MiniatureTudor Apothecary and Workroom Buildings by Brian Long

This is the basic design of the next build, a Tudor Apothecary shop and attached workshop. The project is by Brian Long, for Dolls House and Miniature Scene, and ran over 4 months in 2007 and 2008. The carcase of this project was a gift - I can't remember if it was Mother's Day, birthday or Christmas - a couple of years ago, and it has been sitting and waiting for me to get back to it. Well, today I began again. The instructions are very sketchy, so I am having to extrapolate quite a bit from the photos.

It is hard for me to leave anything alone, and so it is with this one. The workshop, with the large arched opening, has a vaulted ceiling, nicely finished in the original with brick paper - I used paper clay. That part is  long since done, and it was a job and a half. The base for the paper clay ceiling is part of a concrete footing tube.

This is a photo I took of the process, two years ago. I made long slabs of brick and placed them side by side in the "vault" and once dry, added cement lines and colour-wash to the bricks. The cube for the workshop is about 12" (33 cm) to a side. The workshop is intended to be a re-purposed Roman vaulted room, so the bracket holding the ceiling needs to be faux finished to look like marble. Back then, I also made a Tudor brick cook stove and a hood, which will go against the back wall. All of this interior space needs to be bricked, and the bricks need to look as if they've had several centuries of whitewash, so the brick lines need to be rather faint.

Last year, I saw stoves just like this in Hampton Court Palace; Henry VIII had all his meals cooked on these stoves . I did learn that I'd need a metal tripod to place above the cook holes, and that the pots were primarily pottery, terra cotta with a green interior glaze, so I will have to take up potting with polymer clay one of these days. The stoves are almost identical to Chinese cooking stoves, which have a wok sitting over the hole, with steamers if you cook more than one thing at a time on top of the wok. And I picked up three tripods at Birmingham Miniatura, although one lost a leg and will have to be repaired.

This is the side of the workshop I am currently working on. The upper windows are false, as they sit above the arch inside, and will get shutters. The lower window will be glazed, I am currently ageing and staining the timbers for the window lining and the beams of the building. The lower half of this building will be bricked, the upper plastered between the timbers, and the drip mould will be faux finished to look like it was made of stone (I hope).

My work table is an unholy mess, so I have to tidy that up before continuing on. Another change that is coming is the façade with the arch; it is going to be thinner, to allow me to timber and stucco it. No allowance was made for that in the original design, and it has to be set back to allow the piano hinge that holds the two eventual buildings together to fit properly. The other façade was set back ready to receive timber and stucco, and I'd like the two to match better.

Check back regularly to see how this building progresses. It will, no doubt, be interrupted for other, more important things, but I'd like to have it done over the winter. Then I can go back and complete some of the other UFO's I have sitting around. Long post, but I wanted to give you an idea of what is involved in this particular miniature. My husband isn't too fond of British instructions, he finds them rather sketchy and of course, they use UK terms that we then have to translate. This is  the fourth British project he has cut out for me; the others include the Tudor house, Tudor Market Hall, and the garden shed project. The Pawn Shop came from a Dutch publication.