Takara Town

New Mont Blanc Maker by Decollage Brand! Great for Japanese Fake Sweets, or Dollhouse Miniatures.

This is a wonderful new item that I am so happy to finally be selling in my shop! It is the long awaited Mont Blanc Maker from Japan! This is a heavy duty tool for making fake Japanese sweets and cakes! Do you know what a Mont Blanc Cake is? If not see the pictures below. These cute confections are found everywhere in Japan, and they are super fun to make from Clay. 

This is the Mont Blanc Tool! New from the Decollage Collection of items for make Japanese Fake Sweets, this item is durable, and will make the cutest Mont Blanc Cakes around! 

Click Here to read all about it or to purchase!

With the Mont Blanc Maker you will be able to make cute fake sweets like these! You can use a paper cupcake liner for the bottom, or make one from clay. For the whipped cream use super realistic looking Decollage Brand Whipped Cream Clay ( Click Here for Whipped Cream Clay )

Or you can use your Mont Blanc Maker for other things, like Doll Hair, or for making a some dollhouse miniature food, like this plate of spaghetti - Yum! 

If you are wondering how to get that great powdered sugar look on the top of your cakes, just use some ground up white chalk! It is super cheap and easy! For something a little extra special try using clear or white sparkle powder with the chalk or instead - oooh! 

This Mont Blanc Maker comes with six plates for making all different thicknesses of strings, and ribbons. Try using the flat one for making bows, or fettuccine pasta! 

These Mont Blanc Makers can be used with many types of clay, but I especially love the texture of lightweight paper clay! Mermaid Puffy clay is just perfect! Click here to check out all the clays you can use with it!

Click Here to read all about it or to purchase!

Do you have more ideas of what you could make with this Mont Blanc Maker? Comment below!

 

Japanese Craft Book - Miniatures from Clay - Miniature tutorial

The first miniature craft - made ​​from clay and familiar material - Paperback

Author: Kumi Oikawa

Pages: 128

This book is about how to make miniature food from clay, with really great photographs to help you understand how to make them. 

This is a great book for teenagers, and beginners! 

The front cover alone is filled with many great pictures to inspire you!

I especially love the roll cakes! This book is all about using clay, and other items to make your miniatures. These cakes are a great example of this. You can see how small peices of foil, which you most likely have in your kitchen, are cut into little rounds to hold the cake. 

The tissue paper to hold these miniature tulips is perfect! It looks like tiny newspaper. Any tissue will do, but if you can find something like this in your next box of chocolate candy save it, and use for this application. 

To make tulips : shape with your hand, and then snip the petals in with a little pair of scissors! I like to use the little cosmetic scissors - you know the ones for your eyebrows? Yeah those...they are great! 

Here is a picture from the book that shows the clays and tools they use. 

Here are some great inspirational way to make tiny little plates from clay. Any flat plastic can be used to press the clay flat. It does not have to be clear, but it is much much easier to be know the thickness of the plate to be, if you can see it. 

Anyway you smoosh it flat, then using a little cookie cutter, or shot glass, or something else you can find around the house you cut out the plate so it has clean edges. 

You can then use something like a bottle cap, or essential oil jar to make an impression which will shape the plate into a slight bowl, or give it a rim. 

Here is a really simple and fun way to make a tea cup. This picture is very rustic, but if you were to put a little more time and effort you could achieve something very nice! 

Step One: Shape clay into a ball. 

Step Two: Find a rounded ball point pen to smoosh into the ball of clay to make the cup.

Step Three: You can fill with brown clay to mimic coffee, but for a more realistic effect use some glaze. 
I like Sculpy brand glaze for this. All you gotta do is use a razor blade to scrape some brown pastel chalk into some Sculpy glaze, and stir and stir and stir until it looks like coffee! Then fill the cup with that, instead of the clay, and wait at least 24 hours for it to dry.  

I love some of these easy ideas for working with everyday items, like making this plate from a coffee creamer! It is a great project to do with kids, that is super simple, and cheap. 

If you want something more permanent and sturdy, use this little plate with some mold maker. Once you have the mold made, use polymer clay to make a sturdy and cute little plate. 

Here is another idea of how to make a plate from something you might already have. You can find these little drinkable yogurts on the top shelf over all the other spoonable yogurts at the grocery store. Just cut off the bottom and walah! 

Using the same rounded ball point pen cap as before, you can shape a wine glass! Try using transparent clay for a frosty glass, and don't forget to finish the edge with scissors for a very clean finihsed look. 

This is one of the easiest little teapot tutorial I have ever seen. 

Here is some transparent clay mixed with color to make little frosty glasswear. You can also color with paint. 

This is a great little tutorial on how to make a miniature cucumber for your Japanese Deco projects or dollhouse. The clay is slightly color with a pen, but agian you can use paint or pastels to color it. The clay it semi-transparent, which I agree looks best. The the outside is painted and finally sliced! 

