Baked Goods and Experiments

 April 28th - 30th 2021

One of my recent purchases was a bread tower. Or that is how it was advertised anyway. I found it on a nice Etsy shop and the dimensions seemed ok for putting it somewhere in the Tea Room/Orangery/Limonaia.  It came with some small wooden trays that would slide in and out of the slots. The top is open, so I figure I will end up closing it off and making a top shelf for bags or something but for now, I only made a few changes.
Part of the tower’s exposed wood had been laminated and part of it not.  So I rectified that and added some of my own (of course from left over pieces of my other projects) and then stained the remaining exposed areas. Looks a lot better to me. I also aged the trays as they were too new looking. I imagine that in a setting with lots of bread and hands constantly pulling the trays out they’d be beat up a bit. (I soaked a bunch of wicker baskets while aging the trays making them darker and pulling out the useless handles. I’ll use them for bread and other sundries.) I then “made” some paper to line the trays and pulled out my stash of miniature breads that I have been buying over the last few years. 

The original state of the tower. You can see my piece of laminate to the right.

I just needed to add laminate to some sides.

Looks much better.

Shelves painted now too.

Staining the trays and darkening baskets.

Crimping paper so it will be soft and fit in the trays.

The same shop that sold the tower also had some baguette and a little shokupan type loaf. I bought both but when they arrived I wasn’t 100% pleased. The baguettes are bowed and much too light colored for my taste. So fixed them up a bit. The little loaf was not the best either - you could see the seam where the loaf was made in a mold. I have no issues with molds but at the very least they could clean up and trim off the seam lines.  So I made it into a little whole wheat loaf and sprinkled some “flour” on the top of it. Looks better. I also added a little flour (actually scraped chalk) on the large whole wheat loaf I bought (different shop and better quality). Once I fixed up all the bread products and added them into the trays I was pleased with the final result.  Now I just have to make a bunch more bread bags.

New and improved tower.

New and improved bread.

And better baguettes.

Template for making bread bags.

I also stained the cheese board. I scratched it up with knife marks too since I imagine it would have them being a cutting board and all. Looks much better.

Cheese board

I finished painting the two window panes for the door panel. They look fine and of course, since I didn’t put much paint on the sides they are not fitting snuggly.  I will probably have to glue these ones in - or just add more paint to the sides and refit them. More likely that.  So I started to look at the inside of the panels and thinking about how to decorate them. I already have an idea of the designs and “tiles” I want to use. But I thought that just printing them on photographic paper would be too flat and boring. So, I started screwing around with embossing powder.

The tile - powder and pastel chalk.

Mixed green chalk and resin.

The powder is sprinkled over wet ink and then “melted” with a heat gun creating a pseudo 3D effect. (Embossed effect.)  Thing is, the damn powders are expensive and I wasn’t even sure how to use them. So, after navigating the net for info I decided to mix the powder I have (white) with pastel chalk. I couldn’t find anywhere that suggested doing this but I figured it had to work. I experimented on the black & white pic to see if the powder would melt and stick.  The green was fine so I tried yellow.  But since I am not sure of the ratio, I was afraid to put too much chalk in and I ended up with a pale colors. No good. Still, I was able to use it on a color print out of the large lemon tile and I actually like it. I may want to make some areas in the designs in relief. Then I can varnish them thickly to simulate a tile like surface.  There is also the option of buying alcohol based inks and adding those into the white powder.  I may try and find some inks and see if that works too. Anyway, it’s fun finding a new process and experimenting.

Applying the powder to the brushed on ink.

After applying heat. You can see it's glossy.

Adding the yellow embossing to just part of the design.

And here is some more info on my favorite lemon the bizzaria. It is so damn ugly! I would like to taste it one day.