Pasta

Joe was running low on TP so he stopped in at his local supermarket to pick some up.

Turns out they were having a sale on pasta—three boxes for two dollars!—so he figured he'd stock up.

He got several different kinds because of course the variety of shapes are fun; though he also got some regular old spaghetti.

They each have a different recipe on the back. Joe might try some, if he's feeling ambitious. Alas, he's not really much of a cook.

Luckily for Joe, they also have some simple stir-in ideas on the side, if he's not quite up to attempting Mama's Artichoke Pasta Salad.

Oh, and he also got his toilet paper. It's just the store brand, nothing fancy.

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So, this is what happens when I get a new printer for my birthday (yay!); I make ridiculous printables for Joe's (someday) kitchen. By which I mean, I spent way too much time designing the pasta boxes, coming up with the brand name, the copy (including the story of Maria-Louise Caroni), the recipes, &c. But it's so much fun. I did the little Hamm's brown paper bags too, printed on cut up lunch bags. I'm really very pleased with them.

Oh, and I (digitally) painted the portrait of Maria-Louise in the style of over-enthusiastic hopped up on Little Yellow Pills '50s housewife art (it's a genre!)

Here's her story, from the back:

After her husband was killed in the Great War, Maria-Louise was left with seven hungry children to feed. But she also finally found the freedom to pursue her dream of starting a business making pasta using only the finest of ingredients.

Heh.

While I didn't actually test any of the recipes, they're at least plausible. I may try some for real, just to see.

The pasta boxes are filled with seed beads; it gives a nice weight to them, while they also make something like the right noise. The spaghetti is filled with bristles from a house painting brush, cut to the right length. Not that you can see them; I very deliberately left out the little clear windows that pretty much every pasta brand has these days, because I really didn't want to have to make all those tiny little pasta shapes out of polymer clay, yikes.

They're on glossy photo paper, which turned out to be just the right weight to look like one sixth scale cardboard. They're probably a little bit too glossy for my tastes, but they work well enough. They're also printed out at 600 dpi, which means the tiny type is readable, if your eyes are good enough (mine just about are). Not that my blurry photos are doing them justice, I know.

I think I'm going to start Joe's house with a room box of his kitchen, since I've never made a dollhouse before. It'll allow me to work out placement and such, and hopefully I can just reuse the furnishings when I get to doing the real thing.

Apples

I made some little polymer clay apples for Joe; they come to about a half inch across at one sixth scale. They look pretty good in the photos, but trust me they're covered in fingerprints because I haven't figured out how to make something like this without actually touching it. It has to be possible; other people manage, somehow. I'm still ridiculously proud of them though.

I made sure to put some bumps and bruises on them; they're also a bit misshapen, modeled after the ones we had down in the kitchen which might have been locally grown. They're cooking apples, anyway, Macouns maybe, and aren't perfect. I kept finding pictures of all these perfect little (one twelfth scale) tableaux with perfect little fruits, cut perfectly and arranged perfectly in perfect pie-making scenes, and while those are certainly nice, they kind of actually fail the realism test because no one, not even people on cooking shows who have paid stylists, can actually make anything that picturesque. I'm not knocking that sort of thing, mind you; those kind of tiny still lifes are very wonderful. But I know what reality looks like too. And it's waaaay funnier.

They're a bit shinier than I wanted them to be; even considerably watered down gloss acrylic gel medium is still really shiny, which I would not have thought. Well, live and learn.

I should probably make him some more furniture; I have an idea for the couch he's going to get, but that's a bit of a big job. I think maybe he should get a coffee table next, although that's not a type of table you'll generally find as an antique. Though the Arts and Crafts movement was big on these things called 'library tables', basically large tables appropriate for a library that you could sit and read at. I think with a bit of redesigning, mostly involving shortening the legs, I could make something like that work as a coffee table. I do think he probably ought to have one. I don't intend this doll house to be strictly period; it's in the here and now, just an old house with appropriate antiques inside, mixed with plenty of modern stuff.

Just thinking out loud.

Cookies!

So Joe made some homemade chocolate chunk cookies the other night, using white, milk, and dark chocolate chunks. I think they look quite nice!

Well, they look nice on the top; unfortunately Joe may not be the best cook, and some of them did get a bit black on the bottom. Perhaps his oven is not heating things evenly?

Overall though, they look quite presentable, I think.

Of course they're polymer clay and not actually edible, and when you put them on the little tea saucer they go clink, but hey. I made them in two sizes, the larger about a half inch across to look like the big three inch kind. I suppose I should have posed them with something for scale like all the other miniature makers do, like a quarter or dime or pencil, oh well.

I baked the different varieties of 'chocolate' separately first so they would remain in solid chunks and not just get mixed into the 'dough'. I baked them as thin slabs, then cut them up while they were still warm from the oven, which worked quite well. I am very happy with them!

Bits & Bobs for Joe

Just a quick note/update. This is a hobby blog and so a bit sporadic, I know, but I have been thinking about Joe and his house, as well as working on some things for him, not that any of the furniture is up to the show and tell stage just yet. But I did make him a cushion for his Stickley cube chair, after acquiring some William Morris(ish) quilting cloth in my latest quilt fabric shopping foray (that would be one of my other hobbies). I made it up with a little pillow, filled with seed beads so it has some weight to it like a full-sized pillow, which idea I stole from Brae at Otterine's Miniatures.

Of course that pillow is going to be continually slipping through the back of the chair in a very aggravating manner, but Joe probably has more patience than I do. His living room, incidentally, is going to be in warm earthy shades of green and the like, to fit the Craftsman back-to-nature aesthetic.

The other thing I did recently was try my hand at some polymer clay food. There are tons of wonderful miniature-making tutorials out there online, and bread seemed the easiest place to start. It's been a long time since I've done anything in polymer clay, but I had a lot of fun making these. Though I'm not sure Joe is the artisan bread type; he's probably more a frozen pizza kind of guy.

Anyway, what fun! I think some chocolate chunk cookies are next on the list.