You can also use this method to make a kiwi slice..! 

Once sliced use a Sakura Pen ( fine tip permenent marker) to add some detail! 

 

Next this book teaches how to make the cutest teeny tine raspberries. Simply form with your hand, then use a needle or toothpick to impress little seed texture to the surface. 

 

I hope you enjoyed this book preview! If so please leave a comment. 

Japanese Fake Sweets Book

Hello Everyone! I found another great Fake Sweets Book from Japan today. 

I love how real the stuff on the cover looks, especially the chocolate. It has a perfect matte finish, and really looks good enough to eat! 

I particularly love the rings! 

I was looking at this one up close and does'nt it look like it could be made by stamping one of those old school wax letter sealing stamps into some clay?

Like these: 

  

Anyway if you don't have those I know that Padico makes some great letter molds too: 

I am not currently carrying these in my shop, but I guess it was only because I did not have the vision to see how awesome they were until I saw this book! I will have to get some soon and try this out!

This is another great idea from the book. I love the teddy bear biscuits, but really any biscuit could work with this idea. For the chocolate you could use another great product by Padico! They make a great assortment of Deco Sauces, in lots of colors, but for this project they make a perfect chocolate that looks just like this. ( Note: they also make a great milk chocolate too, which is not pictured but available at my shop )

Buy this sauce here

 

Here is another project that uses the Deco Sauce mentioned above.

The cakes are made either in a mold or just by hand. Then using an old ( or new but saved for this specific task ) toothbrush, dab the toothbrush bristles all over the cake. Then "frost" the bottom cake. You do not need to frost the entire top of the cake since it will be covered by the smaller cake. Also you do not want to frost it because when you add the top cake it will goosh all over the place! 

Now add the little cake to the top, and frost. Add the stones, and glitter while frosting is still wet. For the topper, you can find little cute items at bead stores, or thrift stores. Old barbie crowns spraypainted gold look pretty awesome! 

After it is all dry ( 2 hours ) glue to the ring. 

You can also use hot glue as frosting...but I find that the natural drippiness for small projects is more easily acomplished with the deco sauce. 

This is the back of the book. I love the authors picture, just look how cute she is with her amazing shirt! Love. 

 

How to make a Miniature Fake Strawberry Cabochon Tutorial - Japanese Craft Book

 

Here is another tutorial from great Japanese Craft Book called Deco Suites in Goods 100 Yen ( Nice Wife Supplement)

By Yonggao Masumi

First of all, how much do you love the "Nice Wife Supplement" part! ha!

Okay so this book has lots of great clay craft tutorials which you can figure out mostly just by looking at the pictures. I say "mostly" because some of the stuff they used was confusing and I have no idea what it was, but in general you can figure it out. 

They make items other than clay fake sweets, such as flowers and fruits too. 

I like to make decoden craft items for decorating cell phones and to sell on my website so I choose two tutorials that I found really useful for doing decoden craft. 

Tutorial one: 

Fake Strawberry with polymer clay:

This tutorial was one of those that was super complicated, I confusing. 

I cut out those pictures and am just showing you what I like and use. 

So to make this berry here is what you do: 

STEP ONE: Shape the Berry.

I start by putting down a layer of wax paper so that I can pick it up and peel the berry off and not risk misshaping it in the process. 

You will need to knead the polymer a little bit to get it soft, then shape it into an egg shape. Then press it down onto the wax paper, smashing and molding it as you go to make the perfect cut in half strawberry shape.

STEP TWO: Texture the Berry.

This is why I LOVE this tutorial! There are many ways to add texture to your berry creations, but I think this is the best way if you want to have a realistic looking berry! Now it depends on the size of the berry you want to make but you are going to need a hollow tube of some sort to make these "seed" impressions in the clay. 

I have a few different tools for this depending on the berry size, which I have found in objects I already owned, and also at thrift and hardware stores. 

For my teeny tiny berries I use a piece of and old Henna Tattoo kit! This kit came with a squeeze bottle with a little hollow pipe, to apply the henna. I bend it just a little to get a more oval seed shape, and it works great. 

For larger berries, I have an old cake piping set which had a little tip for piping fine letters, again I bent it just a bit, and use it all the time for making these berries. 

Just look around the house, you will probably find something you can use! 

You may want to look at a real berry when you are doing this, because it is sort of important to place the seeds in a nice pattern. 

You can see how the seeds are evenly spaced, but do not always follow straight lines of pattern. 

Okay moving on....

STEP THREE: Color the Berry.

There are a couple of different options in coloring the berry. 

1. You can use pastel chalk. You will want to use a razor blade and shave the chalk into a pile of powder, then with a soft bristle brush, paint the berry before baking. 

2. You can use acrylic paint, either before or after baking. I have had fine results painting before baking, but it still makes me nervous for some reason?

