Cooking up Christmas Foods

With my ability to "shop till you drop" severely thwarted by my health, I've been working on something all year long so that this year, I will have something to "gift" to our friends and neighbors who invariably stop by with something for our family during the holidays. This year, I got smart and planned waaaay in advance, and made them each something from the heart, my own personalized creations of mini foods that emanate warmth and friendship. How better to do that than a tiny miniature oven (signaling the warmth) and the bounty of holiday food and treats? I even added a tiny decorated Christmas tree to the display (finally found a good use for all those beads and bezels I've been collecting from thrift stores) for added holiday cheer. :) The gold bases will be personalized with an inscription of the family's name and the year. This is my first one, finally completed after months of working on it as my hands, joints, and my energy will allow me in small blocks of time during the day. The other ovens are in various stages of "doneness" and I think I'll be able to get them all finished to give out just in time for the holiday.

Cheers! (click on the photos below to enlarge) I hope all of you are having as much fun with making your holiday mini creations this year. Thanks so much for stopping by my blog!

A traditional holiday meal in the making. The family name will be inscribed on the front of the gold plaque.

Would it even be a holiday without gingerbread men and women? :)

The "star" of the dinner. I'm still working on trying to make my cooked poultry look as realistic as I can.

Hidden treats tucked neatly inside the oven, fun!

Cupcake batter ready to go in the oven!

A Hodgepodge of Stuff!

I'm back again, briefly. :) Oh how I miss the blogs! I am taking it easy, resting (lots) and any time I have the strength to play with clay, I go for it. Five minutes here, twenty minutes there. It adds up. Even with multiple daily rest periods. I accumulated quite a neat collection of pictures since my last post, and finally had the strength to post them. I couldn't wait to share these little cuties with everyone! Hope all of you are having some wonderful clay days!

Click on photos to enlarge...

Going bananas! Finally got some decent banana canes going....

Still working with tomato canes...one day, I will get these 100 percent right! Better than my first attempts, but not quite there yet. 

More school locker magnets - a BLT sandwich set with a fun tomato and lettuce face.

Channeling Elvis. :) Peanut butter, jelly, and banana sandwich magnet set. 

Tacos! This magnet set was really fun to make!

Remember the stoves? I did a little restoration work and transformed the all-black stoves I had purchased into something a little more fancy. These are going to be Christmas ornaments when they are all finished, so a little silver and gold detailing seemed right. The two stoves on the left were purchased online (and, on sale!!) from Manor House Miniatures and they arrived just as they look - these two are wooden replicas of the vintage German dollhouse stoves by Gesetzlich Geschutzt. Nice!

A before/after shot. Before on the right, after on the left. :)

I made tiny coal chunks from Fimo Classic black polymer clay, and enhanced them with colored chalks to make them "glow." 

Trying my hand at making my own cookie/baking trays - Kato silver works great for these because the Kato brand is a harder clay which makes it easier to cut the lines very very straight and slightly angle the edges. 

Made some painted pie pans (what a tongue twister - "painted pie pans" ...say that one 10 times fast, ha ha!) I used jewelry bezels, the kind for cameos, and painted them. The spatulas were easier than I thought - mixing colors with lots of translucent clay makes them super transparent and very real looking.

Testing my skill making cast iron skillets and pots. 

More silver cookie trays (remember - Kato clay for these) and cupcake tins - I made these by casting a mold and then using Fimo Soft silver - because you have to work the clay into the cups of the mold,  Fimo Soft works best here. Kato is too hard, it will tear when you try to work it into the mold. I bake the cupcake tins in the molds, and then pop them out when they're done.

Mini Food Magnets to Jazz up School Lockers

So my wonderful daughter takes some old mini magnets I made a while ago to snazz up her locker at middle school. And some of you know where I might be going with this...her friends of course wanted some cute little mini food magnets for their lockers too. :) Luckily I had some pieces lying around that I made a while ago when I made the teacher magnets. So I pieced some together and created little sets for her friends based on their personal noshing habits. One friend constantly says, "I like pie," and she really does like pie, so I made her a pie set with prep board. Another friend loves bacon, so that was easy, put together a bacon and egg set with toast on the side. And still another friend, well, she's just the cheeriest little person on the planet, and she loves rainbows. So what else? Rainbow cake with prep board and a few cupcakes thrown in for good measure. 

My fingers are extremely stiff these days. They can't seem to decide if rolling clay is good physical therapy for them, or bad. So it's probably time I take another rest and leave the lovely clay work to those of you with excellent hand strength and dexterity. I'll be perusing all of your posts and admiring your creativity in the meantime. :) Living vicariously for a while. I noticed that I'm closing in on 100 followers since I first started this blog a year and a half ago! Wow! I am absolutely gobsmacked about that! So I'm definitely going to take a break so I can create some nifty little minis for a 100 follower celebration giveaway when I reach that blogger milestone! 

Thank you all SO MUCH for following, and commenting, and listening to me whine about my health problems (maybe I should make some mini-cheeses to go with the "whine" ha ha)

Click on the pics to supersize!