Even More Lollipops Mixed in With Family Hellos and Bon Voyages......

It has been a very busy time in my real life the last few weeks as I welcomed home my daughter from her year of working abroad and got my youngest son packed off for his four month trip to Indo-China, Australia and New Zealand. My children are trying to pack everything in before they have to settle down and be a proper grown up.

In the mean time this proper grown up has taken every opportunity to escape to her wonderful workshop and make lollipops!! Honeydukes is a big project and is taking a lot longer to bring together than I expected but slowly I am filling the shelves with all things sweet.

I have to fill the false dormer windows with goodies so I decided to dedicate myself to making batch upon batch of lollipops and sweets this last month for two reasons: firstly I have learnt that no matter how much you think you have made this shop is a sweetie pit, it all seems to disappear very quickly, and one of the main lessons I have learnt about working with polymer clay is the more you play the easier it becomes.

All my days seem to have started with very thin lines of various shades of Fimo. I use Fimo because it seems to be the easiest polymer to buy around where I live but I am sure all the other brands behave in much the same way. `I have also learnt that 'warming' up your clay before using is very important if you don't want to spend ages getting it ready to use. I keep small pieces 'warm' by wrapping it in clingfilm and tucking them into my underwear. Works for me!

The lines are then twirled together and can either be left knobbly or rolled and twirled into a smooth roll. 

I have used the smoothed out rolls to make old fashioned lollipops by creating simple swirls and adding white sugarcraft wire that I bought on Ebay. The sugarcraft wire is just the same a floral wire and is measured using a gauge system, the smaller the gauge the thicker the wire. After many different packages arrived through my letter box I have finally worked out that the best gauges for my needs are 30 (very thin), 28 and 26.
When will I learn that with miniatures small never seems to be small enough!!

The smoothed out rolls can also be baked as a very simple cane and then sliced to make sweeties. These triangular trays, also from Ebay, are my new best friend. They are bead trays I think but absolutely perfect for sorting small items, glitters and powders that you need to pour into bags or jars.

 The twisted rolls can also be baked as a cane and then sliced for sweets or cake toppings whatever takes your fancy. This was a mellow yellow day!

Two canes made one tiny bag of sweets which should fill two sweet jars......Only another 50 bags to go!

At the end of a day I hope to have a couple of full tiles. This one has the canes, some tiny pops and some rocket pops.

This one has a variety of lollipops. I bake them all at about 120 degrees for 30 minutes. Once they are cooled I try and slice the canes as they are a little easier to slice when ever so slightly warm. The next day I pack away or add gloss ready for a new day and a new colour.

This was my pink day......

........and this was my yellow day.

Tomorrow is my Kensington day. The Kensington Dolls House Festival starts tomorrow for their two day Spring Exhibition and I am going into London bright and early. For the first time I have joined their annual loyalty scheme which allows for an earlier entry so I am interested to see if that is a worthwhile investment.

The line up looks very exciting and I will take my usual list full of good intentions and then ignore it probably!! I am desperately trying to find china teapots and plates for my Mad Hatter project but because I need quite a few I need them to be slightly reasonably priced. 

I had hoped to see Old Bell Pottery in the exhibitor's list but they are not showing at the moment it seems. Oh well I am sure there will be lots of other wonderful things to see and admire.

Mostly I would like to take my time for a good browse something I never seem to do.

Then back to lollipops!!