Close Ups in the Southwest...

First of all, I added a way for you to get to the voting booth every day. It is at the top, just under the heading. Just press ***About.com/miniatures***. I asked for help and received it, but I am just too computer illiterate to make it work. So.....If you are in the mood to vote for somebody, this will work.

Thanks to all of you that have voted so far. Please keep voting.

Now onto more important matters. I was cleaning Eskiaga's Southwestern room box this morning and decided to go into a bit more detail about it.

Tessie has been following me around and pestering me all morning, so I let her into a couple of the photos. It should have been Eskiaga, but he is preoccupied with Cordelia in the living room. Essentially, he told me to buzz off and go play with Tessie.

This first photo is of the wrought iron chandelier in the living room. It is simply a lot of jewelry findings toggled together with E-6000 and painted black.

To light it, I ran a single wire down into the main barrel of the lamp and attached the six wires from the lights to it in the center. It looks somewhat like a flower on the inside. The stem is the lead wire and the petals are the wires from the bulbs. Their wires are split and half are attached to each side of the lead wire.

I got it all together and made sure that it worked before I painted the whole thing black and strung it up.

The painting above the fireplace is one that I painted on silk with acrylics. The mountain that is in the background is a stylized version of my favorite mountain, north of Tucson. Someone, in their infinite wisdom, named it Picacho Peak....If you translate the first word, the name is Peak Peak....?

Wiring can be fun, sometimes. Since this and the fireplace were the only lights in the whole thing, it was pretty simple to do.

All of the woodwork in the place is done with an Exacto knife. If you look closely, the door itself is all one slab. I copied the design from a book on Mexican interiors. Then I did a straight up and down cut on the line and an angular cut slanting towards the inside of each panel.

The door molding and all of the baseboards and ceiling beams are simply commercial molding with little Xs carved in the center section. I just drew the lines and then cut the Xs slanting towards the center line. There is a lot that you can do to make commercial mini moldings look very different just with a few cuts.

I caught Tessie sneaking around in the bedroom very early this morning. I had to reprimand her for trying on the heshi bead necklaces without permission.

The cross stitch design on the bed is from a book of Transylvanian cross stitch patterns. The pattern on the pillow is repeated all around the bed. I thought it looked very similar to a thunder bird pattern. It fits in quite well with the southwest motifs. And no, there are no vampires involved in the making of this room box.

Someone asked, around the time that we went to the gem show, if I had made any tables out of rock slabs. The answer is yes. This particular one was a bit difficult. The wood is native Arizona Iron Wood....It is literally like iron. It's almost impossible to cut.

I have another one in the Burglar Room box. I will have to take a photo of that one also. It is much larger.

Behind it, you can see another version of the baseboard. This was on molding that had a bead down the center, so the crosses don't actually meet in the center.

The bowl on the table is a real Native American thrown pottery piece.

A little while ago, I found Tessie in the other side of the loft.

Now she wants the hand painted cabinet. I copied this piece from a 1930s or 40s Artes De Mexico furniture catalog. It has different primitive scenes painted on each panel.

The chair is from the same catalog. The catalog very nicely gave measurements for all of it's furniture.

The last thing that I will mention is the wrought iron railing along the balcony edge. That was a piece of an ugly green plastic basket. I cut it to size, glued cocktail picks with fancy ends on the front and painted the whole thing black.

OK. I have to go pull Tessie out of there before she zaps out everything she can get her hands on. You would think that she was poor as a church mouse. Poor, poor Tessie.....

See you tomorrow.