SUSHI BAR

My birthday happens to be in mid July and in 2008 I celebrated one of those 'special' ones which mark a milestone in your life.

My family wanted to do something special to celebrate it and, after much debating between themselves, they decided to trate me to a private, half day Sushi Making course with an accredited sushi chef. My husband and eldest daughter could then join me.

The course took place at the tutors home and we had to travel across London (using the London underground tube system,) to where she lived. It was an interesting and enjoyable few hours and I would say they chose well.

During the journey home I found myself rather wishing I had some kind of permanent reminder of my birthday present. I began to wonder if I could recreate the tutor's kitchen and perhaps put some MiniBears in it to represent my family and I taking part in the course.

The more I thought about it the more I realised the idea was definitely possible. The tutor had a really nice kitchen with a square central island unit and we were each able to have a side of the island to work at and be able to watch the tutor as she took us through her teaching session. If I could make a square unit and place MiniBears around it, they could represent us on the course - especially if I could create miniature sushi!

By the time I got home from the course, I felt that same old enthusiasm inside me and realised that I had found my next MiniBear Project!

Of course, adhering to my own project ethics, buying in accessories was not really an option and there was no reason not to have a go, especially as I still had various clay blocks left over from the days when I made things in wood and clay for the 1/48th and 1/144th scale doll houses I used to put together.

The first thing I did was to raid my small and very old, supply of clay and see what colours I had that were still usable. Some had dried out so badly that it crumbled almost to dust as I tried to mould it! I needed white for 'rice'. Dark green for the 'nori' (seaweed sheets) and several other colours to use for sushi fillings.

I planned on making the miniature sushi by rolling 'sausages' of white clay which I would put around other colour 'sausages' like pink for salmon, light green for cucumber etc. etc. I would then wrap everything in dark green or black clay sheets and finally thin down this larger 'sausage' to the size that would be best for my purposes then slice and harden it off in the oven.

Although far from realistic, I didn't think my efforts were that bad and fortunately for me, they are so small that they are difficult to see anyway! I tried not to make too many, but you know what they say about 'the best laid plans'!

With far more miniature sushi than I felt I need for the project, the original idea of making a simple island kitchen unit with four MiniBears around it looking like they were making sushi began to fade, evolve and expand. Thus I ended up deciding to try and make a much more complex scene of a Sushi Bear filled with MiniBears.

Perhaps I should mention that having the correct tools definitely helps produce a better product and I didn't really have any 'proper' tools. I am more the 'make-do-with-what-you-have' type of person. For example having made some sushi I made some plates to put them on. I had no proper cutter or rolling pin but I used the top of a small spray bottle to cut the plates out of hand flattened clay pieces. I felt that this method would add 'individuality' to the whole project!

I made round plates, I made square plates. I formed tiny spoons and little chop sticks by cutting and splitting bits of a wooden toothpick. I even moulded some clay around the end of a pencil and formed them into little holders which I thought would be cute to put the chocpsticks in. I found it all very satisfying and enjoyable.

I do make real, edible sushi. Some of the ingredients I wanted to use when I next made full size, edible sushi I could not get locally and as I live not far from central London, I decided to take a trip to the Japan Centre near Piccadilly Circus where I thought I might get them.

Naturally I took the opportunity to have a walk around the whole shop. Not only does it have a fresh sushi section, which is popular at lunch times, but it also has a small grocery section, a travel section and in the basement, a bookstore.

Not surprisingly all the books and magazines are written in Japanese. I do have a couple of Japanese teddy bear making books myself, and even though I have yet to make any of these much larger bears, I still thought it a good idea to see if the shop had any different teddy bear making books. Not surprisingly for such a small space, they didn't. They did have some on origami and other craft books. However, there was something that caught my eye.

It was a kit for a Japanese paper doll dressed in a kimono also made of paper. This was not really an origami kit. The little doll kit was made using a certain kind of paper which you folded and other bits which were cut and glued together. True origami is the art of paper folding alone. These paper 'Washi' dolls, are I think, used sometimes as book marks and card toppers. As I looked at the kit I wondered if I could adjust the pattern and use it on a MiniBear. How 'cool ' would that be to put MiniBears in little paper kimonos!

