't last I guess. :( The usual tools I use are the same : two craft-knifes with different edged blades, a school penknife, a metal rule, flat and sharp tweezers and manicure scissors.

I have included two more new tools to my miniature box repetoire as well : a wood carving flat-edge and a scrapbooking flattener. The wood carving tool (get one with a flat or slightly slanted edge) is used to mark and score the folds on the boxes, making folding a *lot* more easier. The scrapbooking flattener does as it says -- flatten folds.

Instead of tacky glue, this round I used Beacon's 3 in 1 Advanced Craft Glue. It is, according to its label - fast-dry, instant grab and dries clear. It is great for grabbing those small slips and corners of your boxes and getting them to stick together within a second. The only tacky part (forgive the pun) about this glue is that it is fast-dry and once it goes into drying, the glue stretches into thin strands much like super-glue. At times, because of pressure, the glue may rise upwards to the opening and "bubbles" over.

Which makes it very irritating to handle. The trick I used with this glue was to make a very tiny hole for its opening and capping it away when I put it down -- so you don't get strands or bubbles.

So here we go: the three boxes made today - and I placed some of the miniature choux cremes and swan cream puffs on the cake box's pull-out tray. The blue box in the second photograph was made a few days ago -- its a very simplistic folded box with a napkin liner. I filled it with some cookies that were made for the February project. A US penny is placed for scale.

The Madness about the Swan Cream Puff

I joined in Snowfern and Asuka's madness with the swan cream puffs and tried to make my own. Everything was quite simple to do and fix until it came to (1) coloring and (2) making the heads of the swans.

(1) being that my cream puff bases kept falling into the coloring pit of horror and I ended up with a few that can't be used. :(

(2) the heads are really tough to make! I think my fingers were sprained by the time I was trying to twist the heads into an S-shape. Finally I gave up and just made a C. So the swans look like ducks instead of swans. :o

Anyway :

Puff-bases from vanilla-based air dry clay. This is pure Grace clay. I simply refuse to use Hearty-Soft since it does not agree with the molds I use. This time, instead of the usual opaque acrylics I use, I colored using a mixture of water varnish for wood surfaces and Tamiya clear acrylics.

They look a little like Japanese soy-sauce crackers on second look - but I am still pleased with the results. These are not varnished yet, so after varnishing, they would be less soy-sauce shiny? :0

Finally got these three assembled after like 30 minutes of struggling with the cream and wings. I had to glue the wings of the smallest one to the cream, else it kept falling off. Then I realized I have a lot more swans to assemble... so I think I'll leave those to tomorrow.

View from the top - the larger swan on the blue plate appears to have an elongated cream butt-tail, now that I look closer at it.

My largest swan - you can see the 'C' neck instead of the 'S' neck.

With a penny for scale for you to gauge the size of these three. :)

And finally, my messy work-top with lots more puffs to assemble.

Till the next crazy CBC challenge! Onwards, girls!

PS: Have a look at Asuka's and Snowfern's swans at their blogs.

Miniature Pastry Boxes

I was debating quite hard on the packaging material for my completed French sweets and was not too happy with just plain cellophane wrapping. I wanted pastry boxes in miniature so I could stuff them all with these sweets, and most importantly, it will look good!

It took me literally a week or so to source out all the bases of the boxes I wanted to make and have them saved up. I found a ton of really nice templates from Mirkwood Designs (a very popular and well-known site, I was told) and Mel Stampz (another wonderful website for papercraft projects with loads of ideas and templates).

I sourced out photoshop brushes if you are using Adobe Photoshop like I do to design the boxes -- you can find tons of these just by googling for photoshop brushes.

These sheets are printed on 190gm2 matte photopaper and 170gm2 glossy photopaper. I use a Canon Pixma MP550 series photo-printer. Likewisely, you can also bring these to a print-shop or Kinkos if you do not own a photo-printer at home.

I used a variety of pens and scissors to cut out the box itself . Since it is that small, cuticle scissors does the trick around the corners and a very sharp, small-nibbed craft knife is recommended for this. A pair of clean pinchers does the trick of pulling away stray bits of paper too small for your fingers to nip.

I scored the box's folding guide-lines using my craft-knife. The craft-pen (in blue) has a pretty good side for scoring, and it is smooth plastic too.

All scored and ready to be glued and folded.

Use tacky glue above everything else since your usual glue-stick or runny glue is not going to work here - the project will fall apart if you used the former, and the latter will just wetten all the printing (which, beware, is not waterproof)

And all glued up. Hold onto it for a few moments to let the glue semi-dry.

And it's ready to hold some of the sweets! Not exactly the best photo since I didn't get this set up in my mini photo-studio but you get the idea.

Time to fold more boxes! :)

Liquid Sukerukun Clay, Part Deux

Snowfern blogged about Over the Silver Moon on her blog and it made me blush a good bit from the way she has written about my endeavours. Thank you, friend! <3

Now onwards to the Liquid Sukerukun experiments.

