MiniArt has been moving full steam ahead on providing diorama modelers with the kind of details that simply weren’t available some years ago without resorting to expensive resin short runs. This set of household crockery and glass is an excellent example.

What you get in the box is a tiny clump of REALLY small sprues, which sort of niggled me at first until I actually started working on it. These tiny sprues offer a LOT of final product.

Prepping these items was much easier than their small size would lead you to believe. First off, there’s very little painting required. Even the opaque items are cast in a while plastic that looks remarkably like ceramic.

The first step for me was to clean up the almost nonexistent mold marks by gently scraping them while they were still attached to the sprues. For the clear parts as well as the tinted clear items, I then sprayed them with some Testors Water Clear to hide the scrapes. Almost all parts are designed with only one sprue attachment point on their bottoms so that final removal is relatively simple.

A few parts like the china cups begged for some decorating. Although MiniArt provides a small set of remarkably thin decals, I opted to paint these based on a set of real china my wife has, which feature little rosebuds. Fun! Other parts needing a touch of paint were the coffee pots, ceramic jugs and teapots as well as the ceramic beer mugs. All of these were painted while still on the sprue. Both the coffee and tea pots feature tiny separate lids which was a real bonus, since I could do them both open and shut. All glasses and other items also feature three-part molding for open tops, although purists may want to ream these out a bit for a more scale appearance.

If you use the decals you’ll find that they go on with no hitches and conform remarkably well to the curved surfaces.

I liked these items so much I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to display some of them more effectively, so scratchbuilt a little shelving unit to show some of the pieces off. Everything on the shelves comes from this set.

As you can see from the display, you get six pieces of all the various glasses, so you have essentially a full dining set of:

• Tea cups
• Saucers
• Wine glasses
• Champagne glasses
• Beer mugs
• Ceramic beer mugs

Everything in the photos comes with this set. I’m hoping that in the future MiniArt provides another set which includes regular plates and bowls, as this would make dining scenes in a diorama complete. But honestly, this set alone offers so much that it really opens up some fascinating options. A beer garden scene? Officers at the mess? So many possibilities . . .

I can’t think of a thing that I disliked about this kit. It’s almost too fun for words. Highly recommended. My thanks to MiniArt for coming up with this kind of stuff and to IPMS/USA for letting me play with it! Fun!