Tasha's Kitchen - Expanding My Horizions

The next group of tasks for Tasha's kitchen included several things that were new to me and some that it seems are just a regular part of every build. I started by getting all of the hardware put onto the cabinets. To make certain they were as perfect as possible, I employed my tried and true method: making a jig.

For the cupboard doors, I took a piece of scrap wood which is the same width as the shaker frame - 1/4". I drilled a hole the distance from the top that I wanted the knobs to be placed and made sure it was centered.

Then by placing the jig flush at the top of each cupboard door, I could use my pilot hole punch to mark the door where the hole needed to be drilled.

Nearly perfect every time! I really like these knobs from Elf Miniatures. They are really heavy, have a lovely ball detail on the end and since they are quality metal, they are very shiny!

For the drawers, I had jigs at the ready. They were the inside cut outs from the Cricut cut cabinets. I just had to measure where I wanted the handles and then make the pilot holes in the chipboard. Some of the drawers have one knob and others have two depending on the width. There are more photos with the knobs later in the post.

The rendering below demonstrates many hardware configurations both for upper and lower cabinets. Pretty much anything goes. You are free to be creative and do what you like best when placing your handles.

The next task was to add lighting to a few of the cabinets - the ones with "glass" doors. I'm using Evan Designs LED products exclusively in this room box, including the transformer. This is a first for me because though I have used LEDs in the past, they are usually sprinkled among traditional 12 volt lights. I wanted all of the bulbs to last as long for Tasha as possible. For the cabinets, I am using the pico sized lights. I didn't want to use warm white LEDs because I'd like to achieve a more modern vibe with this project. The yellowish hue that the warm white lights give off works great for other settings, but here I wanted just bright white. I found that the cool lights were reading a bit too lavender. 

To mitigate the color and tone down the brightness a bit, I combined a 50/50 mix of white acrylic paint and Mod Podge to apply lightly over the bulb. It worked beautifully! It's subtle, ambient light with no more purple hue!

In order to finish the "glass" front cabinets, I had to fill them with their display items. Luckily, I had a bunch of blue and white kitchen stuff left over from the New Orleans kitchen. I am saving the more contemporary and everyday kitchen items for future open shelving. I thought it would be nice for Tasha to have the "family heirloom" type pieces in the china cabinet. None of us gets to escape the stuff our family forces on us, whether we want it or not, lol! I hope she doesn't mind a little homage to the past with "grandma's china" in her modern kitchen.

Because this will be her first dollhouse as an adult, I didn't want to overwhelm Tasha with a bunch of items that come loose and have to be set up again and again. For this reason, I am limiting the loose miniatures to things she can easily change out seasonally or when she's in the mood to create a cooking scene to photograph alongside her real life culinary creations. She posts a lot of her delicious looking meal photos on Facebook and Instagram. She did not get her cooking talent from me!

Once the cabinet items were glued in ( hopefully forever due to the combination of Fast Grab Tacky and Gorilla Super Glue) I affixed the doors. They will not open. Then I installed the double oven appliance front kits and the dishwasher front kit from Elf Miniatures. It's beginning to look like a kitchen that I think Tasha will be excited about!

Time to start on the wet bar. I made an upper and lower unit using the Maker, with part of the lower unit dedicated to a wine chiller. I had not planned for a chiller last fall, but became excited about it when Tasha mentioned how great having one would be. Luckily, I just happened to have sheets of aluminum in my stash so I could make one. This will be my first wine chiller.

I cut the aluminum to line the inside of the box and the bottoms of the "pull out" drawers. I made walnut rails for the fronts to tie in with the walnut stained wine rack in the upper unit. Last weekend's bottle making spree gave me all I needed to fill up the chiller and the upper cabinets. I added some glassware, a little lighting, and viola!

Here it is in the kitchen. The upper cabinet will be mounted on the wall, the same height as the other tall cabinets. Between the top and bottom cabinets will be a subway tile backsplash and the same white counters.

Oh! That reminds me! You don't know about the counters yet! There's still so much more to tell! Sorry for the long winded post AGAIN!