From my earlier post about the liquid sukerukun clay experiments, I was still rather worried that I got scammed into buying a pot of white craft glue. So I kept a constant watch over these donut babies and here they are on the second day after getting frosted. I have sealed each one with Folkart's Satin glaze and there's no super crinkly shrinkage like what white craft glue would do.

I am going to try the liquid Sukerukun with watercolors and oil paints next to see what other kind of effects it will bring since the liquid dries to a transcluent and almost transparent finish if you do it thinly. This is infact quite exciting! :)

* I have decided to drop in a small tag for experiments and once I'm back from the whole Chinese New Year work-out, time to spruce up and clean the blog a little.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone and Happy Valentine's Day! (A little attempt by me below to make tiny pink-frosted heart cookies with some funky decoration job on it... >_<)

Packing the Goods

Today was a long day at work. But I managed to get a bit of time to fix the magnet strips to the rest of the tartlet bases. The flexible magnet strip can be found at Daiso Singapore for $2 a piece. And the beauty of it is it has grid lines for you to follow so you will not cut out of line or shape. These are around the size of a SG50c coin.

I'm not sure how much the people are going to sell it for. Since everything's donated, I'll just not think about it! The bottom is painted and varnished balsa-wood, the kind that is used to make model airplanes. It is light enough with air-dry clay so a magnet strip works well. A bulky round magnet behind would just make the whole piece look rough :(

Bagged and packed! :)

I tossed my crappy tea-cups and my equally crappish macaroons onto the plates and fixed them to the balsa-serving boards to be made into magnets. I have no idea if these will sell but since there's only four of them, at least the disappointment won't be so terrible!

Packed and bagged too! Just no picture for now. So the bazaar items have been cleared. *whoosh* Now to start looking at the list of things to do for Valentine's Day. :)

A New Toy and Bazaar Stuff

Eversince I got the Padico Color Chart and Clayscale, I wanted to try it bad -- so since weekend is clay crafting weekend and produce buying, so I headed over to LC and got the set of Grace Colored Clay just specially for this. So, good-bye to paint-stained hands for a bit.

I am done with the cookie (magnet) bars for the March bazaar. Just wondering if they would hold out on the colors before March. No profits will be made though, I'll be donating these and the rest of the fruit tart magnets as well to charity. (That should get me some good karma for this year! tee-hee)

The bar is 5cm in length, the cookies are roughly 2cm in width, probably on a 1:6 scale. Three sit on a painted balsa wood bar which is also varnished - so you don't have to worry about wood rot!

The strip magnet has adhesive on it already. It was cut from a larger piece using scissors. All the bars have strip magnets. I'm definitely thinking I need to put a warning on these that they aren't too strong magnets and shouldn't be used to pinning up too heavy a piece of paper. The fruit tartlet ones should be having the stronger magnets once I get them next week.

Bagged and packed!

Attempting Cookies 101

I was browsing through another new Japanese food-claycraft site and totally racked my brains trying to think how these people managed to make cookies in a soft baked vanilla like color.














I had a lump of left-over Grace clay and decided to cut some mini-cookies from them.

Ran a old toothbrush over the top of these cookies for cookie texture. And after they dried, I dabbed them with a wash of orange acrylic; tangerine to be exact. Once that dried, it was decorating and varnishing.

Still trying to figure what to do with them since they are just test pieces, but it turned out pretty well, I say!

I dug out some clear acrylic squares and tried to see if I can get a shot of these cookies in some sort of better arrangement. :) Got these squares from a scrapbooking store. It was like $26 SGD for a pack of maybe 30 different sizes of squares and rectangles.

Pastry Magnets - Delicious?

 I thought assembling the cookies without a reference would be a cinch since I watch that many cooking programmes. But it came to really getting down at it, I was at a loss of imagination! And well they didn't turn out too badly, I suppose.

I topped the cookie base with Grace Resin Cream Clay. Managed to stuff a bit into a pastry bag and used a plastic nozzle to pipe it all around the base. I couldn't take pictures of the process since my hands were so sticky with the cream clay. It sticks so terribly; think of it as very melted marshmallow that will not set! I wasn't sure about whether it was the temperature and humidity of that day, the cream clay was so sticky that I could not form proper cream blobs. So I gave up and just whirled in the cream onto every cookie base using an orange stick.

(Makes mental note to try in an air-conditioned room next time. *sigh*)

Raspberries, chopped nuts and strawberries went on the cream-topped cookie bases and after they dried, I dribbled each with some window-glass paint, that dried up to form caramel and chocolate drizzles.

Once that's dried, I varnished it - and slapped some round stick-on magnets to their backs.

 

Now they are on the metal cupboard at my workplace, looking pretty and holding up documents! ^^

NB : Plaid's Gallery Glass window color in Amber makes very rich caramel drizzles. You need to let it dry for a day and you'll be rewarded with this gleaming toffee caramel glaze.