Bits and Pieces....

 ...on their way to becoming something.

We have had to cancel three mini meetings in a row, which means I haven't actually made anything in that time. I have completed several pieces of sewing that had been sitting for months, and sent them on their way, and have begun some knitting to tide me over a two-day meeting I was supposed to attend. Covid is quite bad here right now, so I begged off those meetings. However, I did do some of that knitting.

So be patient, my mini friends, I hope to be back in the mini groove in a couple of days!

Making It Look Used

The floor has been finished to look like an earthen floor, and the walls are being aged and dirtied to show evidence of  long-term industrial usage. We didn't have our meeting today, but hope to get together on Monday to make up for it. By that point, I hope to have the aging finished.

At this point, the windows have been fitted but not yet fixed. I need to make the corner wall and the wall with the stove rather more cream in colour, to match the other wall but will have to check it out in daylight to determine just how much colour to add. The bricks need mortar lining and colour washes to make them more realistic.

The paper clay shrunk rather more than I had planned for around the curves of the windows, so I filled in with paper clay "worms"; it wouldn't do to have light showing around the window frames. Soon I'll have to work on the lighting....

 

Oops, I Did It Again....

It takes me far too much time to get up the courage to do certain things, and one of those things was to do the remaining stucco walls for the wooden shoe workshop. Yesterday, I decided enough was enough, and I put stucco on the remaining walls. 

Only the wall holding the stove needed doing, but the chimney of that stove is made of a plastic drinking straw, dowel, and cardboard. It was difficult to get it to stand straight, as I was worried about messing up the paint job if I tried to bend the straw in a bit. I said a prayer or two, stuck my tongue in the corner of my mouth, and just did it. 

Today, I did some small touch-ups, like filling in a little paper clay around the chimney where it goes into the wall. That dried quickly enough that I was able to paint this afternoon. And I will explain the oops for this entry; I forgot to allow a clear space for the beam at the top of the wall, which meant I had to cut, pry and sand the dry paper clay just as I had to do with the corner of the dividing wall. Guess I didn't learn.....

The floor in this part will be painted rather than done with dry wall compound, as miniature things have no weight whatsoever and would not stand straight on what would undoubtedly have been an uneven floor. The sealer will go on today, and I'll try to get the painting done tomorrow. The doors and windows haven't been placed yet, they are where they're supposed to go only. In order to install the door between the buttresses, I have to take the slanted beam and reed wall section off. That will happen probably after the floor is done. And I just realized that the door would have been difficult to open on a floor that was even a tiny bit higher than the bottom of the door....

The walls will be dirtied and aged once the floor is painted. Stay tuned!

A Repair I Would Not Have Attempted Until Now....

This is the head of a wood chopper's ax I picked up many years ago, at a Craft Fair in Duncan, B.C., where I was visiting my father and my younger sister and her family. I don't know who made this ax, and I don't actually know what the axe head is made of - possibly polymer clay - but the haft of the ax went right through the blade. Naturally, it broke while this little scene was at a show. 

I am proud of myself; I drilled out the stub of the haft, carefully made the pin in the haft a tiny bit longer with sandpaper in order to give it a bigger holding point, and glued it in place. Into the other end of the ax head I inserted a tiny peg sanded down from a wood toothpick (not a bamboo one!), to look as if the haft goes right through the ax head.

Where, why and when this little scene was made has escaped me; I think it may have been at Camp MiniHaHa, or perhaps at a miniaturists' get-together. The lichen and moss on the stump are real; the turkey-tail fungus on the side are made of pine cone scales. The logs are scattered about, some quartered or halved, others whole. The landscaping includes mosses, grasses and tiny yellow flowers, as well as sawdust. I just love this tiny vignette! A miniature doesn't have to be BIG to be good! I do, however, still have to find a permanent home for it, to prevent further ax handle disasters.

Making the tiny tools for the wooden shoe factory has made me more confident in how I use my pin vise drill. I am now comfortable changing drill bits as I go along, to enlarge a hole if needed, and miraculously for someone who is straight-line challenged, I can drill straight!