Fruit still life

It's been way too long I've been away from my blog. Honestly, I sometimes thought I would let it die but I changed my mind. I put too much effort into it in the past to just abandon it for good. I'm working on something new in form. My still life scenes were and are the foundation for my rebirth in miniature making. It's still in progress and therefore a secret, but I'm very excited about it. But back to the still lives.
This one was my most successful one, maybe for it's vivid colors. Those who has followed my blog for a while knows that everything in my scenes is my own work. I made my miniatures after an image in my head. I couldn't find something in a shop I came up with myself in the first place, so I have to make everything with my own hands. The hardest part was finding a method for the pottery. I had some failure on the road, but now I have the solution. I make cylinders from air dry clay then I turn pottery out of them on a lathe. Then I just have to put handles on them and paint them. Not so easy as it sounds, actually, a lathe could be very hostile... But now I'm an expert with it. (I wish!)

 Pots, canisters and jugs I made using my lathe.

My little pumpkins

Making miniature carved pumpkins is always fun for me. So many possibilities and styles I can play with. This is the first time I made pumpkin carriages. When I plan to make a carved pumpkin I build it on an alufoil ball. After baking I mine the alufoil out and it's a hard work, believe me, but I get a nice hollow pumpkin that way. The cogwheels are my own works, too. I made them from paper using various patterns.
I took some pictures with sunflower seeds just to show the measures. It would have been better placing pumkin seeds around my little pumpkins but unfortunately I hadn't got any at home at the time.

Exhibition

We, a little more than a dozen miniaturists in Hungary founded the Hungarian Miniature Workshop (Magyar Miniatűr Műhely or MMM in Hungarian) in the spring. And we opened our first exhibition last evening in Budapest. The exhibition is open for three weeks. We worked hard for that to happen and we were very excited at the opening. There were a lot of people there, way more than we expected. Of course, most of them were relatives and friends but we hope the next three weeks allure many visitors, both children and adults.
This is the logo of the workshop,

I made three new scenes for the exhibition and added my old "Smoky Kitchen" (http://mytinyworldfromhungary.blogspot.hu/2011/01/smokey-kitchen-to-memory-of-my-great.html) and "The Africa-explorer's Desk" with a new box around it (http://mytinyworldfromhungary.blogspot.hu/2013/04/the-africa-explorers-desk.html) to them.

The new scenes are  "The Pantry", "Mediterranean Mood" and "My Grandmother's Scones".
Here are the photos,

Next time I show you photos about the other miniaturists' works, too, I promise.

New territory

Someone asked me to make a seafood display for them. I asked for some experimenting time since I really don't know anything about seafood. Sure, I made fish, but mostly only fresh water ones. You know, Hungary hasn't got any sea connection, therefore seafood is not the part of the Hungarian cuisine. At all. So I turned to my best friend again, the internet. And I found a lot of excellent pictures about lobsters, clams, oysters, octopuses and various salt water fish. But since I haven't seen these creatures live it was quite hard for me to figure out the sizes. I tried to use plates, hands or anything in the photos.

Celebration time

I had two New Year's wishes, to lose some weight (it's a recurring wish) and to try to become an IGMA Fellow. It seems I'm better at making miniatures than keeping on my diet. So as of 5 May I'm an IGMA Fellow. I have to admit, I worked hard for it, but it so paid off. I did my level best to come up with the most realistic foods I've ever made. I can't find the words for how happy I am now.
You helped me, too, with the deciding about the application works. I chose the miniatures you had liked the most for the base of the new ones.

And here are my application works.