Let's touch on the backsplash quickly... I am using the same type of brick patterned MDF stuff that I used in the New Orleans kitchen. You can see that here. Why? because it looks good and it's easy. There is a bit of prep work to make it look nice, but I'll go more in depth on that in my next post. I'm mentioning this because you will see it in the photo below being tested out with the contertops.

The countertops are made from a sheet of white Lucite and will look a lot like real life solid surface countertops. It's fairly easy to cut if you have a mini table saw with a guide edge, or a really helpful husband with nice tools. Cutting them to width and length is easy enough, but what if you need to make a rectangle hole in the middle for an undermounted sink?  This was going to be another first for me, too. After watching a few videos on how they do this for 1:1 scale sinks, I adapted it for miniatures using the tools I have. Here's what I did.

If the cling film that is supposed to protect the surface of the Lucite is compromised, cover with masking tape before you cut it to the length and width you need. This will keep it from getting scratched.

Measure precisely and carefully exactly where you need your rectangle to be. Check and double check important things like remembering to account for the thickness of your backsplash, the overhang on the front of your cabinets, the width and depth of your sink and any recess allowance. Make sure you have enough room for the faucet to mount behind the sink while still leaving knuckle room to your backsplash. If you have a Cricut, take these measurements and transfer them into Design Space to make a template. Cut and overlay the template securing with more masking tape. If you are working by hand carefully mark your measurements on top of the masking tape.

Using an Xacto knife, carefully cut away the masking tape from your rectangle to expose the surface.

Using a Laminate Cutter score each of the four sides of the rectangle 20 times. 

Note: This material is 1/8" thick so you have to be really dedicated and patient if you plan to cut it all the way through by hand. Or, just do what I did - finish the cut with your scroll saw.

Using your rotary tool, drill two or three connecting holes into your rectangle, slightly away from the corner. Make it large enough to pass your scroll saw blade through.

Disconnect your scroll saw blade and reinstall it after you have passed the blade through your access hole.

Using the scored lines as your guidelines, cut the rectangle, then remove/reinstall the blade once again.

And that's how you cut a hole in the middle of something! Not too shabby for my first time! The material is sand-able, so you can perfect the edge once the major cutting is completed.

Now for the sink. I had purchased an Elf Miniatures Underslung Sink Kit that comes with a monobloc tap. I found it to be a good size for a second sink, such as one for washing vegetables or in a wet bar, or in a compact kitchen. But, for a real working kitchen, it's a little small and very shallow (1/2" deep or 6" in real life). So instead of using the kit, I took my experimental 3D printed sink, which was wider and deeper (the equivalent of 9" in real life), and cut aluminum panels to glue to the inside. You'll need to use contact cement for the aluminum to adhere to anything. I used Aleene's The Ultimate glue. 

For the faucet, to make the monobloc tap look a little more gourmet~kitchen~y, I took a silver earring back, a small spacer bead and a spring from a ball point pen to beef it up. I recommend using 5 minute epoxy for this, as most other adhesives will fail over time. Where the base goes into the countertop, I added a silver washer. It's the same as the one I used for the sink drain, 1/4" round with a 1/16" hole.

During my next "Mini Time Opportunity", I'll begin to fabricate some kind of stovetop using components from the Elf Gas Hob Top Kit that I have on hand or I'll see about using my 3D printer to make one. It's been so much fun getting to try new challenges and to learn a few things this week, I'll try to keep the momentum going! 

Thanks for making it to the end of another long post with me! I hope you are inspired to try new challenges and to make good things better, too! 

xo xo,

Jodi

P.S. I finally dusted off the 3D printer to have a try at a gas cooktop. I posted a sneak peek on Instagram with a mention that details would be here for this post. I got carried away trying to make improvements and have printed six attempts now! The design is getting a little better each time. I do have the one for Tasha's kitchen completed, but wanted to present the whole process in one post in the hope that it would be helpful for anyone trying to make a gas cooktop. Please forgive my misleading you - I will have the goods in next week's post!

Tasha's Kitchen - Molds, Bottles And A Love Story

A lot happened over the weekend on Tasha's kitchen - I am super excited about all of the progress being made! But it was so much, in fact, that I think it's too much for one post. I broke it down into three topics, two of which aren't quite completed. I will present one of them here for you today: Molds.

