Wedding Cake tips

July 12th, 2009

Wedding Cake You can make your wedding cake as simple or as complicated as you like. Whatever your choice of design and decoration, you may find the following tips of help when using polymer clay for your cake. 1. Put the cat out. Polymer clay attracts dust and fluffy bits more effectively than any vacuum cleaner. [...] [...more]

Posted: under Miniature Know-How.

You can make your wedding cake as simple or as complicated as you like. Whatever your choice of design and decoration, you may find the following tips of help when using polymer clay for your cake.

1. Put the cat out. Polymer clay attracts dust and fluffy bits more effectively than any vacuum cleaner. Cat hairs can appear from nowhere and embed themselves deep into the clay – even when you haven’t actually got a cat – so it is important to keep your working area and tools scrupulously clean. Nail varnish remover is excellent for this.

2. Cutters are wonderful for cutting out shapes but you need to take care when using them since it is all too easy for the middle of the shape to bulge out when pressing down on the cutter. Once the cake is cooked, you may need to slice the top very carefully to provide a flat surface.

3. If you want graduated squares (or oblongs) for a tiered cake and don’t have the appropriate cutters, try using an omnigrid. This is a special plastic “overgrown ruler” type tool used by quilters for the accurate cutting of material and templates. I have found it works very well for polymer clay – especially when using it with a tissue blade. (See picture).

4. If possible, once you have cut out your shapes, do not lift them from the tile, but bake them first in situ.

5. Don’t be tempted to varnish any of the finished surfaces unless you specifically want something to shine. I have personally found that un-varnished clay makes for very realistic icing.

6. Once you have your basic shapes cooked and assembled, you can decorate your cake to your heart’s content. If using ribbon, you will find the silk variety much more pliable on such small shapes than polyester and they therefore appear to sit more naturally.

7. Remember with polymer clay that so long as you do not over-heat the oven and burn the clay, you can re-bake as many times as you like if you want to keep adding to your cake.

8. Let the cat back in.

Click on the link below to see cakes and pastries I currently have for sale:

http://dollshouseheaven.co.uk/index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=42657f7ef1a9481f1e0ba676374eecd2

A Moment in Spring

May 20th, 2009

Other than the ’sale item, half price’ sign, the dark stoney trough said ‘buy me’.   I hadn’t a clue what for until a recent walk in a park, and there was the answer suddenly at my feet.  The vibrant lights of spring flowers were bursting through the dead leaves of last year’s autumn as winter [...] [...more]

Posted: under Miniature Know-How.

Other than the ’sale item, half price’ sign, the dark stoney trough said ‘buy me’.   I hadn’t a clue what for until a recent walk in a park, and there was the answer suddenly at my feet.  The vibrant lights of spring flowers were bursting through the dead leaves of last year’s autumn as winter was finally switched off and that was it.   The moment to capture in miniature.  That’s why I’d bought the trough.

 

The first thing to do was fill the trough with a thick polymer clay layers of yesterday’s failures squashed together with a top dressing of brown clay.  You can relax.  The slimey trails in the photos did not come out of a 1/12th scale slug, just a tube of glue.  The stuff gets everywhere.

 

The main material I used to make this trough was polymer clay (Fimo).   I love using this for flowers for three reasons.  Firstly the infinite variety and intensity of colours you can achieve.  Secondly the ability to rebake and rebake, so you can create multiple layers of petals/leaves without disturbing the shape of what you’ve already done.   Thirdly, I have a big deep drawer full of it and it needs using up.

 

I used only very simple tools to put the whole arrangement together – just tweezers, a needle, a razor blade and my fingers.  I know that very flowers can be crafted using the many wonderful flower cutters available.   However, the sad truth is that I’m no good with cutters!   I don’t know why, but as soon as my fingers spot cutters, they turn into fat sausages incapable of handling or manipulating anything.  This leaves me with the time-consuming method of tweezers, a needle, and obedient fingers.

 

My method when making flowers is always to start from the centres and work outwards, rebaking the different layers if/when necessary.   I haven’t actually ever needed to dissect a flower but I often root through them in nurseries counting petals.  And yes – that’s in public.  (As an aside, primulas have five petals, sometimes six, and they seem to overlap quite randomly.  I thought you’d like to know that.)

 

The crocuses and the primulas had the same ground rice origins at their centres.  Thirty-three gauge paper-covered wires were dipped in white PVA glue, then into ground rice that had been already mixed with pastel chalk (orange for the crocuses, yellow/green for the primulas).   These were left to dry and harden.

 

For the single coloured crocuses, it was a question of rolling a manageable sized ball of the clay, gently drawing off a petal shape from one end then nipping it off with the needle.   This was applied to the pre-hardened centre with a dab of PVA glue, and the exercise repeated and repeated.

 

The primulas were made slightly differently, having bi-coloured petals.   I made a log of the two colours in a rough petal shape, took very thin slices off with a razor and shaped them with the needle and tweezers.  These were applied and overlapped onto the centres.