The key is to paint in the brightest red you can find. If you will please notice, the berry above, does not exactly look like the real berry that I showed you earlier. They need to be bright true red to look real! 

You can alsp have the color darken at the tip and lighten at the top to mimic a real berry:

Some light green at the top looks good too. 

Now in this book the next step was the flatten the bottom with a nail file ( which works really well), and then you can use like this, or you can paint the underside as well. 

I never paint the botton, since I use these as flat back cabochon cell phone decorations, thus there is no need because you do not see the bottom. If you wanted to make a keychain charm or necklace you would want to color the bottom though. 

I also go a step further than what is suggested in this tutorial, and I paint it with a high gloss finish, so to make it look ripe and juicy!

I have some good japanese sealer for sale on my website: www.takaratown.com, or you can use Triple Thick Glaze by Sculpy which works great too! 

Please Note: 

This is just my interpretation of this tutorial, not a literal translation. :) 

ENJOY!

How to Make a Fake Miniature Banana - from Sweets Motif Wonderland Japanese Magazine

This Japanese Magazine will give you much inspiration for your next Decoden Project! Not only are the pages filled with tasty looking treats that look real enough to eat but also they have some excellent tutorials in here. 

Here is my own translation of this tutorial based on my own trial and error: 

Step One: 

For this project I used White Sculpy brand polymer clay. Start by kneading the clay until it is soft and workable ( approx: 2 min.)

Depending on what size you want your banana, gather a ball of clay and form into a ball, then flatten ball onto work surface.

Now you will want to add a small dab of yellow Oil Based Paint. You must use Oil paint if you want your peice to be of high quality. Acrylic paint can deform the clay when baking. Oil paint mixed well and will not disrupt the cooking procedure.

Now fold over the clay so that it captures the paint inside, and then gently knead until a uniform color is reached, with no striping or marbleing.

NOTE: it is best to add color a little at a time, until you reach your desired hue. If the clay becomes to warm, pop it in the fridge for a few minutes.

 Step Two: 

Once you have the color you desire, roll the clay into a log shape. For best results do not overwork this step. A banana in nature is not a perfect cylinder, but often times can be slighty lumpy and curved. 

Step Three: 

Now using a box cutter, or razor blade, you want to apply a texture to the surface of your banana. This is done by slicing shallow lines into the clay with the blade. Start by making slices that go around the banana, remembering not to be uniform or overly tidy when doing this. 

Step Four: 

Now you must make long horizontal lines across the length of the banana. These lines should be slightly deeper than the lines you made previously. Agian remembering always not to make perfectly straight lines. 

Step Five: 

Once you have all of the outside texture, you will want to cut off the end on a slight diagonal cut, and throw away the end piece. ( or recycle! )

Step Six :

Using a very sharp knive, you will now want to slice the banana into slices. For this type of banana you want thick slices, to show off the outside texture. If the clay is too warm and squishy just pop it in the fridge for 10 min. to make slicing prettier, and easier. 

Step Seven: 

It is now time to put the detail onto the slices. There are a couple of ways to do this: 

    A: Oil Based Paint : For this method, you will want to bake the clay before you decorate it. Bake in a small toaster oven ( you do not want to bake in your household oven because polymer clay gives off toxic gases while baking ) at 275 degrees for 15 min. for each 1/2 inch of thickness. Be sure to place foil or parchment paper both underneath and on top of the clay peices during baking to ensure even cooking, with no burning or bubbling. 

    Once baked let cool without disturbing them. 

    Once cooled you may paint with oil based paints. For this you will want a very fine brush, and also a soft bristle slighlty large rounded brush. You will paint according to the pictures, building upwards from the base. Agian trying not to be too perfect in your painting, as this will make the banana look too fake and unatural. 

    Once the painting in complete you do not need to seal the final product unless you seek a different finish. The oil paint will bind with the polymer and will not come off. 

    B: Stick Pastel Method: This is the method that I prefer. I find that it gives a softer, less precise detail, which looks more natural. You want to apply the detail BEFORE you bake the clay! 

    Using a soft rounded brush, and a small detail Brush you can apply the colors onto the clay. I like to use a razor blade to scrape a pile of pastel chalk into a pile of pigment. Then I dip my brush into the pigment, and then tap off before applying to the clay. 

    Once you are done you will bake it in the oven in the same manner as I have described above. 

Step Eight: 

As you can see here, a bright yellow was applied first, followed by a darker brownish yellow color for detail. 

Step Nine: 

Finally the small seeds are painted on. You may find that using a combination of pastels and oil paint works well for this peice. Pastels are used pre-baking for the bottom detail, and finally post-baking oil paint is used for the fine detail needed to make stunning seeds. 

 

These Banana Slices can be used for most anything, from Banana Cream Pie, to tarts, to waffle and pancake stoppers! 

