Almost There

I am making progress! I should be finished by Saturday at the latest. YAY ME!!!

The outside is finished all but the sign and a few little things on the sidewalk. I am thinking that it needs some plants or something on the sides of the doorway.

The inside is started. The biggest piece, the fabric shelves are almost done. Sorry about the weird photo. It is hard to get a good shot through the glass. The vertical column in the center is filled with 80 or so spools of real thread. I used the metal liners from eye shadow for the cases. They each hold 15 to 20 spools.

Each Christmas I wait for the 75% off sales. Then I go buy the neat little gift sets of cheap make up that they sell at the discount stores. They all have metal liners holding the eye shadow, rouge and lip gloss. I dig out the make up and use the little pans for various mini things. Again, it's a case of getting a present and playing with the package so to speak.

Would you like to see the neighborhood where the quilt shop is going to be living?

This is the miniature shop that stands to the right. I will show you the inside after the quilt shop moves in.

Mookie loves to open the door to this shop and fish things out with his paw. It is now at the top of a bookcase. I may have to glue the door shut. I am forever finding things on the floor and having to put them back where they belong.

The little dollhouse in the window is one that was sold in mini shops back in the 80s. It is the main reason I decided to do a mini mini shop. It needed a home. They were difficult to decorate. They were cast with solid metal and the furniture was cast right into the rooms. Painting them was not fun. They were raw metal when you got them and the only thing that was removable was the front of the house!I made the shop in the mid 90s.

This is the bear collector's shop that will stand to the left. It is one of the first shops that I made from a kit back in the early 80s. I think that Houseworks put the kit out. It was raw wood and basically a box with windows. I had to add all of the fancy stuff.

It used to be a lady's dress shop. The bears started piling up and I needed a place for them to be. The dress shop moved out and the bears took over.

I will try to get some better shots of this one too. It is kind of hard to take photos standing on a step stool,holding the camera above my head and pointing it in the general direction of the shop.

This shop was done way before we had a computer. The sign is just a bit wobbly. I do like all of the folk art painting I did on it tho. The fans in the corner of the windows were made from toothpicks, wood scraps and beads. 7-19 was the date I finished the shop. It was probably '82.

That's it for today. Back to work.