Dollhouse Miniature Holiday Stuffing

 

Watch the video here.

 

This week we are making a casserole dish of stuffing (dressing- what do you call it at your house?) to go with the roasted turkey we made last week.

Be sure to check out my Holiday Dinner playlist on YouTube if you want to make a holiday meal for your dollhouse. Let me know if what else you want to see a tutorial on.

If you want to use your stuffing in your turkey just skip the first part of the tutorial where we make the casserole dish and just make the stuffing.

We start out our project today by making the casserole dish the stuffing will be baked in. For this I am using my some of my stock white/translucent blend. This is a blend of equal parts of both colors and I almost always have a supply of it in my clay stash. When I find polymer clay on sale I will buy a block of each white and translucent and mix the two blocks together, yes the entire blocks. I use this that much. For this blend I really don't care what brand the clays are since all translucent clays are a bit soft and generally this clay is not used for anything that has really fine details. Today we are using it to create the ceramic casserole dish.

For the casserole I needed my clay rolled out into a nice even layer but I really didn't feel like dragging out my pasta machine and setting it up just for this little step. So I used some jumbo craft-sticks (one on each side of my clay) to act as a template to roll the clay out. As soon as my clay roller hit the craft-sticks I knew the clay was an even depth all over. This trick works really well and you can keep sticks of different sizes on hand to make different thicknesses of clay.

Once the clay was rolled out I cut a strip for the sides of the casserole dish. For this I used a regular size craft-stick as a template. The craft-stick is ⅜” wide which made a very nice height for the sides of my casserole. For the base of the casserole I layered 3 thicknesses of the clay together and used a ¾” round cutter. I like this size for a casserole dish. The thicker bottom does two things for us, it makes it easier to make a good connection with the sides and it fills in some of the dish so we won't have to make as much stuffing later to fill it. If you have a ¾” dowel to form your dish over it will be a lot easier than forming it freehand like I did. I just couldn't find anything the right size around here.

By the time I had the dish formed the clay had warmed up from being handled so I placed it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. This allowed the clay to become very cold which made it easier to work with. I used a toothpick to add some detailing around the sides just link my real casserole dish has. I thin used some chalk to color just the outside of the casserole dish. For this I looked through all my chalk sets and found the darkest blue I had. I love how it looks and it is always fun to use those other colors of chalk that I usually don't get to play with making foods.

The casserole dish was then baked at 275°F for 10 minutes.

Now onto to the stuffing. For this stuffing we need to pre-bake some clays. I used- Sculpey III in Camouflage

Sculpey III in Moss Green

Fimo Classic in Champagne

You don't need to use the exact same colors, just pick something close to these. You won't need much of the colors, just enough to grate a bit of the two greens and then some to chop up really fine from the Champagne. With the champagne I didn't work with the clay at all, I just cut it in thin slabs right off the block. This helps it to be a bit more crumbly and look more like bread when it is chopped up. I also used some brown chalks to color one side of this “bread” to add a bit of crust to some of the pieces. Bake these at 275°F for only about 5 minutes and then work quickly to grate the green clay on a very fine cheese grater (reserved for clay use only) and finely chop the champagne clay. It is much easier to do this when the clays are still warm from the oven. If they cool off and become to too hard to work with just stick them back in the oven for a couple of minutes to warm them back up.

After you have your stuffing parts grated and chopped use the casserole dish to measure how much you are going to need to mix together.

Now we need to color some TLS (Translucent Liquid Sculpey) with just a tiny drop of burnt umber oil paint. It only takes a tiny tiny bit of paint to color it. Once you have this mixed add your stuffing and place into your casserole dish. If you want to add a serving spoon to your dish add it now if it is able to be baked with the stuffing. Add a few bits of extra stuffing bits to the top and bake at 250°F for 30 minutes. I like to lower the temperature a bit on long bakes like this because I have noticed most home ovens tend to drift up a bit in temperature over time and this helps to prevent overheating the clay.

As a side note I know there are tutorials on YouTube that use acrylic paint in TLS, this is not recommended because of the water content of the acrylic paint which have bubble in the heat of the oven. I have heard of instances of projects using acrylic paint exploding in the oven. I have not had this happen but I have never used it in my clay. I use the oil paint to be safe and recommend you do also.

Once our casserole of stuffing is out of the oven and completely cooled add a very thin coat of Gloss Mod Podge to just the casserole dish portion of the project.

 

 

 

 

Then follow with some Matt Mod Podge on the stuffing itself. 

Be sure to save the extra baked clay bits to use in future projects. You could even mix some extra stuffing and make individual “servings” to add to plates in a future scene.

Now you are ready to display your dish of stuffing at your doll's holiday meal. Be sure to send my a picture if you make some I love to see what you all make from my tutorials.

As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.