Just a Little Something......

I figured that I had better put something in here today. I am still holding out for the grand opening of the bookshop. To keep you amused here are some of the smallest miniatures that I have made. I don't think that I have put them in the blog before. If i did it was just in passing.

When I was little that was how I built dollhouses. In the summertime my mom would give me a couple of the two section crates and a bunch of scrap fabric from her sewing. My dad would contribute some small scraps of lumber from his carpentry and off I would go. They were always built in the back yard. I always thought that they were wonderful when I finished and would play with them for days. I guess that my miniature history goes back even further than the first dollhouse that I built for my daughter. Anyway, this was a tribute to those dollhouses.

I built the three mini orange crates from bass wood and they have antique labels on the ends that I found on the net.

I never had anything store bought in mine. The stuff that you see in these are mostly metal miniatures and German made figures from the railroad shops. They look pretty good from far away, but when you look at them closely they are kind of crude. Hey! For the price they aren't bad. I get a kick out of the kid swinging from the rope in the tree.

I bought a bunch of these figures at a mini garage sale one year. I still have others. I guess I will have to think of something to use them for one of these days.

This is one of those scenes that fits inside a beanie baby display box. I went crazy and bought about 20 of them one year. So far I have used about half of them for display cases. They work great. If you stand them on end they are just right for displaying a mini doll.

This other scene is all of 1 1/2" wide and 1" tall. I first designed this on in 1" scale for a class. It was originally designed to be made out of a cigar box or one of the cardboard pencil boxes that you used to be able to get to carry to school. I haven't seen any of those for a few years now.

This one is made from illustration board. The inside has a wooden bench, plants and a painting on the wall. There is a tiny Navajo rug on the floor that was printed out on fabric with my computer. The outside, as you can see, is desert landscaping. It's dirt from my back yard....

I did the small size kits for a class that I taught to some friends when I went back to Iowa for State Day a few years ago. It was fun to do in both scales.

The moral of this story is it doesn't take much to keep me amused. Hand me some scraps of one thing and another and I will turn them into minis or some other kind of art.

I hope it kept you amused for a little while too.

See you tomorrow.