DIY: Pantry Turn your hand to woodworking with this 1:12 scale pantry project
Words & images by Charlott Müller
Ma terials
Tools
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Hardwood or balsa wood sheets, 1.5mm and 0.5mm thickness
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Square wooden dowels, 5 x 5mm
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Ruler
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Clamps, clothes pegs or sewing clips
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Wood glue Super glue
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4 miniature hinges
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4 small beads or miniature knobs
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Decorative paper (optional)
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Paint or wood stain 12 toothpicks
Craft knife
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Pencil
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Emery board or sandpaper
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Popsicle sticks or coffee stirrers for moulding (optional)
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Brushes
Connect with Charlott online: Website: charlottsminiatures.etsy.com Instagram: @charlotts_miniatures_ Shrunk.
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DIY Rustic Pizza This intermediate‑level pizza project is one to really get your teeth into! Esha shares the detailed and illustrated steps to sculpt these rustic‑style pizza bases and toppings. Explore different techniques for colour blending, shading and adding texture to create realistic baked dough, melted cheese and glistening toppings. The perfect mini meal for doll’s house al fresco dining this Summer!
Colour the clay ⇨ As cold porcelain dries translucent, we need to add white paint to it to make it more opaque. Add some white and a tiny bit of chrome yellow paint to the clay. Knead it well until you get a pale yellow colour. Take a bit of the clay and store the remaining clay in a zip lock bag.
S tart to sculp t ⇨ Make a ball out of the clay and flatten it into a circle with your fingers. Place it on a work surface. Next, using a flat silicone tool, flatten the middle and push the clay towards the edges of the circle to create the ‘pizza crust’. Then, with the flat silicone tool, create random oblique lines on the crust. ⇨ Take some more clay and add a few drops of water to it. With a spatula, mix it thoroughly to turn it into a paste consistency. Add a bit of white and yellow paint to the paste and mix again.
Add texture and shading ⇨ Using a cocktail stick, add large and small dots or ‘bubbles’ to the crust using the paste. Leave to dry. ⇨ Using an eyeshadow applicator or brush, apply some yellow ochre soft pastel all over the crust. Then apply raw sienna acrylic paint to darken and enhance the ‘bubbles’. Next, go darker and use brown soft pastel to enhance the bubbles and crust. If you want your crust to be light, stop here. Otherwise, for a rustic sourdough crust look, as shown, use a black soft pastel to shade the top of the bubbles. 40
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Add sauce and cheese
Crea te leaves and topp ings
⇨ To add some texture to the tomato sauce, add some red and white acrylic paint to the clay and let it dry a bit. Using a needle tool, gently scrape the clay in circular motions.
⇨ To make the basil leaves, mix a bit of sap green acrylic paint and a bit of white in the clay. Put some of this clay in a zip lock bag and cover the remaining clay with cling film so it doesn’t dry out.
⇨ Take some UV resin, add yellow and red transparent paint/alcohol ink and mix it. Then, add the red clay crumbs and mix to make the tomato sauce.
⇨ Cut one corner of the zip lock bag and squeeze out a tiny ball of clay. Flatten it out thinly, pressing it between your fingers and then flatten it further using a needle. Next, draw lines in the centre and either side with the needle to make the veins of the leaf. Carefully remove the leaf from your finger using the needle.
⇨ For the cheese, make the clay paste we made earlier and add white and transparent yellow paint to it. Once mixed, spread it all over the pizza base. ⇨ Add the sauce to the edges of the pizza first. Then, draw various‑sized circles with the sauce on the base, as shown. Cure it under the UV light. It will now start looking like melted cheese. Then, add the remaining cheese paste in between the sauce circles to look like melted cheese and let it dry for a bit. ⇨ Next, mix some transparent yellow paint and a bit of red in UV resin. Using a cocktail stick, draw lines and dots on the circles so it looks like oil is being baked and separated from the cheese. Then cure it under UV light.
⇨ Stick the leaves on the pizza using glue. To shade the leaves, mix a bit of dark brown paint in sap green and water it down. Apply this dark green paint wash on the leaves to give them more depth and to make them look like they have come out of the oven. ⇨ Apply white soft pastel using an eyeshadow applicator on the crust to make it look like a floury sourdough pizza crust.
⇨ Before the cheese is completely dry (only the top layer should be dry) take an aluminium foil ball and press it on the cheese to give it more texture. Shrunk.
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Feature Mini Made Home
Mini Made Home If you love Scandi style and retro interiors, you’re going to love Gemma Mallord’s work Words by Moi Ali Images by Gemma Mallord
G
emma Mallord is one busy lady. As if five children weren’t enough to keep her occupied, she also finds time to run a successful Etsy store from her home in Devon — oh, and to keep her almost 12k followers on Instagram (@MiniMadeHome) happy with an ever‑changing array of scrumptious, Scandi retro interiors from the 1960s and ‘70s.
miniature passion began. Gemma takes up the story: “Originally, I bought an old Lundby dolls house to use as a set for photographing my peg dolls. This kindled an interest in dolls houses, especially vintage Scandi ones, and I started buying furniture and accessories for the Lundby. I already absolutely loved the design style of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and my own home is pretty retro, and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole!”
Strangely though, it all began with wooden pegs! Gemma had a bit of a thing for peg dolls, which she loved to paint. She needed a suitable backdrop for photographing her work to sell, and that’s how her
It’s fair to say that Gemma was hooked. “The Lundby collection took over,” she admits, “and I started making a few of my own miniatures, often things that I wanted for my house that weren’t available in 16th scale. I
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also began to make my own versions of vintage Lundby items I hadn’t managed to collect, and it grew from there. That was around six years ago, and I’ve never looked back!” Clearly, Gemma was never going to stick to just one Lundby, and she confesses to now having a
Taking my miniature‑making digital enables me to reproduce small batches.
Feature Welcome to The Dreamery Göril’s doll’s house journey began in 2021 when she restored a vintage cabinet house, found in an antique store. Having always been an artistic person, enjoying many crafts from a young age, she had been seeking a new creative outlet. A long‑term, chronic health condition had made Göril’s usual hobbies of knitting and crocheting problematic, with the repetitive motions exacerbating some of her muscular‑related symptoms. “Being able to be creative has been a kind of medicine for me,” Göril shares. “I got very sad and thought I need to find a substitute for this, I can’t just do nothing!” Then, six months later: “We went to one of my favourite antique stores and there
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Being able to be creative has been a kind of medicine for me. was this cabinet that had been converted to a kind of dollhouse and I thought hmmm!” As it turns out, dolls houses and miniatures were to be the perfect hobby for Göril. She says “I can do interior decorating which I love, I can be crafty. I can explore all these different techniques and materials and just evolve and learn
Previous page: A stunning birds‑eye view of The Dreamery floor and a hand‑made, wicker chaise. Opposite page: Left; Miniature plants and foliage bring this enchanting build to life. Top right; The more you look, the more detail there is to see. This charming name plaque welcomes mini visitors. Bottom right; Despite only having natural sunlight for a few hours a day during the winter months in Sweden, Göril has created a bright and beautiful miniature world. This page: The Dreamery in all its glory; a stunning, tiered structure, complete with mezzanine floor and electrical lighting system.
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