A new Look....

Today is Wednesday and we all know what that means. I am not willing to start something, only to stop in the middle and go to the mini witches' meeting. Soooooo. I decided to do some revamping of the blog. Had I known it was so easy to do, I would have had a new background a while ago. I am not sure if this is the one that I am going to keep, but it looks better than just plain teal. I was getting bored with that.

It took me about two hours to do what I did and that was not a lot. I added some more links to mini blog sites as well as some for "regular people". Some of them are French. Don't let that put you off. I read very little French, but I can manage to navigate around the pages and most have beautiful photos of what they are doing. Please go look around. I will be adding more, but that is all I had time for this morning.

I decided to do some close ups of Eskiaga and his home to give you something to look at today. For those of you that don't know, Eskiaga was a real Apache scout for the army here in Arizona before the turn of the last century. I found a photo of him in an old book and thought that he would make a wonderful little person. He won best in his class at the Tucson Mini show the year that I made him. After that he retired to a room box that I had made a couple of years before. He deserved it.

Most of the time he sits in the living room with his cat. They have a love/hate relationship. The cat, as most cats do, loves to annoy him and Eskiaga hates to think that the cat might be going after his tacos if he turns his back. So there they sit.

There is a photo of the room box elsewhere in the blog. If I have time, I will go look for the page before I leave....If not, good luck finding it. I know it's here somewhere.

The room box itself was a wooden packing crate that my husband brought home from work a long time ago. I designed the room to fit the crate. The interior walls and loft area are made of 1/2" foamcore. All of the walls, inside and out, are covered with Spackle. I hand carved the beams and all of the furniture copying real life Mexican antiques. OK. I know that Eskiaga isn't Mexican, but he is very happy living here after spending years out in the desert in tents.

There is a cross stitched bedspread that I designed and made......Don't tell anyone but the design on that piece was based on some cross stitch from Transylvania! No. That doesn't make Eskiaga a vampire. And no, he doesn't have bats in his belfry as far as I know. The throw on the sofa is also a Transylvania design.

The cupboard in the next photo is a copy of one in an Artes Des Mexico furniture catalog from around 1940. That was a copy of an antique in the catalog so I think it still qualifies as a copy of a copy of an antique. It's all handpainted. The original had handpainted tiles. I simply did it on the wood inserts.

The wrought iron railings are scraps of plastic and fleur de lis plastic toothpicks.

In this photo you can also get a better view of the beams. I started with some Houseworks baseboard and carved the diamond pattern into it. Much easier than starting from scratch.

I did start from scratch on the front door. It is simply a false door, but all of the carving is the same as would be done on a real one.

The silver disk that you see above the door is an Aztec calendar.(It's really an advertizing coaster from a shipping company.) The two chairs are "Take a Seat" resin ones that I added a couple of years ago.

OK. This is all I have time to do. Please feel free to stay around and look at all of the pretty new sites.

See you tomorrow.