Merry Christmas 2013

Ho ho ho... wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

It's another year. Thank you for reading my blog and thank you to my blog friends for leaving me kind comments. I read and appreciate every single one of them. Thank you thank you!!

Don't forget to eat some gingerbread men cookies and hot chocolate this X'mas!

Miniature Hot Chocolate Teaset

You've probably seen this in my Etsy shop. A mini hot chocolate set with colorful marshmallows. Some call them confetti marshmallows, some call them rainbow marshmallows. What do you call them? 

Don't you love the pretty cups and teapot too? I bought them from Ebay. You can check out the seller minidreamworld2010. There are plenty of pretty teasets at reasonable prices and free shipping!

Now before you wonder off to Ebay, please finish looking at my photos... O_O   :DDD

Pink Ombre Cake

An ombre cake is a layer cake with graded hues of a single color. I'm not a pink person so I don't know what got into my head to make this pink ombre dessert tray.

I kind of regretted making the cake a square one because it was so time-consuming to texture the four sides of the cake! Seriously, whatever got into my head?!

The cake is meant to be a mini cake (not a miniature cake, but a miniature mini cake). It is cut into a square from a dollhouse scale round cake and measures about 1 cm by 1 cm. I made cupcakes and macarons in matching shades to go with the cake.  

Hope you like this pink ombre dessert tray! 

Croissants & Bonne Maman Jam

Good morning! Weekend is here! How about some crispy croissants with jam and butter for breakfast? *feeling happy*

Have a happy weekend everyone! 

Miniature Breakfast Plates and Etsy feedback

Stealing a bit of time to post these photos of some breakfast plates I made. Yes, I'm crazy over baked beans. Every plate must have baked beans. *LOL*

The set below was custom-made for a customer who wanted ham and a stack of bread.

Breakfast plate made into rings. Hmm.. somehow my wrinkled fingers don't look too bad in this photo don't you think? :P

Close-up shot of the breakfast plates... if you still find my fingers an eyesore.

The plate below is an old photo but just wanted to include here for completeness. It is also my favorite of them all. Smiley potatoes make me happy.

Have a happy weekend! 

PS: I may be a little outdated but I just realized that I can't leave feedback for my customers on ETSY anymore. Whose clever idea is this? Leaving good feedback for customers is the very least I can do to thank them and show my appreciation. A transaction should be two-way. What happens if you meet an unreasonable customer who leaves super nasty feedback on your shop and you can't do anything at your end? For once, I'm beginning to appreciate Ebay's feedback system...

Making banana split ice cream

This was for a customer who loved preparation boards. It was also the 3rd prep board I made for her.

She requested for something like the photo below. Frankly, if I had the choice, I would never want to make miniature cherries again as the stalks are really hard to do. I had wanted to persuade her to do away with the plate of cherries but banana split without cherries??! 

I wanted the cherries to look more like bright red maraschino cherries in real life (see inset below). 

motherinstincts.com

I like the way the cherries turned out. There is also a fresher pop of colors in this new version of banana split prep board. Hope you like it too. ^_^

Miniature Rubber Duckies

It's September! Time really flies. Recently I've been working on many custom orders which I will share later. They are such interesting commissions and the customers I worked with are super sweet and patient. I'm really slow... it takes me a few weeks to complete an order but they waited for me. Thank you so much! 

Here are some tiny rubber duckies I made a while back. Quack!

Showing with my finger how tiny each ducky is ...

 Hmm... baby duck is hungry and wants to have some Ritz crackers. :D

Hope you like these duckies! Have a great weekend ahead.

A coffee break

Take a break. Have a coffee.

Just a very short post to wish you a Happy Friday and a lovely weekend ahead. :D

Banana Waffles with Nutella

It's been a long time since I made waffles. This time I decided to pair them with bananas and nutella. Banana + Chocolate = Yummy . 

It's my third attempt at making peeled bananas. I don't really fancy making peeled bananas with air dry clay because you got to work really fast before the clay dries up. Peeled banana skin needs time to shape and I think polymer clay can do a better job. I did each banana under one minute (GASP!). Minus the paint work of course. I had to dump the bananas that didn't turn out well within that minute because cracks will start to appear. For the two bananas you see here, I threw away six. 

Here are some photos of the prep board.

Since I'm at the topic of waffles, my customer requested for this waffles prep board with bananas, a bowl of vanilla ice cream and a bowl of fresh cream. (Fortunately no peeled bananas!). My challenge? To differentiate between the texture of the ice cream and fresh cream. Can you tell which is which?

Hope this post motivates you to eat some waffles! I'm off to bed!

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Follow me on Facebook (on the right)
Heart my Etsy shop here
For commission, email me at ilovelittlethings@gmail.com

Smiley potatoes and baked beans

Are you a baked beans lover?

If you are, don't you agree that they go well with almost anything? Baked beans with toasts, with eggs, with potatoes ... I can even have them with rice. 

How about some baked beans with smiley potatoes? Unfortunately, smiley potatoes are not so common in restaurants over here but we can always buy the frozen packs and fry them at home.

Are there any improvements in my smiley potaotes?

Now

Then

I don't know which version you prefer but I feel like laughing now when I see the old version.