Decision made (they had some English instructions!), and I bought one of the paper doll kits. It turned out that the kimono was just a piece of oblong paper folded in a certain way. You then cut and glued other pieces of paper on it. If I wanted to have a go, I would have to adjust the 2 dimensional instructions to work on a 3 dimensional bear. It was not quite as easy as I thought it would be but eventually after quiet a lot of frustrating attempts, the result I achieved encouraged me to keep at it.

This is my first attempt to clothe a MiniBear in a paper kimono. When I bought the paper doll kit, I also bought a small pack of ordinary origami paper. I planned to use this nice but cheaper paper to practice on. The paper in the kit looked too expensive for me to practice on and when I used it, I realised the difference in the feel of the Washi paper against the ordinary origami paper. Washi paper really does feel more like fabric and is far more malleable than the origami paper.

With a total of five kimono clad MiniBears completed, I felt I was off to a good start. Initially I thought of trying to make something that could look like refridgerated display units. Not easy! Then I found myself thinking of those sushi places that have a conveyor belt to carry plates of sushi around a counter top and which you just help yourself to as the food you want passes by.

Unfortunately that 'conveyor belt' idea wouldn't go away. Obviously I would need to have a try at making one and fail before I could move on to a different idea.

My first creation was something that looked more like a banqueting table.

This was okay, but how would the MiniBears sit at it?

That's better

This time I could have the MiniBears sitting at the unit. Mind you, I still had no idea how I was going to make the conveyor belt thing?

Up to this point I had not given much throught to what the shop itself was going to look like. I cut a new 'frontage' from an empty cereal box which I bent and folded until I had a shape for the walls which might work for me.

I now had the main sushi bar, some plates, some sushi, a couple of tables, five Kimono MiniBears and a shop wall! There were enough bits and pieces so that I could put things on a surface so I could get a general 'feel' for how the project was coming along.

As you can see from this photo, the walls of the shop are pieces of a cereal box with holes cut out for windows and doors. The 'flooring' is actually the top of the table I set everything upon. Even in this, its very basic form, I knew that this project had real potential.

I also felt that the accessories were going to be just as important as the little MiniBears themselves. It was only after I had taken the photo below, that I realised I might have made more accessories than I actually needed for this project and I still needed more kimono MiniBears!!

I had not given any thought whether or not the MiniBears would be standing and/or sitting in the scene. I liked the idea that some might sit on stools or chairs. I had already formed some basic tables which I would eventually glue to the walls. These would help secure the walls to the floor and add a bit of stability. The next step was to come up with a design for some chairs which I could make. I would then be able to answer the question whether or not I could get the bears to sit on them.

This simple design was made from four pieces of wood. Although I have glued the parts together and painted them black I am going to have 'seat cushions' on each one, when I decide what the colour scheme is going to be!

Making a seated MiniBear might not be as difficult as I think it might be but dressing it in a tiny paper kimono and seating it could be!

Flooring. I felt I had several choices here. I bought a roll of red flock-like sticky back paper and another in black. This could be stuck directly onto the card to cover it and form the inside of the shop walls. The red flocked paper was a kind of 'pillar box' red and looked totally wrong. The black flock paper seemed a better colour but I felt it swamped the dark accessories and was also discarded. So back to the drawing board for more ideas!

Some DIYshops still allow you to take small samples of wallpaper. I took a small piece of several (suitable) papers to see how they looked as flooring. I had one with a bold black and silver-grey design on it which I was preparing to use. But there was a little voice inside my head which kept telling me that I could come up with something better. It was only after visiting a Scrapbook & Rubber Stamping show that I saw some thin black card with a simple embossed dsign on it. I knew that that would be just right.

Inspiration is something that occurs suddenly with me and over which I seem to have no control. For months I had thought the blue plates I had made were fine. I had even made some tiny spoons and rather odd shaped bowls to match as well. One day I looked at them and decided with odd finality that the blue plates and bowls were the wrong colour. Perhaps a shade of red would fit more in with a colour scheme I had in mind?

The first kimono MiniBears with some of the early crockery I made. A £1 coin gives you an idea of the size

The joy of the sushi glued onto the plates!!

