Bamboo!

This turned out just as I had hoped! It still needs a proper, edged flower-bed, but it fits very nicely in that corner of the Japanese vignette. Two days' work, I must be crazy....

I started by stiffening a piece of coarse cotton thread with glue, and allowing that to dry. Once it was dry, I wound it two to three times around portions of my stems, actually bamboo skewers, and glued it down. I did this by eye, so it would be irregular. Tomorrow, I'll post a close-up, as I hope to have the flower-bed done then, so you can see the nice little joints in the bamboo.

Once that was dry, I painted the thread-wrapped skewers with green paint. The joints are highlighted with a dry brushing of lighter green paint, which adds dimension to the rings of thread. Then I started on the leaves.

I have a punch with three sizes of sword-shaped leaves on it, so I punched about a hundred or so of those in three shades of green-painted paper, to add variety. The leaves were creased down the centre to give them dimension, and I began gluing them on to very thin strips of curved, green paper stems. The top of each bamboo stem has three sets of three small leaves, pointing upwards. Then I did a couple of rows of the medium-size leaves, transitioning from 3 to 5 per stem. At the base, I used the larger size of leaves, sometimes mixed in with the odd medium-size one. The lower end of the stems will be left bare. Tomorrow, once they are thoroughly dry and planted in their bed, I'll spray them with a clear satin spray.

I need to paint paper for Japanese maple leaves, and then punch myself into a stupor as I'll likely need hundreds, to fill in my Japanese maple tree, which will go on the other side of the doorway. I've saved a very nicely-shaped branched twig from the garden for that.

A Few More UFO's, UFO'S No Longer

I put together half a dozen "crystal" candlesticks, and two ewer-and-basin sets, two covered chamber pots, and a soap dish, all Chrysnbon left-overs I picked up from the yard sale table at some show years ago. The blue pieces still need to be painted; there is also a set of men's shaving gear with this set. Once I decide which project to use these in, I can decide on the colour. Right now, I'm thinking ivory with gold accents, which would fit just about anywhere.

While looking at this photo, I realized I didn't like the door step into the Japanese vignette. So I did something about it.

I designed and made a small step-up platform, following a photo in the Japanese book I'm working with. This will have "cement" footings, gravel underneath, a fence on one side and a bamboo plant in a small raised bed on the other - as of now! In front of the step-up I plan to place a flat "boulder" or perhaps a rock-studded paving stone, I haven't quite decided yet. The granite rocks on my patio won't be accessible again until April or May because of the snow, so whatever I use I will have to create.

I'm also going to add a sliding door panel, as I feel the opening is way too big. On Pinterest I found a photo of a very nice one, from The Guys from Texas, designed for their tea-house class. It will have a solid bottom panel with trim, and a 3 over 3 light window in the upper part, and be fixed behind the right-hand wall to look as if it has just been slid open.

Then I have to design the gate; this is a huge affair with 2 sliding doors, a slatted window in the peak, and a central thatch roof as well as two smaller side thatch roofs. For the thatch or straw, I will try garden raffia, sewn on the sewing machine to an interfacing backing and then decorated over the sewing lines with embroidery to mimic twine tying. This gate will have to be pretty much free-standing, as I can't fix it in place until the courtyard landscaping is done.

The landscaping is, after all, the focus of this vignette. There will be a Japanese maple, the  bamboo, hydrangeas, hostas, possibly an iris if I can figure out the Japanese version, which has a much looser ruffled petals, a small water feature, and a stepping stone path, with bamboo fences here and there and pine tree hedges on the edges. Now is the time to see if post-Christmas, I can acquire some in-scale looking pine stuff for the hedges and perhaps, a cloud-form tree.

The book I'm using is in Japanese, which I can't read, so I am going by measurements given in their sketches and what I think they used to create the scene. It's kind of a hit-and-miss process, as I'm guessing at all the small measurements. Somewhere, I know I have the instructions for a boulder water barrel with a bamboo dipper and pipe, which would work very nicely in this scene. The hard part will be to create a serene setting, so I have to practice self-control in regards to the garden plan.

I will have to put something in the interior of the house, probably a tokonoma niche, and perhaps a shoe rack, to give the idea there is a whole house behind the brown wall. I'd kind of like a sleeping cat on the step, too....

I really am trying to finish some of my many UFO's!

Finished UFO

By temporarily withdrawing from a bunch of my usual activities, I hope to catch up a bit on the multitudinous UnFinished Objects I have sitting around the house, in all my hobbies, not just miniatures. (Quilting, embroidery, knitting and dolls' couture, among others; I have mentioned that I seem to have too many hobbies.)

Yesterday, I dug through my box of kits never done, and pulled out a potting table I purchased at Camp MiniHaHa back in 2009.