 

And finally another page from this lovely publication for your viewing pleasure: 

 

    

How to make a miniature drinking Straw - Tutorial from Japanese Fake Sweets Book

If you can find it, this is a Japanese Craft Book worth having. It is full of pictures, that are just packed with ideas for your fake sweets making. You will also find all kinds of tips for making items out of household items. For example, how to make a drinking straw from a paper clip: 

Is this not a genius little idea?! This book is full of them. I love it. 

 

Here is the cover art, which also has enough inspiration to keep you going for a week or more! 

The title of this publication is : 

Miniature Cafe Part 3 ( I think ) I have it in Hardcover, but perhaps it comes in soft cover as well. I do not know. 

ENJOY!

 

How to make Miniature Fake Ice Cream Scoop - Japanese Decoden Tutorial

This is another beautiful Japanese craft magazine for making miniature fake sweets for dollhouse craft, or decoden craft. The author is Tatsumi Mook. 

This magazine is not only full of tasty photos that will make your crafty mouth water, but also it has some great tutorials as well. This would be a worthwhile addition to your library. 

I will feature one of the tutorials here, as well as a few pictures to inspire you! 

You cannot deny the beauty of these mini ice cream scoops. They are perfectly made, and look good enough to eat. I especially love the marbling effects they have achieved, and with some practice you will be able to get these results as well. 

MMMM......

Lets get started! : 

Gather up a large ball of white clay, and a slightly smaller ball of brown clay. 

For this tutorial I used Hearty Paper Clay in Brown and White. 

Purchase this product here!

 I used Hearty Clay for this because it is so easy to use, and to achieve the marbled effect, especially because Hearty clay comes in the perfect shade of brown so there is no need to mix up your own color.

 Also Hearty paper clay is very soft and spongy, and  you can easily get an ice cream look to the finished product. 

It must be mentioned though, that hearty clay is not as strong or durable as a resin clay, or polymer clay. 
It remains slightly squisy, but with a velvet soft texture. I prefer using Hearty clay when making dollhouse miniatures, or artistic pieces, and the resin or polymer clays for decoden and jewelry.

 
Step One:

Now it is time to gently mix your clay colors together. For this tutorial the colors are brown and white, but you can use any colors, and even more than two colors if you like. 

You want to twist the colors together, and smush them, but you do not want to actually MIX the colors. You want to still see each color individually, and do not want to dilute each color by over mixing, or smashing the colors together. 

If you are in a warm climate it is a good idea to put the clay in the fridge for a few minutes before you do this. 

Step Two: 

Roll the clay that has been gently mixed into a ball in the palm of your hand. You do not need to have a perfect ball with an even surface, in fact having seams, and air pockets will increase the realistic look to your finished ice cream ball. 

Using a round measuring spoon you will smash the spoon down on top of the ball so that it fills up the cavity of the spoon, and squish out the sides. You do not want to smash the spoon all the way through the ball, just enough to fill the cavity and make the bottom flat. 

Step Three: 

Now you must remove the spoon from the clay. Depending on the clay you are using you may find this to be a problem. Hearty clay can stick, and it is best to use a mold release oil to keep this from happening. I use Padico Mold Release Oil, which works so well with Hearty clay and other paper clays, plus it lasts forever: 

Purchase this product on my website!

 

 

Once you have taken the clay from the mold, you will want to rip the excess clay from the bottom of the ice cream ball. You do not want to rip ALL of the clay off of the bottom, because having a lip of ice cream looks real and pretty. Be careful to rip it off, and not to smoosh it in the process because you want it to look light and fluffy. 

Step Four: 

Now using a toothpick you will add some more detailed texture too the base of the scoop. 

Step Five:

Using a toothbrush apply texture to the top portion of the ice cream ball. 

You may want to mark this toothbrush with a permanent marker to ensure that it does not get used for teethbrushing agian! Hearty Clay is non-toxic, but not all clay is, so it is just something to keep in mind. 

Purchase this Sealer Product Here

 

You many now finish the final end piece with a sealer. I prefer to use a Matte Sealer for this, but it is really a choice of personal preference, if you choose matte or flossy finish. 

 

These great little scoops can be used for all sorts of Japanese Crafts.

Additionally you can use the following items to make them even prettier, and more tasty looking!

 Deco Sauce is a nice drippy sauce which dries to a hard and shiny consistancy, but will drip down for realistic sauce effects while drying. Comes in many flavors, more than shown here:

Purchase these Deco Sauce Products Here

Another great product for decorating ice cream balls is fake sprinkles:

Purchase these Deco Sauce Products Here

And finally some more pretty pictures from this wonderful Japanese craft magazine for your inspiration: 

I love the little jar of jam with the beautiful decoden whipped cream and fruit on top. This would make such a wonderful present don't you think so?!

ENJOY!