Miniature Foxglove Plants - The First of Many....

This was a kit from The Miniature Garden in the UK, bought at least two plus years ago in Birmingham. It took me this long to get up the courage to make these plants, and it has taken me three whole days!

Each blossom head consists of 40 tiny tubular flowers in 3 sizes, laboriously glued into a tiny tube around a pointed tweezer; then each flower head was dipped in paint for the sepal (my own addition); and then the "lip" of the blossoms had to be teased out with tweezers. Then there are 50 leaves on each plant, in 4 sizes. Except for the smallest leaves, they had to be hand cut. The tiniest blossom  "tube" was formed from a rolled, 1/8" (3 mm?) heart shape, while the largest was 1/4" or approx. 6 mm in size....

And I have to make at least 5 more for the foxglove patch in the Apothecary Garden to look good! However, I will have to punch my own blossoms for these, and I think I will make my teeny components just a little bit larger. The effect is very good, but the amount of work involved is crazy.

The Miniature Garden's kits use scrapbooking card for the leaves, personally I prefer paper that has been hand painted to add some colour variation. And I think the leaves are a little too large, really, except for the very top ones.

Along with 5 more foxglove plants, I also have to make at least 2 more velvet-leaf mullein plants; that kit (Verbascum in the UK) also  made 2 plants, but there was enough material for me to make one more. The mullein plants also require hand-cut leaves; I will check the provided card against what my local Michael's has in the scrapbooking section, before I paint my own paper.

The instructions for at least 3 more medicinal plants are available on the internet, two of them in French, and very complicated; belladonna, deadly nightshade, and St. John's Wort. However, they are essential. An idea has come to me how to make the garden, so I will sketch that out and run the specifics by my carpenter-in-chief; after all, it was his idea to add an herb garden!

In my stash is a white metal dolphin wall fountain; painted like verdigris copper, this would be a wonderful addition, next to the garden gate. I also like the idea of a turf seat under a rose arbour, and 4 to 6 raised beds with wattle edgings, for the smaller plants, with gravelled walkways in between. The large plants will go against the walls, and I hope to add two or three espaliered fruit trees along those walls as well.

This wall was photographed in Arnhem, The Netherlands while I was on mini tour there; it is in the old part of the city, and struck me then as the perfect outside wall for my Apothecary Garden; I just love the diamond-shaped windows with their metal fretwork! Behind this lovely old wall was a bricked terrace area, with potted plants around the edges, like something out of a gardening magazine....

Santa Did Bring Some Minis

Santa decided my Apothecary Shop needed a jar of medicinal leeches; I really don't like the idea of these things, having been threatened with them as a child, but I do agree they are required in a proper apothecary shop. This jar of the creepy crawlies came with a very fine wooden bowl containing bloodied bandages and an apparently dead leech. Wonder what happened to the patient!

This will look gruesomely great in the shop, eventually!

There are actually four of these pattern envelopes; obviously someone took note of the fact that there are a couple of plastic dress forms among my supplies! I see a dressmaking vignette in my future....

These gifts came from my younger daughter; my older daughter supplied larger, doll-size props appropriate for my Sasha Morgenthaler doll collection. My son and his wife gifted me with another year of Doll House and Miniature Scene magazine, while my Carpenter-in-Chief is giving me a year's subscription to the Dutch dollhouse magazine of my choice; there are two, but one is easier to subscribe to from overseas than the other.

Thanks to all the Santas! A miniaturist friend from Camp MiniHaHa, Maureen H., sent me a pair of Aitken's Pewter coat of arms plates, for my lamp vignette. This was a very good Christmas for miniatures for me....

Merry Christmas, Everyone

Well, I found the instructions for the other poppy kit, but I put the kit components in a "safe" place, and three days later I still have not been able to find them. And here I thought I was sorting things out quite nicely!

Things outside are not as Christmas-card pretty as last year; it is foggy, and we are promised rain for Christmas day. However, there is a good load of snow down, so it is sort of a White Christmas.

I hope you will all enjoy visits with friends and family, enjoy good food, and excellent company. Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noel, Frohe Weinachten, Gelukkig Kerstfeest, and Feliz Navidad. Hopefully, Santa Claus will bring  a mini or two!

Poppy Cultivation in Miniature

These Oriental Poppies are from a Ruth Hanke (Hanky Panky Crafts) kit I purchased many years ago. The kit called for White-Out Fluid which is not exactly easily available these days, but I decided to try using a gel pen instead, on a scrap of the tissue paper, and it worked quite well. So I decided that tonight, I would finish these opium poppies, which will go into the Tudor Apothecary Garden when it is built.

