Dollhouse Miniature- Fruits for the Cheese Board

Watch the video here.

This week I am going to make just a couple of simple fruits to add our cheese boards we started a few weeks ago. Next week we will be doing the assembly of the cheese board and bringing all the elements together.

I started with grapes, mainly because the are fun to make and really easy. The real secret to the grapes is to use a lot more translucent clay than your colored clay. In the case of the ones shown on the video I used Sculpey III in Plum.

Off camera I also made some green grapes and for those I used a mixture of a leafy green (Sculpey III in Leaf Green) and a yellow (Fimo Sunflower)

For the grapes start by making the core that we will build on and some loose grapes. Then bake those. While it is possible to do this without pre-baking the components it is much harder. By pre-baking and using some TLS to stick the parts together we get much better control and don't have to worry about smashing our tiny pieces.

I like to add grapes to the core then bake and repeat. I do this as many times as necessary to get the bunch to look as full as I want it to be. Depending on how the grapes will be displayed I sometimes fill in the flat bottom of the bunch too. This time since I am going to be attaching them to the marble board I decided to leave the bottom flat to make that attachment easier.

For the last baking I usually bake the grape bunch for a full 10 minutes to ensure that the TLS is completely cured.

For the apple slice again we are using mostly translucent clay with just a touch of colored clay. Since most of the apples I have recently purchased have been of the red variety that is what I made for the dolls. For these red apples I mixed a touch of yellow (Fimo Sunflower) into just a bit of white clay. Since this particular yellow is so strong I ended up adding more white and only using a portion of what I mixed.

If you want to add some green apples to your display substitute a leafy green for the yellow . Mix that with a bit of white and proceed just as I did on the video. Use a pretty apple-ly (I know not really a word LOL) green color of chalk to corm your apple peel.

Since I wasn't concerned with the apple slices squishing a bit while slicing so I didn't chill the clay. If you want to have your apples more consistent in shape feel free to freeze the cane for a while to get it hard so you can slice without squishing.