One Thing Leads to Another... And Another....

OK... I am finished rearranging things.  At least until I get my workroom cleaned up once again...

I found all of the smaller scale things that I wanted to put in here. Notice I didn't end the sentence with all of the smaller scale things...

There are still two 1/2" houses that aren't finished.  Don't ask...

So soon we forget.  I almost forgot the little wall house that is hanging center bottom.  I just finished that a few months ago and stuck it in a corner, above the wood box.

It's out now and the Terrible Two have taken possession..

When I moved the 1/4" Tudor wall house, that left an empty wall. 

So I filled said wall with a few of my favorite things.

The centerpiece is Italian gold leaf sconce.  I found it in a thrift shop for just a few dollars... The left side tail of the top bow is missing.  I keep meaning to repair it, but somehow it never happens... I kind of like it that way.

I collect antique scissors... Who am I kidding?  I am a scissor addict.  If it cuts with two blades, I collect it.  I represented that with the long bladed library scissors at the left.  It used to be that all of the pages were not necessarily cut when you bought a book.  You needed these scissors handy so that a page could be separated from it's neighbor.

Evidently I am a plate collector and didn't even know it.  These are just three of quite a few that I have around the house.  The two gold ones are antique Japanese and the blue rimmed one is a hand painted lake scene from turn of the last Century England.  It is signed by the painter on the back.

I also collect antique purse frames.  Nope.  Not purses.  Just frames.  A lot of the time, they are much prettier than the purse.  That part wears out.  I like what's left.  Sometimes I will put a new body on a frame.

News Flash!  The Terrible Two just announced that the quarter inch section of the wall is theirs. 

They are calling it their very own "Mini, Mini Museum. 

I can see that this is going to lead to trouble.  They are already rearranging things and are demanding that I refurbish some of the pieces. 

I have to admit that, for one, the Neiman-Marcus Cheese Shop is looking a bit bedraggled.  Maybe I will humor them for a couple of days. 

If "their" museum is in good repair, maybe they will spend some time there and keep out of my hair.

I have to go see about a cheese shop... Back to work.

See you tomorrow.

The Case of the Missing House!!!

OK. The date on this one should be May 27, 2011. Starting over after the entry disappeared!

I will try to recreate what I did the first time. Needless to say, I am not a happy camper right now.

This is a house that I designed, years ago, from a book of house plans that is about 110 years old. It is a little Italian Style house by Gervase Wheeler.

As you can see, beside Tessie, it is about dollhouse size for a dollhouse. I didn't really plan it to be any particular scale. That's just how it turned out. It was just for fun.

The only tools you need are sharp scissors and some white glue...Oh and either colored pencils, pens or watercolors. I used plain old Crayola pencils on this one. It is printed on card stock.

After you color it, the next step is to cut it out. I do this carefully, because the directions on how to fold and where to cut are right on the sheet. If you don't mess it up, you can lay it back in place and see how the folds should be.

If you do origami, the "fold out" is a mountain fold and the "fold in" is a valley.

Make sure that all of your folds are sharp.

I start at the top and glue flaps under as I go. There is one piece at the long end of the roof that looks like another wall. It is simply a support and it gets folded inside the wing, where it turns. That is so that the wing will stay straight and not bow or collapse inward.


Just be patient and hold each flap in place before going on to the next one.

The last step is the bottom. I find it easiest to do this with the aid of tweezers or an Exacto knift to slide the flaps inside.

The two smaller pieces are the chimneys. This time I cut off the flaps on those and just ran a thin line of glue around the bottom edge and sat them on the roof top, where the marks are. They seem to fit better without the tabs.

I did succeed in taking out the color in the background. Now it won't eat all of your ink just for a cream background.

Print it out on an 8 1/2" by 11" piece of cardstock and you should get the size that you see in the photo. You can resize it in one of your programs if you want it smaller.

Now....I do hope that this one doesn't disappear.

Have fun folding.

