Yeah…it’s another play on words.  I like to do that.  I like the eye rolls I get from my friends and my kids when I do it.  Makes it all worthwhile.

So…as we have all grown much older waiting for the conclusion of my Kitchen Box post, we might as well get out the hair dye as it’s going to be awhile yet before I get the kitchen finished.  I apologize, but TRW intrudes more often than not.  And of course, there are my other obsessions…Outlander, genealogy, fretting over my grown children, etc..  I have made some of the tweaks, but there are still several to go before I can post about them.

Meanwhile, back at the OSS ranch…

We’re making butter.  Well…we are now finished making butter, and that’s a good thing because it nearly made me go blind and bitter with frustration.  As many of you know, I cannot ignore a challenge.  Someone asked me if I could/would make wrapped butter sticks in 1:12 dollhouse scale.  Could I politely respond in the negative?  Um…well, NO.  And so I set about figuring out how to make teeny weeny butter sticks that looked realistic.  The butter itself wasn’t too difficult.  Blend polymer clay until you get the right color for butter, roll it, pat it, mark it with a “B”…  Oh, wait…  that’s something else entirely.  Blend the clay, roll the clay, cut the clay, bake the clay, et voila! butter sticks!

The next step was the tricky part.  How was I going to make wrappers in dollhouse scale that looked like the waxy paper, sorta see-through, paper wrappers on real world butter?  Dh suggested I just use regular paper.  Silly man.  Just who does he think he’s been married to for almost 27 years?  Regular paper, my eye!  Vellum came to mind, but it’s too stiff and crackly (is that a word?).  My thoughts turned to one of my favorite things when I was a kid…tracing paper!  If you don’t know what that is, you’re too young, and I’m not sure I want to hear about that.  lol  Tracing paper…that glorious, semi-transparent, thin paper that allows you to just barely see what’s underneath or behind it.  Perfect!  Unfortunately, I had to buy an entire sheaf of the stuff.  Duh.  And the salesman informed me that most printers wouldn’t pick it up since it was so thin.  Oh, yeah…and the ink floats on it, so it smears easily.  Great.  Any more cheer to spread, Mr. Office Supply Man?  Undaunted, I brought the stuff home only to realize that it’s not 8.5 x 11.  Um….I had missed that part.  No biggie.  I used a tiny bit of double-sided tape on the two upper corners of the tracing paper sheet and tacked it to a regular sheet of printer paper.  I then trimmed the excess off around the regular paper.  The printer handled this with flying colors!  Cool beans!

Next step:  buy butter and scan a wrapper.  Check!  I then had to shrink down the image of course and paste multiples onto my Word paper.  I chose “best” for print quality and then ran the sheet.  I didn’t touch the paper for several hours as I wanted the ink to dry.  Once it dried thoroughly, I was able to separate the paper sheets and cut the wrappers into the correct size.  Wrapping the individual butter sticks was the part that drove me batty as my hands are large, and the butter sticks are not.  It took several steps.  I used a fast drying, instant glue to adhere one side of one stick to one panel on the label.  Once that was dry and secure, it was much easier to wrap the rest of the sides.  I used a toothpick to fold in the end sections so they were in lovely little points just like the real thing.  The yellow of the butter showed through the paper wrapper just like the real thing.  Success!  I love it when a plan works.  I made 3 dozen of the 1:12 size for my client, several for the OSS Etsy Store, and I even made some in the larger 1:6 scale.  And so ends the butter saga.  Here are a couple pics: