Snack time!

Some of my favorite things to sculpt are snack foods...a few posts ago I showed you the chocolate chips cookies I made.  Yesterday's post was starting to get kind of long so I decided to hold off on the other snacks I made until today.

For a while now I've been making potato chips in 1:6th scale for Barbie and Monster High dolls, but I wanted to make them in 1:4 scale as well.  I sat done one day and made a bowl full.  AND I finally found a good use for the huge amount of supposedly Barbie sized bowls I have.  They make perfect snack sized bowls for the 16" crowd!

Lena and the rest of the girls are thrilled to have some salty crispy snacks to munch on.  Hmmm I seem to be hearing a lot of clamoring for a TV... Demanding little things these dolls are! LOL

Potato chips are one of those polymer clay projects where fingerprints are actually a GOOD thing!  I use a blend of translucent clay and white and punch small circles, which I then flatten into VERY thin chips.  I then toss them in a small jar with several colors of chalk to get their color.  I carefully remove them with my tweezers and gently shape them. Some I leave flat but more often than not they get some kind of a curl in them. I think they look MUCH more realistic that way.  After they are baked I brush off the extra chalk.

In this bowl all of the chips are glued down, but when I list them in my shop I will add a couple extra chips loose, that way my customers can use them in various scenes.

Now I love chips, but I KNOW that they aren't exactly the healthiest option for a crunchy snack, so I decided to sculpt up another favorite treat in my house: CARROTS!!!  My children LOVE them and I do too!  I started off by making a cane from polymer clay with a pale-ish orange in the center surrounded by a darker orange.  that way I could use the same cane for making not only whole carrots but sticks and slices too!

I cut and shaped each carrot before dusting them with a little bit of several orange/yellow chalks.  Each carrot is around 1.25 inches long (without the greenery). I then baked them, once that was done I took the back of my craft knife and little scored various places on the carrot in short horizontal stroke to just add a bit more dimension to them.

My next job was coming up with a way to make the green tops as I had someone specifically ask for farm fresh produce.  I did quite a bit of research online and thought about sculpting the leaves from clay, but I was concerned about the fragility of doing that.  I found some tutorials that used string; that just didn't look right to me. I even say some that used dried florals: but those either didn't look right or again I was worried about them being fragile.
Then I stumbled upon a website that talked about glycerin preserving for flowers and leaves.  Curing the floral material in a glycerin solution preserves the color AND the flexibility!!! 

After 3 different shops I finally found a bottle and came home to scout for the perfect foliage.  I found it in the weed you see in the above picture.  Sadly at this point I cannot seem to find any more of it, but I WILL be looking. I ended up with enough to do about 15 carrots.  I am ridiculously happy with the way they turned out!