The kit, like most of them, was a multi-step one; and I used dinner to dry out the gel pen enough that I could go over it with a .005 black Pigma pen. The effect is quite dramatic; two petals of each flower had the black and white treatment, and I am now tempted to try it in deep rose for a white poppy, or purple for a rose one. I tend to make these flowers assembly-line style; first all the tops, then the petals, then the leaves, with lots of drying time in between to avoid tissue paper petals sticking to me and everything else on my work surface.

The buds are cheats; I was supposed to paint mustard seeds, but as I had seed beads in the right colour, I used those for the buds instead. As they sort of lurk among the blooming poppies, they should pass nicely.

Drawing on tiny tissue paper petals is a bit nerve-wracking, especially when your black pen seems to be running dry! But there was an excellent tip in the kit; tack each petal to be painted to the adhesive strip of a post-it note, to keep it from moving while working on it (and to keep from sneezing them away, or the cat from just plain batting them away). It worked a treat. These tissue flowers will need to be sprayed to prevent fading, which tissue is very prone to.

And since I had started these flowers about a year ago, I can now mark another unfinished (small) project off my list! There are, however, some more poppies barely started that I have to find the instructions for; I hope they are in one of my magazines. This second group uses a bead as the centre of the poppy; it will be interesting to see what the final product looks like.

My Wall of Shame: UFO Number 1, December 2014

This is one big beast of a project: a fishing shack on a pier on a beach. It was the Camp MiniHaHa 2008 project, based on a Joann Swanson design (we got permission from her), from the larger format NN. The shack sits on the pier, which is fixed to the beach base. The pilings are real Bay of Fundy driftwood, aged and darkened to look like the sea comes in regularly.

The shack itself is barn red board and batten siding, and a cedar shingle roof, battered by years of Atlantic Ocean storms, with white trim. My original plan was to have a woman tugboat captain, in retirement, now writing her memoirs and living in the shack she inherited from her father. However, the shack turned out to be too small to make it living quarters for anyone, so the project has sat for 6 years....

The captain's bed will go, although the bookshelf will stay. The dog will also stay, he'd look quite nice lying on the deck of the pier. The wonderful writing table was purchased from an Australian miniaturist, during an on-line miniature show, several years ago, and will be the main take-off for the "story" of the shack.

Did I mention that I collect "stuff" in shoeboxes for my projects? This project has 2 boxes, the stuff above is the landscaping stuff; driftwood "logs", shells, seaweed, sand, gravel, rocks, you name it, it is there. Funnily enough, none of it stinks any more, but perhaps I am smelling selectively! The beach already has a coat of sand, but as you can see the front of the beach needs more, the coverage on the built-up area wasn't great. This is something I can probably do indoors; however, pouring the resin for the seawater will have to wait until I can do it outdoors, in five months or so!

And then there is the shoebox of "stuff" to go inside the project! A dory, lobster pots, fish barrel and creels, food, pots, pans, chair, slicker, 2 sou'wester hats, 2 pairs of rubber boots, lobster buoys, more shells, starfish galore, pictures, cushions and paintings, enough gulls to clear out a garbage dump, even a pelican, it just goes on and on. There is also a tiny, 3-prong fishhook, less than 1 cm (3/8") long. There's a can for worms and a fishing rod, two rope mats and one braided one, as well as nautical brass minis. And a lot of it will probably not fit; the scene is massive, the base measuring 50 cm (19.5") by 43 cm (17"), while with the shack on top, it is 50 cm (19.5") high. The shack itself has a footprint of 25 x 20 cm (10 x 8").

What will likely happen with this scene is a complete change of story; it will be a writer's retreat, rather than a place to live in, a sort of weekend cottage, with minimal facilities for making meals and hot drinks.  There will be lots of nautical and maritime stuff on the deck and beach areas, and perhaps a sleeping bag in the loft for long nights. I have a lovely Shaker stove kit, nice and compact, which will go into the scene, and I'll likely add a small sink area for washing up, along with a small table and chair for eating at. The outside will have lobster floats, glass floats, fishing gear, and as much beach stuff as I can get in without overcrowding the scene, with the boat on the beach, of course.

It may yet change as I get back to work on it; certainly the shack could be done indoors over the winter, and some of the basic landscaping. Only the water has to wait for spring. That should empty one box nearly completely, while the decorative indoor and shack stuff can be pared down to what will fit and look good, and the remainder re-purposed.