Oh... and here is the complete preparation board. Fried eggs, broken eggs, raw egg in bowl... you name the egg, I have it .. LOL

Available at my Etsy shop. Have a great smiley week everyone!

PS: Thanks for all your replies on my previous entry. Now I know there are people who still read blogs after all! 

Ritz crackers

Am I the only one who feels that nobody reads blogs anymore? While traffic at my Facebook has gone up, it seems that traffic here has gone down. I'm partly to blame for my infrequent update. Nevertheless, I do wonder if blogs will become a thing of the past.

Flickr is not doing too well either. Is everyone turning to Instagram? I'm really behind time. In fact, I set up my Facebook only half a year ago. I must be getting old ... finding it quite hard to keep up with trend and technology. *LOL*

Anyway, a quick post on some Ritz crackers. It's 2 am! Being a stay-home-mum with a young toddler who wakes at 7 am and sleeps at 12 midnight is really not easy.

Hope you like these mini Ritz crackers. Hand model: my husband. He's going to charge me 50 cents per photo soon because he says I keep making use of his hands. :D 

Off to bed! Happy Fourth of July to my blog friends in the US (just realized my first photo is red and blue)!

Miniature Fishball Noodles

I am almost "dying" from the recent haze in Singapore (see below). My eyes hurt and my throat becomes sore if I step out of my house. I also worry about my little girl because at her age, she refuses to wear a mask.

I wanted to share this miniature fishball noodles that I made for my father on his birthday last October. (Why did I only upload it now?!) Have you tried fishball noodles before? It is a very popular dish in Singapore. Its ranking is nowhere near our famous chilli crab or chicken rice, but I think we can't live without it. The flat version of noodles which you see here is called "mee pok" (noodle flat if you translate it directly). 

Just check out the haze condition in Singapore! *eyes tearing again because of the smoke*

 Photo: REUTERS/Edgar Su

M&M necklace & Giveaway Result

A very sweet customer of mine had a special request. She wanted a brown packet of M&Ms and the chocolate candies displayed on a wooden tray and made into a necklace. This order took 5 months!!! I was stuck with work and she had a long vacation in between. I'm so glad it's finally done and shipped.

Anyway, we have a winner of the giveaway. Congratulations, Rachel! I will contact you for your mailing address shortly. 

Giveaway - Blog's 5th Birthday

Do you know I started this blog on 1st June 2008? I can't believe it's been 5 years! Although I don't have as much exposure as other miniaturists in Singapore (partly because I'm rather inactive due to my commitment as a stay home mum), I'm grateful for the support I got on this blog and at Etsy. Thank you!

I'll be having 2 giveaways to celebrate I Love Little Things 5th birthday.

This week, I will be giving away this adorable pair of Starbucks Frappucino earrings studs made by my best friend, Jowie. The earrings are made of printed images covered with a few layers of resin to create a domed effect. Note that you won't get 3D cups, just flatback earrings with a beautiful glass-like finish. We made this pair together for the giveaway. 

What do you need to do now to win this? Simple! Just like my Facebook page AND like this photo. Existing Facebook fans just need to like the photo. (My Facebook link is on the right of this post) Last day to participate is 31st May. I will announce the winner on 2nd June.

 

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Anyway, Jowie has stopped making earrings due to personal reasons. Here are some of the cute studs she made. It's a pity she had to close her Etsy shop. Hope she will reopen her shop soon!

PBJ Sandwich Preparation Board

Hi everyone!

I know I've been missing in action (1 post per month!!!). Hence I thought I'd make it up with what is meant for TWO posts. As if two is a big deal. :D

I've always wanted to make some mini peanut butter jelly sandwiches. I haven't made a preparation board in a long time. So tada ... presenting my PBJ prep board! I wish I could use something other than my wrinkled fingers to show the scale, but somehow the tools that I have (toothpicks, old tweezer, stained  brushes) don't fit in so well. You can just pretend that my fingers are blurred out.

 

Some fun facts from Wikipedia.

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich or PB&J is a sandwich, popular in North America, that includes a layer of peanut butter and either jelly or jam on bread, commonly between two slices, but sometimes eaten open-faced or with one slice folded over.

A 2002 survey showed the average American will have eaten 2,500 (really???) of these sandwiches before graduating from high school.

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What is meant for another post is this pastel layered cake. I love making cakes!  

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Oh... Wikipedia even has a page for layered cake but nothing interesting though. 

Hopefully my next post won't be in June. Have to break the one-post-a-month cycle! 

And ... 

Happy Mother's Day to all wonderful mums out there. ^_^

Macarons make me happy

Do you ever get sick of macarons? Not me! Especially when they are in cheerful colors.

This is the biggest order I ever had for macarons. I needed to make 42 macarons and that's like 84 shells. Ho ho... 

I just had to take a picture after everything is pieced together. Don't you love the colors? It's like seeing seven rainbows.

Then I was itching to take a picture of big versus small. The macarons above are about 0.5 cm wide. I happened to make some 0.2 cm wide versions. See how they compare!

The rainbow macarons necklace is available in my Etsy shop.

Goodnight! I'm off to bed.