Cocktails

A sordid tale of crafting dozens of tiny odds and ends in a quest for more alcohol for my dolls.

But first, Ellen Harvelle demonstrates how to muddle Angostura Bitters, a sugar cube, and water to make an Old Fashioned:

I feel we need the history of the Old Fashioned, and also an explanation of that bottle she's holding in the first photo:

Colonists from Europe brought their methods of distilling alcohol to the New World.  By the early nineteenth century, simple mixed drinks of whiskey, sugar, water, and bitters were  popular with tipplers.  The year 1806 saw the first use of the name 'cocktail' in print.  

By the1860's, bartenders were adding fancier ingredients to cocktails.  These new-fangled drinks were very popular, but some folks began to ask for "the old fashioned kind" of cocktail.  The standard recipe for an Old Fashioned was published in 1895.  

Today, the Old Fashioned is considered a classic cocktail.  

Fun fact:  You may notice that the label on the bottle of Angostura Bitters doesn't fit the bottle;  it's too big.  It's that way on purpose.

The story goes that two brothers inherited the company, and decided to design new packaging for the product.  One brother designed the bottle, and the other brother designed the label.  There was only one problem:  neither one bothered to check with the other, and when the new bottles and labels arrived, they were different sizes.  

The brothers were advised to keep the too-large labels as a marketing gimmick, and bottles of Angostura Bitters have been sold with oversized labels ever since.

Now for some crafting tips!  But keep scrolling if you want to see Ellen mix up some more cocktails!

Pictured above:  Coupe glass from Etsy, polymer clay olives made by me in a Dollar Tree bottle, and a mini liquor bottle repainted and labeled by me.

These Gloria sets are pretty easy to find online.  The mini glasses in the Gloria sets look like champagne flutes and water goblets to me, but of course you can use them for wine and other drinks.

There are lots of other mini wine and liquor bottles sold online.  I got all of mine either as gifts, or included as little extras from sellers I bought doll things from.  They vary in size from accurate one-sixth scale on down to almost one-twelfth scale; for example, the Jim Beam bottle shown in several pictures in this post.  

You can find just about any type of one-sixth scale glassware online, too.  These mini glasses are in high demand from adult collectors and miniaturists, and the prices often reflect that.

Of course, a Martini is best served in a Martini glass, but mini glassware quickly adds up, so I chose an Etsy seller that offered several different shapes of glasses as a set, including the Highball and Rocks glasses I wanted most.  Honestly, this Coupe glass looks more like a dessert bowl to me, but if any doll of mine insists on having a Martini, it will have to do.  I picked a mini bottle that was shaped more or less like a full-size Gordon's Gin bottle, added a label I printed from an image I found online, and repainted the bottle lid yellow to match the full-size original.

The Vodka bottle above was made just like all the other mini liquor bottles in this post.  The Tabasco Sauce bottle was a thrift store find that I think was meant to be a Coke bottle.  I painted the green "label" around the neck of the bottle.  The celery and lime slice are polymer clay.  You can see I'm no artist, but I think they do the job.  If you'd rather not make then, you can easily find mini citrus slices for sale online, either sold as miniatures for crafting or as nail art.

The lemon slice and cherry are polymer clay.  I made a hole in the clay cherry before baking it, and stuck in a thin piece of wire.  After baking, I glued the wire in  place with super glue, and painted it with a couple of coats of red nail polish.  The straw is a piece of plastic coating from a paper clip.  Keep scrolling to see what I used to make the blue drink and ice cubes.

I included a bottle with no label in the cocktail kit to be a simple syrup bottle. Many of the videos I watched on YouTube--to learn what ingredients go into cocktails--showed homemade simple syrup stored in a repurposed bottle  The drink in this glass is the subject of another craft tip below. Should it be served in a Margarita glass instead of a Rocks glass?  Yes, but I didn't want to buy dedicated Margarita glasses.  In my humble opinion as a (mostly) tea-totaler, most doll cocktails look just fine in a Rocks or Highball glass.  The different shapes of glasses were developed mostly to highlight the different aromas of cocktails, or to maintain sparkling drinks' fizziness and bubbles for as long as possible.  If your doll tipplers care about such things, they can pretend, like they do with everything else in their tiny lives!

Some bartenders use simple syrup instead of a sugar cube to make an Old Fashioned, because they don't want a gritty texture from the sugar.  Others insist the grittiness is an essential and desired part of the drink.  I'm sure its a subject the dolls could have fun debating. The swizzle stick in the glass is another piece of coated paperclip coating.

I used these to make the Bloody Mary and Blue Lagoon cocktails shown in previous photos.

I cut the bottles with a dremel tool, which worked well, but produced a lot of dust.  Plastic dust is likely toxic, if not very toxic!  If you're dremeling or sawing through plastic material, work in a well-ventilated area and wear a respirator, and/or other appropriate protective gear!  Mess with plastic materials at your own risk.

I used the resulting plastic bits to make the Old Fashioned and Blue Margarita pictured in previous photos.

I used clear beads for most of the cocktails, but the Blue Lagoon was so vibrant and pretty, I thought it deserved matching blue ice.  I have several pounds of these beads that my daughter bought for me at a yard sale, so this is very economical ice for me!

Here's Ellen making another classic cocktail:  the Negroni.

The Negroni calls for equal parts Gin, Vermouth, and Campari.  Ellen's measuring cup is a piece of a ballpoint pen.

The ice bucket is a large Elmer's Glue Stick lid painted silver.  I covered the outside with woodgrain contact paper for that classic Seventies look.  I filled the bottom of the ice bucket with homemade ice, layered with hot melt glue for ice that wouldn't spill.  I put a small amount of loose store-bought miniature ice in the top of the ice bucket.

Now Ellen is going to show us the classic brunch cocktail, the Bloody Mary:

The lid of the ice bucket is made of two buttons with a bead on top for the handle.

I didn't bother to use any salt on the rim of the glass because it was such a tiny detail and I was getting lazy at this point.

The pitcher is an actual Barbie/Mattel pitcher that I got at a thrift store.  I repainted it silver and added  stainless steel contact paper.  I would have used the contact paper all the way up to the rim of the pitcher, but it's thick and stiff and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get the cut-outs for the spout and handle to line up.  This type of contact paper is pretty difficult to work with.

I used a glue stick to attach the labels to the liquor bottles as well, and then covered each label with a strip of packing tape for sturdiness.  
I packaged the little polymer clay garnishes with tissue paper.  The set of mini plastic glasses I bought included stemware with incredibly tiny stems, so I packaged it in lots of tissue paper and put a warning on the lid of its box.  I also put some bubble wrap around it for extra safety.

On the bookshelf in the background above is an antique salt shaker used as a fancy glass liquor decanter.  I temporarily fill it with a little iced tea for the liquor.  It's a little large, but I like it.  I included one in the cocktails kit.

Above is a jar of dill pickles I made out of polymer clay.  The pickle brine is water tinted with food coloring. I've had these pickles, plus polymer clay peaches and other fruits, stored in bottles with colored water for over a year, and the clay doesn't seem to have been damaged at all.  To make the bottle of olives in the cocktail kit look more realistic, one could make brine out of water tinted a very pale yellow-green with food coloring. I didn't add water because I don't trust the corks on the Dollar Tree bottles (below) not to leak and make a mess. 

Happy tippling.  Make sure your dolls drink responsibly!