Campi Basket

I won’t go into all the detail of making my basket, as I (mostly) used the tutorial found here.

The biggest difference is 1, my basket is square, and 2, my basket is much, much larger, as seen in the Campi scene.

I used a cardboard form made out of a cut-up toothpaste box, taped and covered in tinfoil.

Some other deviations from the original tutorial: 
I didn’t use crochet thread, I used a 2-ply embroidery floss (as all my crochet thread I had on hand is the 3-4 ply kind).  This ended up as a happy accident, as my floss was an orange variegated floss, and I watered down the tan paint, there is a slight variation of color to the basket that is quite pretty, and doesn’t show up very well in the photograph.

I also didn’t drill tiny holes in the sides of my base, as I didn’t have any drill bits anywhere near small enough.  I know what she meant about the mat board ‘splitting’ when pushing the wire inside, but that was dealt with fairly easily by letting the glue dry under some weights.  (I need to work on my patience….I kept messing with it before the glue was completely dry, making the whole process much harder on myself than it ought to have been!)

I also didn’t do the ‘braided’ top or the handle.  To finish off the basket, I cut off the spokes just long enough to fold over and go back in the adjoining weave.  (If that makes any sense…..the method is particularly noticeable in the front edge of the front basket)

Anyway, without further ado, here is the first basket!

I thoroughly intend to stuff the bottom with foam or some sort of filler….there is no way I’m making that many peas to fill it up!

 

 

Also, note to self:  just because it’s tiny, doesn’t mean it doesn’t take just as long as it does to make it full size!  I severely underestimated the time it would take to complete this little project!

Campi Peaches

 

I hesitate to use the word “tutorial” for my “how-I-did-it” blog posts, since I am certainly not an expert, and only guessing and bumbling as I go!

That being said, here is how I ended up doing my peaches for the Campi scene…..

I mixed up a batch of yellowish clay.  I ought to have photographed, or at least written down my recipe.  From what I remember, it was about:

• 1/2 translucent
• 1/2 ecru
• smidge of bright yellow

I rolled the clay into a log and sliced up into (fairly) regular pieces.  Then I rolled each log chunk into a ball.

The next few steps were a trial-and error process.  What I ended up doing was using a small ball-pointed tool to make the ‘stem divot’ (is there a name for that thing?)

Then, I rolled the ball of clay down the tool, starting the line down the middle of the peach.

The ball point tool was a bit too thick to create the entire line, so I used a needle tool to continue the line to the antipodes of the peach. 

And this picture isn’t part of the tutorial, I’m just proud of the way my little peaches look!

I used a mix of bright and dull red, and a peachy-pink for shading.  One thing I need to learn is how the baked product differs from the raw clay! 

Here are my pretty, blushy peaches, pre-baking, looking juicy and ready to bite into!

And here are the baked peaches.  While still quite pretty, are not what I was going for.  I liked the shading on the raw clay better.  The colors are more muted, and there isn’t quite the stark shading differences I was going for.  But, it’s all a learning experience, and all in all, I’m still quite happy with them, even if they turned out much more orange-tinged than I was aiming for.

I was going to do a couple of close up shots (or as close as I can get with my camera……it absolutely refuses to focus on things properly!), but I left my whole tub of miniatures over at my sisters’ house!  Ah well, next time!

Miniatures Project

My good friend Holly came up with a fabulous idea to do a medieval (or renaissance) dinner scene, but I was having a hard time coming up with a picture that had full tables – paintings and frescos of dinner and feast scenes seem to be fairly devoid of the heaping platters of food one imagines when thinking of such images!

However, there are plenty of paintings of the ‘lower classes’ selling all kinds of food, and quite a few kitchen scenes overflowing with all manner of foodstuffs.

After browsing through various paintings, I decided on “The Fruit Seller” by Campi. 

I picked this one because of the wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and the fact that there is only one ‘main character’!  (I’m still really nervous about doll making after my first, very poor attempt.)

I’m pretty excited about this project, and the best thing about it is there are quite a few different skills that I will be able to hone by going through the entire painting.

Not quite a miniature, but done in Fimo!

There is a sweet gal at work that I wanted to make something for.  She wears bright pony bead bracelets, and she likes peace signs.... So I made some peace sign beads! Not the best quality in the world, but was a super fun learning project!