Camp MiniHaHa 2019 Project

This is the prototype of the Ruffled Rooster Kitchen project, designed by Connie Sauve, that we were doing at camp, with her permission, this year. It is jam-packed with cupboards, drawers and cubbyholes, and the camper who cut out the pieces for us figures there were upwards of 4,000 or so to have enough for all the campers and the extra kits people asked for.

I have mentioned, in the past, that we tend to do as many variations of our project as there are campers, and you will see some in the photos below. There are a lot of photos, so this is a long blog entry.
Unfortunately, people started to pack up mid-afternoon on Sunday, so there are a lot of examples I was unable to get photos of.



Debbie P.s kitchen is a lovely grey-blue, the photo does not do it justice. You can see where things have been switched about to personalise the project.



This is Janice's kitchen, in blue-grey and yellow. As you can see, more switching around of the kit's components!



Myra works small, so her "kitchen" became a three-story house! This is probably 1/48th scale, as the box is 15 1/2 cm (6") wide and 17 1/2 cm (7") high. I did tell you it was a compact kit....



Iris and Kelly were both reproducing a 1700's restaurant kitchen/stove they had visited in Spain; the restaurant has been operating for nearly 300 years, and is believed to be the oldest restaurant ever. The sides and stove hood were tiled, hence the tile work; the stove portion - a huge metal beast - will go into the open space.



Aleeta is making the wardrobe scene from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The kitchen has been transformed into a wardrobe, and you can see the door opening which has been cut, and which will become the entry to Narnia; she plans to do the scene of the snowy forest, street lamp and Mr. Tumnus the Faun in behind the wardrobe, thus expanding the scene.

Brandy carved her doors; she painted background scenery on the kit doors, then cut some thicker doors and carved them with trees, foliage, bear cubs, rocks and stones, to be applied over the painted background. Sadly, I didn't get a photo of that. And Patricia was creating a theatrical dressing room, complete with light bulbs around the mirror, from her kit. (No photo of that either...) Lynn and one other camper were turning their kits into Hallowe'en scenes.

Already in existence, in the prototypes, were 2 complete, beautiful kitchens, a laundry room with many flamingo accessories, and an optometrist's office. I hope to get some more photos up at some point, as three of the prototypes were made by members of my local mini group.

It was a a rather exhausting camp, with all the many pieces that needed to be assembled. My own version is partly stained, partly painted, partly done, partly not done; you get the idea. My stain had deteriorated, and they don't make it any more in the water version, only in oil, so I have to re-stain all the pieces with smelly stain. I am pulling out the bottle drawer (long and narrow on lower portion of kitchen), and will enlarge the shelves to allow for more "stuff". There are lots of little glass jars and bottles in my stash, which all need to be filled with polymer clay candy, not to mention the bins and shelves of the kit shop. I also want to add a shelf unit to the left-hand door to accommodate some jars. The drop-down table in the project will be my store counter, with a small scale on top. Did I mention that my project is intended to become an old-fashioned candy shop? It will become part of my between-the-wars market setting. To that end, I have to figure out how to make "glass" fronts for the 3 tiny drawers. That should be a challenge! And I would love to be able to figure out a way to make the tip-out "glass" shelf on the top portion into a pair of tip-out bins.

Next time, I will show some of my camp goodies, but this is enough for now, I think.

Books Vignette Progress Six

Today I had a good day for getting work done on my miniatures; quite necessary, because next Saturday is the model railroad show and I have some things to get ready for that. First of all, I did paint and "tile" my fishmonger's stall, and tried some of the fish my older daughter made for me to see how it all looked together:

The silvery fish look pretty good against the tiles, although I think some of the smaller fish products need to be in trays or tubs; however, the bigger fish should look quite good piled across the table. This should work nicely. I'll try to make a couple of trays tomorrow.

I took a number of very big breaths, did some calming thinking, and actually CUT INTO my book covers. The first cut was for the clerestory window, high up in the end wall. There is also "glass" in the window, now, although I still have to make the window frame inside the book vignette.

It fits and there are no huge gaps on the sides, thank heaven. Cutting through book board is very hard on knives, I used a dollar store folding box-type cutter with razor blades in it to do this job. The window is designed primarily to bring light into the interior of the box, although there will also be a set of LED lights inside.

This is a general and messy view into the book box, from the back side. The panelling for under the bay window is going in with double-sided tape, as I think that will hold better than glue in the long run. I seem to leave gaps when I glue, although I spread the stuff using an old credit card! The bay window also has glass, now, and you can just see the side door into the shop. The framing for inside and outside of this door is drying in the photo. Cutting the opening for the door took some more calming breaths! You can also see the clerestory window, minus its inner frame. And white dust, where I had to do some sanding....

For putting the plastic "glass" into the window frames, I used tiny self-adhesive double-sided glue dots; these things are tough, and they should hold the windows in place. I first used these dots (the local brand is called Zots) to glue items onto the shelf liners in my Provencal scent shop, and more than a year later, they are still holding tight. They are pretty much invisible, once they're in place.

Tomorrow, the inside window frame...

