First polymer clay miniatures

In case you thought I'd forgotten the Dolls House....

Of course I haven't, just not blogged about it for a while. Exciting post to come about the "fourth wall", and the orangery I'm building, but what I'm really excited about at the moment is building miniature things for it out of polymer clay.  I've bought loads of beautiful things for it from dolls house shops, from the Miniatura exhibition and from eBay, and all have been beautifully handcrafted. So I thought I'd have a go myself.  Bought a few different colours of polymer clay and set to work. Of course, I soon realised it was harder than that, and I needed tools, chalk pastel paints and liquid clay. But, I'm persevering, and these are my first attempts

A bread loaf, two cheese, tomato and cucumber rolls and a red rose in a black vase:

Some lemons, clementines, apples and pumpkins for Halloween

And some sweet things - a strawberry cheesecake, a kiwi tart, a lemon custard tart, and two cupcakes.

Just realised there's nothing on the pictures to give you an idea of scale, but each tarts above is smaller than a penny.  Not brilliant, but not bad for a first attempt! 

Making a ring

A couple of weeks ago, I went with a friend to a jewelery making day  - courtesy of a Groupon offer! We turned up early - 9am is certainly early for me on a Sunday - and met our fellow jewelers, as well as our instructor for the day, who turned out to have worked with one of my neighbours who is a designer and silversmith.

Most of the morning was spent learning about how jewelery is made from scratch, and the difference between hand made and hand finished. We saw how moulds are made, and how the metal is introduced into them, and how things are finished afterwards. It was fascinating.  Then, we had to make our own silver ring, from a strip of silver, carefully cut to match out finger size. This was mine:

Then we had to bend it into a circle using some small pliers to start it off, and then hammering it over a spike of some kind. Forgotten the technical term! Mine didn't look too bad, but I did get some help. then the most exciting bit - I love playing with fire so a bit of silver soldering to seal them was great fun. At the end we had a lovely circular ring

All it needed now was hitting with a big hammer to flatten it off

Then we had to put the facets on and make the ring bigger to fit. This was a real specialist job and involved another hammer. It also involved Andrew starting it off for us, and then us all having a go. It certainly wasn't as easy as he made it look. Every facet had to be same size and even, and you had to hit each one in exactly the same place with the hammer every time. Here's me doing mine.

And here's Andrew correcting all of my mistakes to make it presentable!

After some serious finishing and polishing, I had a great ring at the end of it, and a great day. Would certainly recommend it. They do a lot of different courses, you can see them here.

Chatsworh Country Fair and Sculptures

I've just realised that we've been to Chatsworth 3 times in the last 6 days. I love Chatsworth - we're "gold friends" aka season ticket holders and I go as often as I can. I particularly like that it's still owned by a family - not been given to the National Trust  - and they've worked very hard to make it pay its way. Hit by enormous death duties, which took 17 years to pay off, it's now a thriving business, (actually a charitable trust), and a huge employer in the region.

Last weekend was the Country Fair - an enormous event, and we get tickets for two days as part of our membership, so I get to go twice. Each day opens with an amazing parachute display

There's then a whole programme of entertainment, including falconry displays which I love. One of the birds landed very close to us:

And one very stupid one got stuck on the wrong side of the fence trying to get some food

But one of our favourite things to do is go round the food village. Loads of stalls, each giving away free samples. This year the favourite seemed to be flavoured vodka and liquers. Of course it would have been rude not to try them, and by about 1130 we were all a little tipsy. Soon sobered up by a small shot of naga chillis in vodka. One day I might get the feeling back in my tongue...  Of course there was cheese, bread, cake, chocolate and loads of other things to taste, but we still managed a hot pork sandwich and a pint for lunch!

There's always something a little out of the ordinary, and this year it was the dancing diggers - JCBs to be precise. Strange but true.



However, the stars of the show are always the Red Arrows. Amazing. Could watch them all day.

Then last night we went to the opening evening of Beyond Limits, the annual sculpture exhibition in the grounds. Think its fair to day that some I loved, some I didn't!  All these pictures are of ones I loved, especially the last one.

Definitely worth a visit.