In pursuit of inedible stuff

So, raventhourne commented that she was amused by my fascination of making food replicas. I admit, it's a bit odd to say the least.

It started nearly two years ago thanks to earthstar_moon. She showed me a tutorial on DeviantArt for a felt cake. We'd gotten on a plush doll kick and she found it while looking up other stuff. It was fairly fascinating to me. Here's my detailing of that first outing. During that time, I was between newspaper jobs and working for Bank of America. Because of my hours, I couldn't participate in a lot of SCA activities, and I badly needed a creative outlet. This was a good one. The tutorial was cute, felt was cheap and I gave it a try. I was very pleased to craft something that to me now is a bit lumpy and amateurish.

I started seeking out other tutorials and discovered the Japanese tendency to turn pretty much anything into a craft, including making food replicas out of clay and felt. These were stunningly realistic and, being curious, I wanted to know how they did it. Here's a picture of one of the books I bought and you can see what I mean:



I found the English translation of one felt book in Phoenix and got a second Japanese book from Etsy. I practiced and got better with the felt, including making a ring box for misaoshinomori. I discovered how clay was used to help craft the felt objects and from there began working with clay replicas. Then I moved to Pennsylvania and other than a brief period in the fall with clay, I turned back to working on knitting.

I happened to stumble back into felting and got some PDFs of Japanese books to try and puzzle out the realistic techniques that I still wanted to know. With the books from Kinokuniya, I finally got it. *cheers* The cookie I displayed a couple days ago was the first result. The second is taking shape on my craft table right now - literally.

So, what can you use felt replicas for?

A lot of moms here make them for their kids to play with because it's low-cost and pretty child-friendly. The Japanese books provide ideas on how to turn the results into pretty arrangements that can be used as gifts, decorations, even framing for someone's kitchen. Smaller replicas, such as the clay ones, can be sold as cellphone charms and jewelry, which is pretty popular at cons (welcome to the Namesake comic and cake table.) As for me, it's actually been providing me good lessons in color theory, recreating 3D objects, etc. It's an unusual, but interesting creative outlet. Not quite the SCA, but in the same spirit!

Besides, it burns calories to do this work instead of consuming them. Can't argue with that!