Tasha and her fiancé Brent like to entertain. They are both hard working professionals, but when the weekend comes, they are a fun loving and jovial couple to be around. For this reason, I knew any dream kitchen for Tasha would have to include a wet bar. For a wet bar, I would need a lot of different types of bottles - wine, liquor and mixers. I had several of these types of bottles in my supplies and decided to make molds of them.

When you mold an item with a flat back it is pretty simple: Just place the item in a similarly sized container and pour the mold material over the top. But when your item has a more complicated shape, like a skinny neck and a wide bottom, you have to think creatively. The clay method for the wine bottles seemed like a good solution.

This clay is a non hardening clay - it is made specifically for mold making. For this type of mold, press a level layer of the clay into the bottom of the mold container, press the items in only deep enough for the clay to hold them steady, then pour the mold material over the top.

When you de-mold, you remove the clay from the top of the mold and store it away for the next use. You can keep using it until it has become too gross to want to work with any longer. 

Sometimes you have to destroy the container to get the
mold out. Use disposable condiment containers whenever possible.
This is a good excuse to eat more takeout!

Now you'll pull the items you've molded out of the new mold. They are hard to get out sometimes - I use my teeth!

Once the molds are ready, the exciting part begins - making the bottles with resin! You'll need some two part resin, disposable medicine cups (1 oz size works great), disposable stir sticks and pigments.

For the resin, I recommend something that has a working time of about 30 to 40 minutes. This gives you enough time to mix the resin, let it gas off a bit to reduce the bubbles and still gives you time to get it into the molds. I like Ice Resin, but it is about twice as expensive as other comparable brands. If you are going to color your resin, you really don't need to pay a whole lot more for "non yellowing" resin. If you are going to sell your items for a bunch of money, then you have to be more cautious. I have bottles in my Starbucks project from 2013 using Amazing Clear Casting Resin and they still look great.

The Amazing brand comes in clear and white so be sure to get the one you intended. Amazing Casting Resin White only has a working time of 10 minutes, so it is only good for small, quick, NON CLEAR pieces. It can be pigmented, though. Amazing Clear Cast, though clear, takes 24 hours to harden.

I discovered that both brands of my on hand resin was solidifying. The manufacturer recommends that you use them within 6 months but mine are much older than that. I made a valiant effort to stir them, and then gave them a try in spite of the warning signs. Surprisingly, it still produced usable bottles - it just took overnight to harden! Waste not, want not I always say!

Meanwhile, because I wanted to get a replacement supply ~F~A~S~T~ I tried an inexpensive brand that had same day Amazon delivery. It is called FanAut and gets high reviews. It seems to have worked fine, though it took overnight to harden, too. It says it has a 40 minute working time, but I suspect that adding in the Epoxy Pigment can extend that time. As long as I end up with usable bottles, overnight is fine with me!

For my previous post on using the Mold Star 15 rubber molding product, See This Post.

For more on working with resin and pigments, See This Post.

As far as how the bottles came out - some were better than others. I seemed to have had trouble getting the resin all of the way down into the neck of the bottles in the molds. It happened first with the red wine bottles, which told me that I needed to make a specific effort to be sure the resin was not stopped by an air pocket when I poured the white wine bottles. In spite of my effort - taking a toothpick, plunging it in and pushing the resin into the hole, I still did not end up with great necks on my bottles. In the interest of not wasting my efforts, I tried to find a fix for these bottles.

Though the extent of each bottle's misfortune varied, I was missing an average of 3/16" on each of the necks. I decided to try gluing dowels or toothpicks to the ends to see what I could salvage. I cut the dowels to size, put a bit of Tacky Glue on the bottle, a small amount of cyanoacrylate glue (super glue) on the dowel, then held them gently together.

Once the extensions were dry and set, I sanded and shaped as carefully as I could (probably should have shaped them first!), painted them black to simulate the cork labels, then coated in Mod Podge.

Before I show you how they came out, let me tell you a love story... Some of you know that Tasha has always been a really smart kid. She always tested highest in her classes in school, was in the Spectrum and Running Start programs where she attended college classes while she was in High School, and has always worked super hard to do her best at everything she tries. I know I am her mom and am supposed to say nice things about her, but truly, she is an extraordinary person.

