Tiny Tea Time Tutorial

It's my birthday again! Which can only mean one thing... a new paper tutorial for everyone to have fun with! Ray!

This year's lesson shares an easy technique I developed for creating the tiniest tea cups, saucers, and plates I've ever seen. These were created for an original folktale movie I'm making whose tiny little red cloth-covered mushroom cafe in the garden needed little white dishware spots on them!

I'm thinking a child finding a tea setting on a rock or flower in a real garden would fill them with the pure joy and wonder at the possibilities forever, don't you agree!?

I used plain white watercolor paper and fast-grab white glue. Here's how.

1. Just tear little squares of whatever heavy-ish paper you might have around. For the scale of mine, the wooden point in the picture is a clay tool but I imagine any simple pencil with tape to cover the lead would do the trick.

2. Smash the paper square down around your pointed tool, creasing and pressing, until it begins to conform and hold the shape a bit.

3. Use whatever glue you like to work with (I am a huge fan of Aileene's Fast Grab white glue because it's thick enough to actually stick right away and hold on tightly.) and apply it into the folds of these little creases with the tip of a toothpick. Let set for a moment until you can remove the little cup and it will keep its shape as it dries.

4. Moving on to the saucer, I used a standard round hole punch to knock out as many little bases from the same paper for the amazing cups I wanted, crunch, crunch crunch.

5. With a sharp scissor, slice off a bunch of super thin, fairly even, paper slivers, about an inch in length, for the fancy cup handles. These can be cut to size or curled into fancy-pants shapes, depending on your dexterity and patience. But even a simple curve will make for a perfect illusion.

I used a toothpick to work the strip into a curl (those familiar with paper sculpture will recognize how it feels to break down the paper fibers so they'll hold a shape--only this is at nano scale). *one important note is that the key for the tea cup structure is to use a tweezer and crisply bend one end of your newly made handle (marked with an asterisk in #5 and 9 to demonstrate why that works so well to do.)

6. The next step is to trim the now dry cups off at their tops to even out all the little folds for a smoother rim. (The bottom of the cup shown is to the left of the scissor blades as the tops are being cut away on the right.)

7. Get a dollop of glue out nearby, load a bit onto a toothpick, touch it to one of your saucers in its middle, while holding it down with a pair of tweezers on the edge. Then take one of your now trimmed cups and smash in down onto the glue on the saucer (sorry for the dark photo, it got overcast quickly that day). Leave these assembled teacups and saucers to dry a bit.

8. Now your handles come into play. Put a bit of glue onto the bent end of the little strip and nestle it against the bottom of the cup, where it meets the saucer. Let it grab and then dry it well. (Doing a bunch at once makes the entire assembly painless because by the time you finish the last in your set, the first one is ready for the next step.)

9. The last step is to adhere the top end of the handle to the rim of your cup with a small bit of glue applied via toothpick tip. (I have been known to glue a too-long handle right inside the cup and use my tweezers to crimp the two pieces, cup and handle, into one thing, laminating them together, as it were.) Point is, there's no wrong way to finish these off. Cut the handle to length, make another curly-que at the top and then glue it down, etc. Even plain the effect will be magical.

To make the plates, cut out small, slightly larger, circles by hand and press their centers with a grommet (I had one laying around that was the correct diameter but you can use anything around, even a pen cap) to create the plate's rim shape.

If you like, you can seal and finish the set with a coating of varnish for greater durability outside, unless a fairy takes them home right away, in which case it doesn't matter. :-)

That's it! Delight all the little ones you know by afixing a few of these in your garden, where you think fairies might naturally gather for tea, and letting them find them on their own. Be sure to pretend you have no idea where they've come from! I bet they will always look very closely at nature from that day on. Better yet, why not make these for friends with sweet kidlettes too. They'd be awfully cute gift wrapped as a set in a small jewelry box!

Enjoy! I'd love to see what you do with these!