Because of the size of the 'conveyor belt' in the counter, the plates could not be too big. I had bought some clay the colour of granite and another block of black. I flattened bits of clay out and cut some squares. I thought these would look good as components of a 'table setting'. I had round and square plates, chopsticks (cut down toothpicks), chopstick holders, black spoons, tiny sake/tea cups and finally made red serviettes to complete the table setting. (This was funny because I could not get hold of the right size and colour full size serviettes, which I was going to cut up to make miniature ones for the scene. Also I needed something the right thickness. Out of desperation I took a sheet of cheap [ yes, unused!] toilet paper, coloured it with a felt tip pen and cut that up. It was going to be just a trial thing, but the colour, size and thickness worked well, so U just used those).

The next major part of the project to think about would be the walls and windows. The walls would need to be flexible enough to fold into whatever shape I wanted, remembering that they would need to be shaped so they would stand up, more or less unsupported. The shop name and logo design on the window 'glass' was important as it needed to be simple, but descriptive. I had chosen, 'Simply Sushi' for the shop name and designed a very simple logo of 'three sushi on a plate'.

The inside walls were covered with a different roll of sticky back paper, this time in a sparkling silver/white colour which I felt worked well. The outside of the walls were covered with a suitably sized small brick pattern which I had created on the computer and used on previous occasions for the Jewellery and Wedding Cake shops. I designed this scene to be viewed from one side so the 'street' side is very plain.

This project has a 'back' view which is the 'street' side, but unlike previous MiniBear projects, has been designed to be viewed from one side only, looking directly inside the restaurant

Experience is a good teacher, I felt sure there were certain things I had to do before I began to fix things permanently in place. For example; the walls needed 'something' to liven them up - they were to plain. If I wanted to glue something to the wall, it was going to be easier to do if I could lay the walls flat on a firm surface and be able to put pressure to glue it properly to the wall.

I wanted something to break up the 'plainness' of the walls. My first designs were okay but I bet many of you will know the feeling when you look at something and know that it is not right!

Eventually it dawned on me that the idea may have been sound, but I should have made the design a finer quality. So, I discarded the first attempt and tried again.

Original verson of the wall decoration can be seen on the left

The improved version is on the right

So now I felt I had most of the various bits and pieces I might need to complete the project. Chairs, tables, individual pieces of sushi, plates, spoons, serviettes and five kimono clad MiniBears!

I found glueing the food to the plate - strangely satisfying. (Or maybe, it was just nice to be able to pick up a plate of food and not have the sushi fall off it!)

One of the things I had to make a choice about was, 'Do I put the central unit vertically, horizontally or what?'

The basic shape of the project has been sorted. At this point, still no idea what the base/flooring is going to be

Vertical or horizontal position for the main sushi bar unit. Both are not bad, but ....?

It was most gratifying when I reached the point of gluing the walls to the base and the tables to the walls. Made and 'planted' a flower bed to the front of the shop. With all the accessories made and waiting to be fixed in situ, finally I could no longer avoid it. I had made a number of MiniBears in a different colour fabric to the original five, but there was nothing left to do now, I had to work on dressing them in their kimonos.

Almost there! (did you notice, the central unit is horizontal in this photo?)

The original five MiniBears were made in a creamy/white colour fabric. I decided to use the same gold fabric I had used for the Chess Set pieces for the rest of the MiniBears. Different fabric creates different looks and sometimes different sizes, even when you use the same pattern. Thus I found the original MiniBears were 2" (50mm) tall and the gold fabric versions were 1 3/4" (45mm) and their 'children' smaller still at 1 1/2" (40mm) tall.

By this stage I had been working on the Sushi Bar project for just over 4 months. Initially I found fitting the kimonos onto the bears more difficult than I had expected and I had to accept that I was doing everything else I could in an attempt to put off the time when I would have to make the rest of them.

Considering how troublesome and difficult I had found the first five to make, the next 20 were much easier!

The whole project was about to come together. I still had a few decisions to make. For example, were would I finally position the main sushi bar? How many MiniBears would be the right number to use? Would I get any to sit on the chairs I had made? How was I going to 'edge' the scene?

Finally, it was done. I had created a miniature Sushi Bar and populated it with 14 MiniBears in three sizes, each of whom wears a kimono.

Finally, the completed project!

I really like this view. It almost makes you see what it would be like to be 2" tall and a customer!

So, in the end, I chose neither the 'horizontal' nor 'vertical' position for the main unit, but a combination!

NB: With so many unused pieces of sushi and a number of kimono clad MiniBears not included - I have a feeling there might well be a Sushi Shop (with a refridgeration units if I can create one) before too long!

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