She and Brent met on OkCupid in 2009. If I told you that I was horrified that she had met someone online (this was back when it was not as common and horror stories pervaded Dateline NBC), and that the same day they met he took her 60 miles away from home to hike in the woods, I would be underselling my panic. Of course, I did not know these facts until after she had safely arrived home. After they were already on the hiking trail, she finally had some misgivings about the situation, too. In her realization of the potential danger she had put herself in, she decided the best way to discourage her murder was to steer the conversation to forensic science. She told Brent that with modern forensic science methods, her DNA would be all over his truck and probably on him too. He just thought she was weird. Luckily, Brent turned out not to be a serial killer, and instead is the most amazing, smart, kind, loving, and perfect partner that we could have ever hoped for, for Tasha.

They are truly poured from the same mold.💗

They knew they would always be together, but wanted to be finished with school and in good jobs before they got married. They got engaged in 2019 and Brent graduated with his electrical engineering degree last year. They had already waited for so long and were finally planning the wedding, then Covid happened.

Brent popped the question while hiking the trail of their first date.
He designed the ring, too. Blue topaz is his birthstone and teal
is Tasha's favorite color.

So a long love story just to say that during Covid, to keep them busy and focused on their future plans, they began making wine for the reception - banana and watermelon. Tasha graduated Magna Cum Laude in Science, is a total chemistry nerd, and making wine is all about chemistry. Her labels look like elements on the Periodic Table - of course they do! And I knew I had to make replicas of the wine bottles to be included in her wet bar.

My bottles came out pretty well, considering I had to add the tops. But I wanted another try. More on that in a minute...

The other bottle blanks I had just needed labels. I looked online to find actual brands in the colors and shapes of the bottles. I saved the pictures and then resized them to fit on the bottles. 

Once they were printed, I applied a piece of packaging tape over them, cut them out with a ruler and an Xacto knife, and applied them to the bottles with Mod Podge. I like it better than glue because the excess is easily removed with a toothpick and leaves no residue.

I wanted to give the wine bottle mold another try. I knew what the problem was - trapped air. Now I just needed to find a solution to get the air out.

Using my pilot hole punch tool, I pushed it through the mold until it came out of the bottom of the mold. Then, using that hole, I pushed a toothpick up into the mold from the bottom.

Look closely and you'll see the toothpicks in the holes.

Toothpicks pushed up into the bottom of the mold.

When I filled the mold with resin, about three quarters of the way full, I gently twisted and pulled the toothpicks back out the bottom. The theory was that by doing so I would pull any air pockets out while also pulling the resin into the bottle necks in the bottom of the mold. It seemed to work, as the resin level dropped as I pulled. Was this just displacement from the toothpick, or was it going to work? I'd have to wait overnight to know for sure. 

While I was at it, I decided to cast a few more things.

When I woke up the next morning, I raced to the dining room to check the results. Success!!! The resin didn't even leak at all from the hole in the bottom of the mold. The rubber just sealed right back up!

Much better bottles and no toothpick tops for this batch!

And I even made the watermelon wine in green bottles like Tasha did. A little black paint and Mod Podge for the cork paper, more labels and viola! These are going to work great!

Now I am repeating my experiment with a batch of red wine bottles. I'll have to race down again in the morning to see if my luck scientific reasoning is verified! And, if this weekend is as productive as last weekend, I might even be able to finish the wet bar!

Hope all your mini experimenting and love stories have happy endings, too!

xo xo,

Jodi

P.S.

Speaking of happy endings... Birgit, the creative genius and inspiring artist behind the hugely popular BiWuBären blog, is known for her incredible generosity and thoughtful Christmas Care Packages. She is also very diligent, and so mailed all her packages from Germany in early November. A couple of us U.S. residents just received them within the past week! Poor Postal Service! Those guys have a lot of challenges to overcome in these Covid times! But whether late or not, the kindness is no less joyously received! And as usual, the package was a trove of treasures!

We ate the marzipan before it made it into the photo! Yum!

Just look at this darling little house that Birgit made! There are real windowpanes and you can see into the house! Look at the tiny wooden porch posts! The teeny-weeny porch planters and that tin roof! 

Amazing! I love it, and most of all I love that Birgit sends her heart out across the world and makes it a much more special place! 

Thank you Dear Birgit! You are a treasure!