See you tomorrow....Well not really. I have already seen you tomorrow, because this was the supposed to be on the 27th. Are you now thoroughly confused? I know I am.

See you later today....29th for the regular post.

A Little Make Up Test....

Tessie, with good reason, perched herself on the door handle this morning and refused to enter the workroom. If I could perch on the door handle, I would probably have refused to go past that point either.

Unfortunately, there was no place for me to sit without cleaning up first. So I was elected.

I got the iPad, turned it to "Roswell" on Netflix and went to work.

I got enough stuff put away so that I could walk around and sit down. That was a mistake. I think that I should never clear the chair until the rest of the room is finished.

In my defence, I needed to sit down to pop the rest of the make up out of the big flat boxes that I bought on after Christmas clearance at Walmart. I did that, and as I did, I started thinking of uses for different pieces.

BIG mistake. I should never think while I am working....Just work.

First I thought of a lipstick tube with a mini scene in it that I had seen sometime ago. I wrote about it and then when I got a comment from Eliza about Sue Ann Thwaite of Lady Bug Miniature Fairies, it came back to me where I had seen it. Not in a magazine...At a show. She makes all kinds of lovely tiny fairies and she does some in lipstick tubes. If you would like to see them, go here. http://www.ladybug-fairies.com/ She also sells kits for making them. They are great. I am in no way in competition with her. I just liked the idea.

I am taking the photos and directions down, even though it wasn't a fairy scene. I don't think that it would be right to leave it up.

Instead I quickly took the boy and the tree out of the tube. I found one of the eyeshadow boxes from the same assortment. I have not seen mini scenes in eyeshadow boxes and this one is my own idea, so I feel free to put it up.

Actually, I think that I like this one better. It is more "Tessie sized".

She can put it in the townhouse on a table or shelf.

I think that I have some of these eye shadow boxes around here somewhere with no lettering on them. I may just have to make some more of these. It was a matter of minutes and lots of fun. Start saving tiny boxes and do some room boxes for your dollhouse.

See you tomorrow.

Tessie's First Mini....

A couple of weeks ago, one of the Wednesday Witches gave me a Sue Herber kit for a mini mini travel trailer.

This morning Tessie found it. She Oh-ed and Ahh-ed. Then when that didn't work she whinged and whined.

I finally agreed to make it for her. It seems only fair that she have a mini collection of her own. Since the scale is 1/12th of 1/12, It is perfect.

She even managed to find a car to pull the trailer in the toy drawer.

I'm not sure what the thing is built from, but it is kind of like very thin foam core. It had a bed built into one end and a sofa in the other.

Out came the finest paintbrushes that I own and a few other tools....It's amazing how many pieces of equipment it takes to build something so small. The pile that you see in front of her feet are all of the components of the kit.
The trailer was supposed to be a cute little Mary Engelbreit style. I changed it to a good old fashioned aluminum one. After all, the car that Tessie found looks kind of like a mid century mod car.

After I got the trailer finished, I needed a base for it. I found a piece of packing material that I kept just because it looked interesting. I sliced the top off of one corner and trimmed it down some.

Then I painted it with watered down acrylic paint. I grabbed my landscaping box and planted a couple of trees and some grass.

Then I glued down the trailer and car.

I used some of the Heavenly Bamboo, aka Nandina, stems that I use for plants and glued railroad foliage to the branches.

Basically, that's it.

Tessie is pleased. I am pleased.....Now she has the same problem that I always have when I finish a project. Where is she going to put it?

Not my problem. She will have to figure that one out for herself.

Here's a little closer view. Please notice that there is a coffee cup on the nightstand. No. I didn't make it. I found some strips of tiny plastic accessories at last year's mini show. The mat in front of the sofa is a piece of an extremely fine Japanese mat. The pieces of bamboo are about the size of a hair and the thread holding them together is even finer.

Anyway, now that I have that finished, I think that I am going to go clean the workroom...........Again.......

See you tomorrow.

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.