Yes, we are shipping worldwide!

This is really quite outrageous. 

YES! We are shipping Pocket Kitchen all around the world!

And now, we have decided to launch a limited shipping promotion for 30 of you! It is now only +$10 (originally +$40) if you make it there fast enough!

I've always felt very blessed to receive compliments on my works from time to time, but you know what, YOU can create the same beautiful and amazing works too! 

With some creativity and time, you will very soon have your own treasure trove of unique handcrafted pieces, that you can keep or wear to show them off! 

The Pocket Kitchen is designed with making everyone a MAKER, in mind. With it, you spend less time searching for the right materials, and more time creating! 

==============================================

Let me share some behind the scenes of the miniature iced coffee making process.

Top-down view of the whipped cream on the iced coffee.

I design all of my labels on the computer then print them out.

Here they are. All cut out. :) 

Bonus tip! I used a wet cotton to remove the paper fibers at the back, so that the label would be thin.

Pocket Kitchen - miniature food craft kit.

I thought this day will never come.

But I'm so glad that it is here, and I can finally unveil the project we've been toiling away for at least a year now.



 POCKET KITCHEN. 

Now you can create miniature food sculptures in the comfort of your home and at your own pace!

Before you dismiss this craft kit as irrelevant to you because you either a) don't want to craft, b) feel like you can't craft, c) you can always buy this next time..

Let me remind you that..

There is so much noise in our world today, with everything clawing for our attention. It's no wonder why attention deficiency is a serious issue in both kids and adults alike.

Which makes immersing in the here and now, really important.

Many of us need to regain the important ability to anchor oneself in the present, with neither burdens of the past nor worries of the future.

And this is what Pocket Kitchen can enable you to do.

Miniature food crafting is about sitting down, and letting all your energies flow towards the polymer clay in front of you.

I could be texturing a 'cake', putting on tiny decorations, rolling thin strands of 'noodles'.

During the creative process, you immerse yourself in the physical experience of using the tools, seeing the material come to shape under your hands, and admiring your final work.

It is a calming and rewarding journey which one has to experience to believe its effects on our overall well-being.

I should know, after conducting countless workshops and seeing the participants lose themselves in the craft as time slipped by unknowingly. 

Pocket Kitchen is a carefully curated collection of tools, materials, even jewelry accessories to kickstart your miniature food creation journey.

I won't go into details about the wide array of items it contains, but let me just highlight that you also get a full collection of 12 mini food video tutorials. Which are produced and shot by me.

So you don't even have to join my workshops now to learn the craft, hooray for those who live Far East or outside of Singapore!

These are the miniature food you'll learn to create in the video collection. And you can view sample snippets in my YouTube channel, just search AiClay on YouTube.

The full Pocket Kitchen craft kit (including videos) is now offered at an exclusive pre-order price of USD129.

The original retailing price will be USD149, so please take advantage of the pre-order period!

After toiling away for so long and hard, my biggest wish is to see the campaign climb to success. But this is not possible without your support.

So for all who've been asking for a craft kit, or who wants to experience the joy of creating with your hands? This is for YOU. 

Click here to grab a set.

This is my website right now. Eh overload of pink? Haha.

At the campaign page, you can check out the rest of the perks as well, we've thrown in some interesting ones in there. 

I also want to say a HUGE thank you to my friends who helped out in the Indiegogo video. 

Over here we have Qiao and Alex, a couple in real life as well haha. Machiam they 拍电影。

Can you spot me and JY cameo-ing at the back? 

At the end of the video, I roped in another group of friends to film as well.

And it was so hilarious! The laughter is real lol.

Kudos Ros, Di, Mab and Adrian!

A superbly pretty screenshot of my pretty friend. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am so overwhelmed with gratitude. Because I just opened up my Facebook page and I saw all my friends sharing the post about Pocket Kitchen with the nicest captions.

Then I opened up my mailbox and I saw a few congratulatory emails from Indiegogo! Opened them up and hey, they were all familiar names!

My friends actually contributed to the campaign as well, one of them even shared the cost of Pocket Kitchen Ultimate with the girlfriend! AWWW. 

Seriously, my heart is full.

I've always wanted to put Singapore in the world's limelight using my own capabilities, and the desire has never been greater than now, after the past week of mourning and education on our nation's history.

I'll appreciate if you could share the Indiegogo campaign (there's a little share button on the left at the page) on your own Facebook feed, or tell your friends about Pocket Kitchen.

We need your help in getting more eyeballs on this campaign, the more the merrier.

Thank you. 

A belated birthday, and thank you Mr Lee.

The past weekend, was happily spent with family and friends celebrating my birthday.

Blew out a lot of birthday candles, not unlike the miniature ones I'm showing here. This is an old work (kudos to you if you recognise it!) that I've hand sculpted. And they are TINY.