The bits and pieces, along with the instructions, are pictured above. I did make a few tiny changes, using thicker wood for the peg board, for example; that's the piece across the picket fence edge of the table. The peg are rather closely spaced, so I don't think they could be used to hang much other than potting tools, in which case the pegs are rather long. The shelves at the left are somewhat narrower than their supports, and are made of craft stick pieces. One of them is somewhat warped, not unusual for craft sticks, so I decided to add some tiny shelf supports to strengthen the structure.

And here is the finished item, photographed in the space for the garden of the UFO Japanese vignette.
I haven't decided yet whether I want to paint or stain the potting bench, as I really don't have a place in mind for it, and besides, I already own a perfectly nice potting bench, complete with pots, packages, watering can, dead plants and the like. This piece may end up in my Shop in a Box....

So that's that. Another item done. Now I'll go find something else to finish up. And with three kids, now all adults, there is a huge box of Lego blocks etc. to sort through; I intend to make up all the kits they got over the years, and store the pieces that way. By the way, there may be a one-off Lego and minis story one of these days....

Playing With A New Plant

Happy New Year! We saw the New Year in with a case of the flu here, but we are just about over it now. While waiting, I did keep busy, checking out all the December 2016 Advent Calendar pages I could find. The French one had a wonderful new plant on it, so I decided to give it a go.

Did you pop the berries of the snowberry bush when you were a child? The scientific name is Symphorina, Symphorine in French. The lovely detail in the miniature is what caught my eye. I loved popping those berries when I was a child in The Netherlands, they grew all over the nearest city park. My Carpenter-in-Chief, as a child in Nova Scotia, also popped those berries, on the way to and from school. So the berries are also a bit of a nostalgia for childhood.

There may be a small Shabby Chic vignette in my future this year, and this is one of those plants that would tone beautifully in such a setting. You can find it at the blog jicolin, calendrier d'avant 2016, Dec. 16 - I really don't know why the blog won't let me add in a proper link, but just google jicolin and you will get there.

The maker used small styrofoam balls from Pascale Garnier, which were then baked to reduce the size; I prefer to use household items, so I used some model railroad scale apples for the tiny berries at the top of the branch. When I discovered these were much the same size as the poppy seeds in my pantry, I decided to use those for the second batch of baby berries I made.

When the tiny "berries" had dried thoroughly, I put more glue on the stems and added mustard seeds, shaping them a bit with my fingers. Once these larger "berries" were dry, I glued some extra seeds in the odd gap that appeared here and there.

Once the glue was dry, I painted the whole thing white for an undercoat, using a dry brush to remove excess paint from between the seeds, as it could hide detail. Once that was dry,  the tiny seeds are painted a very pale green, and the larger seeds pink in one batch and white in the second, again dry brushing to clean up detail. I found a tiny bit of cream added to the white paint toned down the starkness a little. (I was taught that one should avoid stark white and stark black in miniatures as a rule.) I used a brown micro-tip permanent pen to make the tiny dot on the ends of the berries, that represent the bottom blossom. (I used a Faber-Castell PITT artist pen - you have to use a permanent pen, or paint, to prevent smearing when varnishing.)  I had to touch up the green stems, then used satin varnish on the berries. For the leaves, I followed the tutorial on the advent calendar, as I had one of the suggested punches.

I tried to add a close-up of the berries, but the photo comes out sideways, although I rotated it previously; however, the computer won't let us - three of us have tried!

Then I spent a fair bit of the day figuring out how other miniaturists create those wonderfully shabby and chalky interiors, and making copious notes....

Merry Christmas 2016

This photo was taken just after daybreak on Friday, because I loved the looks of the clouds in the sky, and all the fine, powdery snow that had fallen was still on every branch and tiny bud. This is the view from my living room, through the windows, out over the Saint John River valley, now obscured by trees, unfortunately; the opposite bank is visible on the horizon.

Since then, we have had rain, and today lots of very strong wind gusts; for a while this morning, we lost electrical power in our neighbourhood. But we are used to this, and our generator kicked in just fine, and by 1 p.m. power was restored to the area. It was likely another tree or branch falling on a line somewhere.

I had hoped to post a photo of my Christmas vignette today, but my camera is still giving us problems; the fresh batteries I put in on Friday were completely drained today. It appears the problem might be that one of the coils inside is causing a drain on battery power. In the daylight, we will try to fiddle with this, using one of my long, thin tweezers.

This was definitely not a mini Christmas; my Sasha Morgenthaler doll collection, however, was very well remembered, with fabric, books and clothing! However, they are the wrong scale for this blog. Now that my work surface has been tidied up, I hope to get back into miniatures. This afternoon, I was madly hemming the last of the patchwork Real Life place mats I had made to brighten up our very quiet Christmas dinner. Now my time can go back to some of my other hobbies.

I hope you and your family had a wonderful Christmas.

Camera Woes Resolved

My camera has been giving me a very hard time lately, as it is eating batteries like a shark with a bucket of bait. Hopefully, we have now sorted out the problem, and I can try to catch up a little bit with the blog.