Although snowdrops in real life have coloured centres, you can’t actually see them unless you turn them upside down, so I skipped that step and started with the petals.  The three inner petals were made using a very basic cane with white and a green “V” shape, from which a cut three slivers.  I then drew out three longer petals from a ball of  white clay and placed these in between the three inner petals.  

 

At this stage the flowers were all baked.   A word here about clay baking temperatures. For delicate flowers, you must make sure they don’t bake at too low a temperature otherwise they will crumble. Depending on which clay you are using and the plasticizers they contain, the necessary range is 110 – 130 degrees C but you will need to experiment with your own oven as they are all slightly different.   For my oven the correct temperature for flowers is just one tiny click below Gas Mark 1.   An accidental tiny click above Gas Mark 1, a long phone call and the flowers are burnt.

 

Once baked, I added additional greenery to the stems of the crocuses and snowdrops while the rest of the leaves were made separately.  If you want to add very fine veins to a polymer clay leaf, or simply give it that extra little crinkle, try pressing the clay against a “skeleton leaf” then removing it before baking. I came across these skeleton leaves (see photo) in the card making/scrap booking section of craft shop and I think they worked particularly well with the primula leaves.

 

When it came to arranging the flowers in the trough, I had no great design in my head.   I just dug holes with the needle and placed them and re-placed them until I was happy with the effect.   I didn’t use glue at this stage, but chose the liquid clay.  This gives a sufficiently globular medium for the flowers to stand up in, but doesn’t set until going back into the oven so I could move everything around until I was happy.   The whole thing went back into the oven to harden the all “earth” and liquid clay, and the scene was now set.

 

Now for the finishing bit.  The fun bit.  Throwing scatter material around the base of the flowers and leaves.   And it’s so easy. It all comes out of bags (apart from the diluted PVA that is spread first.)   First of all the loose earth, which is just very fine brown railway ballast.  Like the glue, these tiny granuals did get everywhere, so they had to removed from petals and leaves with a pin to prevent the appearance of a premature aphid attack. Then the miniature real dried leaves – again railway material.   (You can get mixed leaves, oak leaves and ivy leaves.   For the trough, I stuck to oak leaves).  Then finally other odd bits of greenery which I’ve picked up at various dollshouse/model railway shows and the trough was complete.

 

So there you have it, a moment in spring, my lasting memory of a beautiful place in a park at a particular time in the year that will last for many seasons to come.  It is something to hold on to.

Oranges Aren’t Very Orange!

February 1st, 2009

Tomatoes and strawberries are red, bananas are yellow, cabbages are green, chocolate is brown, and oranges are – well – orange, aren’t they?  One of the key things to making successful miniature food is getting the colour right.  So, put aside these stereotypical colour preconceptions, get some of the real full sized examples in front [...] [...more]

Posted: under Miniature Know-How.

Tomatoes and strawberries are red, bananas are yellow, cabbages are green, chocolate is brown, and oranges are – well – orange, aren’t they?  One of the key things to making successful miniature food is getting the colour right.  So, put aside these stereotypical colour preconceptions, get some of the real full sized examples in front of you to copy, get your clays out then prepare to experiment, and have fun!

 

Half close your eyes when looking at the real thing and forget for a moment that it’s an item of food.   See it in terms purely of colour then attempt to describe that colour to yourself before you start mixing your clays.

 

For example, study the outer leaves of a Savoy cabbage and you’ll start seeing more blue than green.  The brown in milk chocolate is more blue than red.  Strawberries vary from cream to a deep red, but by far the most common colour I’ve seen in strawberries is orange.  Unless bananas are very under-ripe in which case they are very yellow, they do contain  a high proportion of ochre and white.   And oranges are often more yellow than orange.  Tomatoes can often be the hardest colour to replicate since too much red makes them at best over-ripe, and at worst something else altogether.  The irony is that when it comes to mixing, tomatoes are actually more orange than oranges.  So from experience, I can tell you that the trick with tomatoes is to start with orange and gradually work in small flecks of red. 

 

You should also look at the intensity of the colour of the item that you’re copying.    Translucent clay is an absolute must when you’re making miniature food as you frequently need to soften a colour.  I probably use as much translucent clay as all the other colours put together.   

 

If, when looking at the item, you think that Mother Nature has merely brushed a little colour onto it (for example the mauve on a turnip or a garlic bulb), try doing the same with your miniature using some powdered chalk pastel before you bake it.   The effects can be extremely realistic.  (A bit of a digression, but a useful tip here – brown and black chalk makes brilliant dirt on potatoes)

 

Most of all don’t forget to have fun.  No clay needs to be wasted even if you go wildly off-colour.  It will keep.  You can use it again for something later.   I have a huge box of bits that I dig into as a first port of call when making a new miniature.   I only go to a fresh block of colour if I can’t find something to mess around with from my bit box first.

 

In summary, don’t assume you know the colour of something before you start, but be prepared to experiment.  As in nature, you can – and should – vary the shades of the same things for added realism.     Going back to oranges, strawberries and tomatoes – remember - some are less orange than others!