Siebunkan Bookstore and Sweets

The other day I went to Seibunkan, a local bookstore chain, to get some more stickers for my New Year cards (nengajoo). I blogged before about making my own cards this year. Anyways, while there I was unfortunate enough to wander into the stationary section. The "stationary section" is an understatement. It is one hell of a section, with any art supplies, craft supplies, and, well, stationary, that you can possibly imagine. I was there for a long time, stickers long forgotten, examining their sculpting supplies. I don't know if they have natural clay there, because I made a point of not looking, otherwise I'd be there forever. They do have such interesting polymer clay, of various consistency. Most of it is white, but they also sell Fimo, the clay I have been using in Canada. They also sell colored paints, liquid paints that solidify and look like syrup, and clay of cream consistency (well, it's probably not even clay), that's in a tube and feels exactly like cake icing. That is, until it solidifies, then it's more like rubbery plasticky material. Of course, this visit to the bookstore was the doom of me, as I could not resist trying out the clay.

As I was paying at the counter for the clay and the stickers (I did get them after all), I was thinking, thank goodness I am so bad at kanji, so I don't have interest in buying books... Actually, speaking of books, they have a pretty big English section, with some interesting stuff. Not that I am planning to buy any books there any time soon, but still. I thought that was nice. This store sure beats Chapters. Of course the manga section is enormous too, but I never go in there because most books are sealed, and also because they are expensive. There are quite a few large bookstore chains like "Book Off" (great name, eh?), where you can buy used books in very good condition for rather cheap. For example, one volume of a manga could cost between 150 to 300 yen ($1.5-$3). Not that I bought that many...

Anyways, back to clay sweets, this is what I made.



They look better than the picture, but anyways, you can at least get the idea of what this clay does. It's so interesting, I am very curious about what exactly it's made of.
The tart featured at the top is called "Взрыв на кондитерской фабрике." Not sure I can really translate that properly because it refers to an old joke, but anyways, the literal translation is "an explosion in the bakery." It's the last one I made, and by then there was not as much clay left in the tube, so it came out unevenly. I have no experience with icing and the tools that bakers use, so it wasn't too easy to fix the damage. Guess I managed somehow, but still it doesn't look as nice as the others.