Miniature Teapot Project

Many years ago, I worked for a mail order company making miniature objects of all sorts. One of the projects I had was hundreds, and hundreds of miniature teapots. My husband made me molds of the teapots so that I could make many of them at once. The teapots for the project did not have to be functional, only cute, so what I did back then was just make the basic teapot from a mold, then paint the bisque piece with colorful designs in acrylic.

Fast forward to my new obsession with all things scale miniature, and finding these molds was a very exciting day! This time, I plan to make the teapots properly, with real glaze and carved designs. Not as easy as I thought it would be...what happened to the claim that slip-casting was fast?

I broke at least a dozen of the clay teapots when I first tried to carve on them. The handles were the first to go. I wanted the teapots to be "true" scale, knowing that the handles on the basic teapot would be far too thick and wide for a hand to actually get around if it was really in scale of one inch = one foot. So the first two that did make it to completion have new handles. My second breakage came from trying to make the spout functional. I broke a lot of spouts this way, and finally figured out to just chop off the molded spout and make a new one.

Still, the first two teapots did not end up functional. The spouts cannot pour on the two teapots in the left of the picture. The second two teapots were not designed to have a real handle, (the molds had a formed handle I just painted to give the illusion of a handle), so I made holes for a wire handle to go through. I have not been able to get a non-kinked wire handle on these two teapots yet. I have tried 3 different kinds of wire so far, but they have all been too tough to manipulate once they are on the teapot. I have some very thin copper wire that will be the next experimental handle on the two teapots in the right of the picture. I am using the #3 bugle bead as a handle on the wire to be more like a real teapot. These two teapots are functional :)

This is one of those getting side-tracked days. I started out thinking I would be taking pictures and listing the vases I made last week. That was really a couple of days ago...because the side-tracking from that was deciding some of the vases really needed flowers first. So I put off picture taking and started making flowers. Then, I just couldn't stop thinking about, and trying to fix the wire on the two teapots that need a separate handle.....that's how it goes so often. I don't stay focused on the task at hand, and feel all over the place on what I "should" be doing, and go do something else instead.

(new listings will be done soon, at least the poor neglected blog got a new post today ♥)