Our FAME group had a Christmas party at one of our member's homes in the first week of December, pot-luck style with a gift exchange among ourselves. We are now 10 members, and all of us were able to come to the party. The member hosting us this year is a collector of miniatures, and oh my goodness, does she ever have a wonderful collection! There was so much to see that it was impossible to see it all in one visit. As she visits Hong Kong on a regular basis, she has  been able to acquire some wonderful Asian miniatures, very different from most of what we see here. She has been collecting for 25 years, so you can just imagine what there was to see; a small sample would be a guitar case, showcasing musical instrument miniatures, for example.

Our gift exchange was fun, and I got a lovely gift, a Reutter Porzellan miniature loaf of bread with a knife, a submarine sandwich, and a porcelain breadboard, which has now gone into the little cupboard that sits on top of my Christmas room box. (This will be posted on Christmas day.)

The breadboard has a Christmas-y feel about it, although the image is of a rooster, but it looks right at home in the Christmas miniature.

Our newest member (and right now the only male in our group) made a Christmas miniature for each of us. He made a dozen of these little vignettes, and each one was very different, although the little building, the many signs, and the animal or bird in each kept recurring. This piece has a place on a small side table at my house, and will be part of our Christmas display every year:

Mine is a blue woodshed, full of wood, with a dog in a sweater sitting out front and a white Christmas tree, with a Christmas bauble hanging on a branch. There are probably two dozen little signs in this vignette, and all sides of the little woodshed are also decorated. I think it is just fabulous!
One of the pieces he made for a family member has over 70 different little signs on it - he is obviously very computer-savvy! We hope to visit his miniatures in the Spring of 2017 - he travels more than an hour over country highways to come to our meetings....

Marilyn and Louise handed out Miniature  Bingo cards at Camp MiniHaHa this September, and I am attempting to fill some of my bingo squares; two are done, I think, and I hope to get another one done this weekend, as I am repairing the window of the Pawn Shop vignette, which caved in on the trip home from our show at the end of October. Each square of the bingo card has a different miniature challenge, and for each challenge finished - with photographic evidence of the work -  your name goes in one of two draws for a prize in September 2017. I don't know if I can fill them all in by then, but I'm going to try.

We are expecting lots of snow overnight, in time for Christmas; it will, however, cause some problems for people who are travelling. I hope to  be back on the blog on Sunday, although I am really not expecting any minis this year; however, who knows?

Back Again

We got back from our western Canadian odyssey just in time for me to assist Marilyn D. (Charminis) who was teaching the corner vignette for the class I taught back in June. I forgot to bring my camera. So I am hoping to find some photos somewhere that I can eventually put on this blog.

Once that was done, I had a week to make some items for a Secret Santa Swap. As that has now been received, in the US, in under a week (!), that is done. (That it got there that quickly is a bit of a Christmas miracle, as it can easily take a week or more for us to get a letter from across the river in the town where we live! And this parcel was international....)

Then on Saturday, FAME, our local miniature group, exhibited at the model railroaders' show here in town. We displayed a number of pieces by a new member of our group, Garry R., and had a lot of male visitors to our display - perhaps because there was a man behind the table? Garry has been doing miniatures for many years, has won national (US) prizes for his work, and has exhibited at a number of now defunct shows in the State of Maine. My family and I visited several of those US shows regularly, but I must have been overcome with all the bounty on display, as I have no memory!

His work is excellent: my favourite piece of his is his room box of Maine homeless people, a sad subject, but so beautifully and sympathetically done. There are even wet patches around the manhole cover in the area where the people are attempting to shelter, and posters for charitable groups offering meals and a roof for the night. Again, I forgot to bring my camera to our show, but I have been promised a photo or two in the future. Next up is our group Christmas get-together, a Pot Luck at a member's house that will include a look at her extensive miniatures collections.

I didn't think I would encounter any miniatures on our western trip, but in a second-hand store in Edmonton, AB, I found a book I had never seen before: Make Your Own Dollhouses and Dollhouse Miniatures, by Marian Maeve O'Brien, published in 1975. I own her other book, Make and Furnish Your Own Miniature Rooms (1976) in hard-cover. The new-to-me book is a large soft-cover book.

It contains loads of general tips, instructions for creating 5 houses of  varying complexity, as well as finishing details, electrification, a number of furniture how-to's, accessories, small miniature pieces and miniature needlework ideas. What a treasure trove! I know our group, which is made up of people of widely varying experience in miniatures, will find it a great resource.

I have to make some Christmas miniatures for our Christmas Party gift exchange, which means that I have to look through some of my old magazines to find the perfect pieces, how annoying (not!). I love looking through my magazine stash, but usually do not like how much time I end up losing doing so.

Hopefully, something will catch my eye quickly, and more importantly, I will have everything I need to realize the project right here in my stash.

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