The Mouse Market

New Dessert Display

This was quite the busy weekend, and I finally finished the last dessert display. Today and tomorrow I’ll be finishing up the preparation board areas, and then with any time that remains I’ll make breads and cheeses, and a few holiday items. I ended up buying a roll of white paper for my table covering, with the added bonus that I can use it on the top of the table as well, delineating different display areas with designs or decorative papers attached to the table “cloth,” and I might put some of the prices directly on the paper, just to keep little, easy-to-lose price tags to a minimum. We’ll see.

Chocolate Dipped Peppermint Bark

I completed tons of cakes, cookies, truffles, candy apples, and other sweets yesterday and Saturday (pop over to my Flickr galleries to see the complete collection), and I made my first batch of peppermint bark, which was so strangely gratifying that I ended up making two plates of bark, one metal tin filled with bark, and I added the peppermint chunks to a jellyroll cake and a set of white chocolate truffles. I turned an odd-shaped dish into a chocolate fondue pot, and used up a handful of cedar wood pieces for my candy apple display board. I still need to make little designs to affix to the top of the cookie tins, and the jellyroll boards need edging (they’re going to be little trays when I’m done) and a paint job, but other than that, the desserts are finito!

Hot Chocolate with Homemade Marshmallows

After wrangling with a pair of earrings and a bottle of glue this weekend, I’ve also decided to make a switch in all of my jewelry pieces made from this point forward. Rather than using glue to attach metal components to the clay pieces, I’m going to use Liquid Translucent Sculpey to create a bond between the two, and once it is baked, the components will be permanent companions. I’ve decided on this for a couple of reasons: one, the bond will be stronger than any glue I can buy, and two, all of the glues that I’ve found to be successful polymer clay/metal adhesives are really toxic, and I can no longer buy or use them. Not only am I worried about my customers’ and my own health, but I don’t want to support the exposure of the workers who are making the glue. If it’s incredibly toxic-smelling when I’m using a just a little dab, I can’t imagine what the factory must smell like. Not worth it!

Tentative Booth Display

This weekend, a great deal of my time was spent on readying my booth display, and I successfully finished everything on my to-do list, including painting and attaching the little wooden strips I’ll be using as mini shelves for my earrings, sewing the table skirt, cutting poster board to cover the unsightly underbelly of my display, and other miscellaneous tasks. The picture above shows the booth without the poster board side covers attached to the table risers, and, obviously, with none of my pieces displayed, but you can still get an idea of where I’m going with this.

Mermaid Lagoon Doughnut Earrings

My tentative plan is to fill the white cork board area with earrings (propped up on the wooden shelves) and necklaces and bracelets (pinned to the cork board and allowed to hang). The very top shelf of the table risers will showcase the small selection of dollhouse miniatures I’ll be bringing to the show, and the green area to the right of the table risers will house the mailing list/business card station, adjustable rings, which will be propped up in little ramekin dishes filled with white or green sand, magnets, and maybe some hair accessories. I still haven’t decided what I’ll be hanging in the little white tree, but I’m sure I’ll find some odds and end pieces to display there.

Orange Sherbet Doughnut Earrings

I spent a good amount of time at the craft store trying to decide on an appropriate glue for affixing wood to painted cork out of the eighty billion or so options, including special glue for sticking crap onto rubber flip flops. Really? We need a special glue for that? I finally opted for Elmers’ Super Duper OMG! Glue or something like that, mainly because it had a picture of the Elmer’s cow, which normally looks rather sedated (or perhaps high on glue fumes), only it had been transformed into a blue, steroidal monster with rippling muscles that was snorting fire out of its flaring nostrils, all of which did wonders for inspiring my confidence in its supernatural gluing abilities.