There were 25 of us at Camp the year we made this, but at the moment I can only recall 2 or 3 which have been finished; a couple at least were antique/junk shops, with so much stuff you never really see everything, it is new every time. It was a rather big project....

The Tudor House Revisited, Part 4 - The Final One!

The street level of the Tudor House is the home owners' embroidery shop. It is sparsely furnished, with just the bare necessities. The trestle table at the centre is a display surface for large embroidery pieces, and is piled pretty high currently. The chest has an embroidered pad on it, as well as a cushion in the corner. The box contains samples of black work offered by the shop, and with the lid down it doubles as an additional seat. The lady of the house is hard a work at another commissioned project; from the looks of it, it is intended to be another seat cushion or pad.

The majority of the furnishings here are from DHMS projects; however, the chest was a kit purchased at Camp MiniHaHa, put together by Shelley A. of mini_addiction. The embroidery designs are from books and magazines; all 3 of the UK publications, and Pamela Warner's and Sandra Whitehead's books on dollhouse embroidery.

The designs are a little more visible in this photo; the peacock table carpet needs fringing, but is otherwise done. Early carpets were too valuable for floors, so they were used as table and bed covers. Dutch people still tend to put carpets on their tables; I do! Those are specifically made for tables, though, and I inherited a narrow Bokhara runner from my parents and a larger carpet from my maternal grandparents. The latter has a small hole, and I am trying to find someone to repair that Real Life carpet for me, difficult indeed in our small province of Canada.

 The small black work squares are "samples", while the larger ones and the rectangles are "for sale". Black work is fun to do, these were done on 22 ct hardanger fabric using a single strand of floss.

Black work was introduced to England by Henry VIII's first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and if you look at paintings and drawings of the period, you will see this type of embroidery widely used in the clothing of the very wealthy, often with the addition of gold thread detailing. 

The small cushion has a bird on it, while the hanging on the left of the photo is of a rabbit. The other hanging is a very old type of sailing ship, with Moorish roots from the looks of it. I just loved the colour combinations in this little hanging.  I really should put a rail on the wall to display these hangings, you can't see them all covered up on the table.... (Oh no, I just created myself yet another project!)

I wonder if I should start blogging photos of UnFinished Objects; maybe that will be the kick in the backside I need to get these projects done. Once they are done, I will not have to have all those shoebox-size boxes, full of things to eventually go into these projects, sitting on my overburdened storage shelves!

The Tudor House Revisited, Part 3

The kitchen/living area is the most crowded in the Tudor House. The table, benches and dresser shelf were all made from instructions in Making Dolls' House Interiors, mentioned in the previous post, as were the salt box (seen on the fireplace mantel in the kitchen picture) and the three-legged stool. The green box is a dough box; you mixed the bread dough in the inverted lid, then put the bread to proof in the box, out of drafts. I believe this design came from a magazine, likely a UK one! A decorative, carved wooden box on the dresser holds valuable spices.

Pottery in this setting comes from a wide variety of sources, some of them on the secondary market, and a couple of pieces imported from Mexico and Portugal. The dead bunny was a purchase at Birmingham Miniatura a couple of years ago, while the superb tripod kettles came from Earth & Tree in New Hampshire (Old Mountain Miniatures). The buckets are hardware store finds, stained and with rope handles. There are also some small Mexican copper bowls with handles on the shelf.

There are also food items made by me, some of them for the Christmas season, although in Tudor times ordinary people didn't make a great fuss over the holiday, except as a religious one. The setting also has tiny turned wooden bowls, gorgeous baskets from the UK, pewter, glassware, and a tiny, hammered silver bowl I made at Camp MiniHaHa some years ago, under the tutelage of John Meacham, an IGMA artisan.

There is also a tiny hedgehog in the kitchen; these were kept to help keep down flies and vermin and this practice continued into the 19th century in parts of Europe. This hedgehog also came from Miniatura, one of the items on my long list that I was able to fill during that trip. And a broken egg lies in front of a tiny basket of eggs in the bottom section of the dresser shelf. Also on the bottom shelf is a small barrel with a spigot, sitting in a barrel cradle; I believe it contains Madeira....

Among the food items are a Stilton cheese, pears in wine sauce, gilded gingerbread Tudor rose, Christmas pudding, bread loaf, garlic string, and onions in the basket. There is also a dead chicken, made by me many years ago; it is somewhat primitive; the cleaver next to it is a British find, and it is sharp as the real thing.

The next visit will be to the shop area of the Tudor House.