Let me show you.

Making the wick was crazy, lol.

However, when I woke up this morning (Monday), I saw that my Facebook feed (and every other social media) was flooded with tributes and teary messages to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who had passed on earlier at 3.18am.

:(

It was not a surprise, as he had been seriously ill for some time. But still, the air of grief is present definitely in our country. Below is what I wrote in my Instagram.

This morning, our nation's founding father, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, passed on. 

I will not pretend to be any less uninformed of politics that I honestly am, and I don't think I can even confidently state the many political achievements of Mr Lee.

This however, does not undermine the immense respect I have for this great man, for his legendary contributions to the beautiful country I have grown up in. 

The current comforts I enjoy (safety, hygiene, education), and the possibility of being able to thrive as a full time miniature food sculptor, all of these have to be attributed to Mr Lee Kuan Yew's lifelong work in politics.

Thank you Mr Lee, and I will continue learning from your extraordinary strengths, and do my part, in his son's words, "to build on his foundations, strive for his ideals and keep Singapore exceptional and successful for many years to come." 

#thankyouLKY

Surprise Workshop Mission!

Some day last year, I received an email from Junda who wanted a private craft party for his fiance Bellina. Bellina is in love with miniatures, specifically food miniatures, so it was perfect that he found me and AiClay! :D

A few emails later, we had a surprise party all ready on 8 Nov 2014, for the beautiful lady.

She was all smiles during the workshop, actually they both were. :) The hours sped by, and here are some shots of her doing the necessary photoshoot of their completed works after every AiClay workshop.

Junda also joined in during the workshop, and he actually made that miniature double deck sandwich! While Bellina went super creative and made two adorable cupcakes.

All of them were made into necklaces for the lady. ;)

Thank you for coming for the workshop, you two! I really enjoyed hanging out with you guys, and I really hope that you two will remember that day crafting together for a long time to come. :)

A small frappucinno to go. Tiny please, thank you.

I'm baaaaaacckkkk. 

After some persuasion from my partner JY who has had enough of looking at cafe cakes and waffles whenever he pops into the blog, I have decided. That I will restart my engine for blogging.

Vroooommmm. Hehe.

Okay here goes. It will be crazy for me to put up all the backdated photos, so I'm going to start with the newest miniature work.

It's a tiny frappucinno! It's also available in the store.

Or iced blended coffee, just to avoid any copyright situations ahem.

I made this using a photo of a Starbucks drinks as reference, but after much research I still can't figure out what is the exact name of this drink. 

The closest I have so far is the Zebra drink in Starbucks' secret menu? Any help here, guys?

I made the straw (yes it's hollow!) and the cup as well. And also designed the logo for AiClay Coffee.

Posted a photo of the WIP process on Instagram when I was designing it in Photoshop, and someone commented 'AiClaybucks'. Teeheehee.

Alright, an unzoomed photo now! 

I'll be back with more photos and stories of my works, catch up with you all later.

Happy 2nd, d'Good Cafe!

Please visit Dayre.me/aiclay for more of my ramblings. :)

Dear all, this has been an amazingly long hiatus from the blog. I'll skip the apologies and excuses (well, it really is because I document my life mostly at Dayre.me/aiclay now) and head straight to showing you a part of what I've been up to!

So if you've a Singaporean, then you should have been to Holland Village. And if you've been to Holland V, then you MUST have seen a cute cafe which popped up 2 years ago, called d'Good Cafe!

October is the cafe's birthday month, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Remember this post, where I talk about my dream of having my miniatures showcased in F&B venues? So, here's the first collaboration I did (well, Sift didn't really count as it was more of a gift commission for the owner, and not the cafe) with d'Good Cafe!

After bouncing some ideas back and forth with Jasmin, marketing manager of the cafe, we finally settled on these 4 items from the menu to replicate!

It took a few weeks of R&D till the miniature food replicas were completed! I happily trooped down to the cafe with JY for a photoshoot of my works and the real food items. Jasmin kindly treated us to the spread of food in the end too, much to the joy of our empty stomachs.

Some of the photos below have yet to be featured on my social media, so you're seeing it here first!

Here's their Maple Sea Salt Cheesecake.

Hot Chocolate

I had so much fun recreating this, as I watched a few latte art videos and then recreated the miniature bear by pulling the 'milk' in strokes in the 'chocolate'.

d'Good Triplet Cheesecake

Teeny weeny macaron sitting atop the miniature cheesecake.

 Waffle with a generous serving of vanilla bean ice cream, strawberry and banana slices.

I enjoyed eating this the most. Packing in the cold ice cream into the welcoming cavity of the warm waffles, topping it off with a slice of fruit and then sending the tasty combo into my mouth. Mmmmm. 

It's been a day since my works have been featured on d'Good Cafe's Facebook and Instagram. And already, the enquiries on workshops and sales are coming in! HOORAY. Plus I just got word from Jasmin that a radio DJ is also enquiring about AiClay, could it be that I'll be appearing on airwaves soon?!?! I'm bouncing in excitement!

Once I'm done with creating a display for the miniature works, I'll be sending the replicas off to the cafe so that the patrons can view the tiny food sculptures. :) If you're in Singapore, do head down to the cafe for a visit if you haven't! It's a lovely chill-out place with tasty dishes on their menu.

d'Good Cafe
273 Holland Avenue #02-01/02
Singapore 278992

July is for workshops.

Popping in for a quick shout out, to those who have been waiting for a chance to create food miniatures! I have three workshops arranged this July (there was four but the nyonya kueh workshop has sold out!), for you to come join in the crafting fun.

Please check out more details at http://aiclay.com/workshop.html

Nyonya Come-back!

I know I know, it's unforgivable that I've taken such a looooooong break from my blog! It's been, what 4 months since I blogged in here?

-looks down in shame. 

Sincere apologies to everyone who's been checking in here for updates, the break is unintentional and I blame it all on the different social media outlets AiClay has hahaha. I've got a Facebook page, twitter handle, Instagram account, and even a Dayre account (microblogging). I don't want to regurgitate all identical content on the different platforms, which is why I've been perplexed on what to blog about.

But I think I've finally cleared my head on what content I should keep for my blog. So enough talking, let's see what I've been busy with the past few months!

So I finally made these little nyonya treats into earrings. I love the daintiness, yet strong pop of colour.

For those who aren't familiar with these desserts, they are angku kueh, ondeh ondeh and lapis sagu in order of pictures. :)

I eat this rainbow kueh by peeling them off layer by layer, and then rolling it up before popping into my mouth haha. I guess you can call me a systematic eater.

Right now, I'm waiting for Sheryl, my private workshop participant to arrive for her third lesson - we're making cupcakes today! Cupcake earrings to be exact. The past few lessons have been really enjoyable crafting with her and sharing my techniques and tips with her, so I'm looking forward to the rest of the workshops as well! She signed up for a series of 10 workshops, and you can too! Over here at http://aiclay.com/workshop/private-one-to-one-workshop.html The private workshops are heavily discounted if you buy 10 slots, up to 50%! Heavily recommended by me hehe.

I'll be back here soon, in the meantime do follow me on the rest of my social media platforms to stay updated! :)

A fresh new look. :)

Hello my lovelies! If you're reading this, then you've probably already seen the new look of AiClay's website! Instead of a blogger layout, it's finally a real website where you can navigate around to buy directly from me, read the story of AiClay, register for workshop slots etc. Personally, I LOVE IT!

Apologies for not announcing the launch of the website over here earlier, hence giving some of you a scare when you went to www.aiclay.com as usual to read my posts. It was launched on 13th March last week.

I've been working on this for a few months together with my website designer, emailing back and forth about little details about how to improve the website and its aesthetics. Basically I just wanted a clean, simple layout with the main focus on my pictures, I think the final product is pretty much what I had in mind!

But I'm never going to neglect this blog, this is where AiClay started and I've always loved sharing my stories and experiences of being a miniature food business owner with the readers. Although I don't receive many comments, there are a few I always recognise. You know who you are! I'm always very touched when I see your names appearing in my email inbox as commenters, thank you for the continual support. :)

This is also why there is a tab on the website which links to this blog.

=========================================================

On to one of my new works!

My inspiration comes from all the food I see, in real life bakery stores and online platforms. And sometimes, my customers are my best sources when they link me up with fabulous food places and makers. 

Today, let me introduce to you Maria Carrossel - Doces, a Portugal-based cake design brand. Their cakes are just the prettiest, sweetest designs around, and I wish I can fly down there for a bite!

My customer showed me a photo of their cakes, hoping to get it miniaturised. And after asking for permission from the talented sisters at Maria Carrossel, they were psyched to see their cake in tiny form. So here it is. 

On the left is a photo of the real cake, and on the right is the miniature cake (duh).

A sweet weekend. { chocolate-coated strawberries }

I'm so looking forward to this weekend! A rainbow nyonya kueh workshop tomorrow noon, bbq gathering at jy's place, and then sleepover with Taro until next week. Since we'll be in the east, I foresee many trips down to East Coast Park. ;)

Here are some miniature chocolate-coated strawberries to sweeten your weekend as well. I actually made them for Valentine's Day, but hey presto, it's March in a blink of an eye lol.

The March holidays are coming up! I have organised a whole week of holiday workshops, for the students and also the parents who are finally getting a break from fetching their kids to school. Please refer to http://www.aiclay.com/p/workshops.html for more details. Slots are already getting filled up, be quick!

P.S Thank you all of you for your comments on the previous entry, I read them all! :)