Back to Minis

Now that I have some priority projects done, I can get back to miniatures and get things ready for the upcoming show with the local model railroaders. This year, I will be bringing my between-the-wars market scene, and I finally put the fishmonger's stall together today.

It still needs to be painted, and I have decided to put a strip across the back of the table as well, but it is just about ready to spray white. The design is from the Venus and Martin Dodge book, Making Miniatures, another David & Charles publication. This book was the first one I got, back in 1996, and got me started on this hobby.

The fishmonger is financially stressed,(perhaps the boat needs repairs!) so the canopy over the stall is faded and fraying around the edges. I'm going to try to do a "tile" centre for this stall; seems to me fish look good on blue and white tile, and the cold tiles would also keep the fish cool, as well as being easy to clean, just hose it off. I have some Delft blue tile paper that would do the job, especially with a shiny tile finish. I think the proprietor will be a woman; my great-grandmother was a fish wholesaler in Amsterdam, a century or more ago, and this would be a fun way to remember that. (As a wholesaler, she did quite well!)

There are already a lot fish ready to go onto the stall, some made for me by my older daughter quite a few years ago, including some lovely squid and scallops. I will just steal some trout from the Tudor market, and the oysters from the shop in a box - people here don't "get" buckets of oysters, so they aren't selling. And I may have to add a display shelf to develop extra space. There are smoked kippers and cod fillets ready to go into the stall as well. However, one of these days I need to add shrimp and sole. And perhaps crab and lobster....

Tomorrow I work, but Friday is another mini day - back to the book vignette, which I would also like to be able to display at the show.

The People from the Miniature Market

Merry Christmas to all of you from the shoppers and the proprietors of the Chipping Littleham weekly market!

Miniature Flower Seller's Market Cart

This is currently the last of the market pieces; it is still a work in progress, as I have to make far more plants for it as well as a vendor for the cart.

It is a variation on the vegetable barrow; posts in the corners, a ridge beam, two end panels and side panels covered with a piece of striped "canvas". There are several brass rails not visible behind the canopy, from which will hang additional plants. The table top lifts in and out, and holds a series of flower buckets that in real life are Marr connectors (electrical caps for bare wires), from the hardware store.

Looking at the photo, I think I shall glue some small rails around the edges of the table, as they would make it possible to place small potted plants around the edges of the barrow. The stain used on this piece is one of my most favourite colours, called Ipswich Pine; it is a lovely warm rosy gold that looks wonderful on miniatures, and I use it extensively, especially as the undercoat stain on painted and distressed pieces.

The Christmas Holiday is fast approaching; we had a heavy snowfall yesterday, more than 30 cm (about 1 foot) of wet, heavy snow that stayed on all the tree branches. Most of our small cedars and birches are bent right over, touching the ground with their tops. More snow is on the way, but on the weekend it should get cold, which means it will definitely be a white Christmas here. The downside of all this lovely snow, of course, is the inevitable power outages; two lengthy ones and quite a few short blips yesterday. Fortunately, the house is warm again today. As we heat and cook with electricity, and have a well with an electric pump, power outages are more than just a slight nuisance; no hot food or drink,  no water, and no flushing of toilets, not to mention the chill that descends upon the house. I truly don't know how our ancestors read or worked by the light of a single candle.

Miniature "Junque" or Antique Dealer's Stall

Probably all of us who make or collect miniatures have "homeless" minis, things we wanted to try and make or were given, that we don't have a setting for. A second-hand dealer's stall in my market acts as a showcase for some of my homeless minis. This little stall is open to being raided, and some of the children's toys are quite likely to end up in my children's nursery shop. My friend Sonia W. keeps her homeless minis in a roombox antique shop. Sharon B. has a number of small glass and brass display cabinets, in which she keeps her miniature cranberry glass and rose-patterned china.

Other excellent settings for homeless minis include attics, antique shops, and one which really appeals to me, an auction house sales room. I made some of the items in this setting, like the telescope, doctor's bag, Noah's ark and contents, some of which are in the doll's cradle, bunny on wheels, and the rocking horse, among others. The cardboard box contains Christmas decorations, but the miniature nativity scene has been moved to a Christmas roombox. The wonderful sword in the blue and white jug is a Toledo blade cocktail pick, part of a set of four, complete with colourful enamel work on the guard. If you can find a set of these, they are pretty much 1/12th scale. The "estate" crystal on the little side table is from a number of Chrysnbon sets I assembled.

This stall has no dealer, which means I have to get to work one of these days and sculpt another batch of mini people. The keeper of this stall should be just a little shifty, as some of the items he has on sale (or she!) might well have dropped off the back of a truck....

 This week a stuffed envelope of plant kits arrived in the mail; once the hectic holiday season is over I'll get out my flower-making tools and put some of these together. The plant kits are intended for the Camp MiniHaHa '12 project, which means garden design is also on the horizon. As well, I will post another plant how-to.

Welcome to the new followers of this blog, and the people who wrote to say they enjoyed the plant instructions.

Miniature Butcher's Market Stall

The butcher sells all sorts of meats, including ground beef, beef stew cubes, and oxtails. Along with those, he also sells home-made sausages of all kinds, including black pudding (which I do enjoy, in moderation). I was once asked to sell some of the black puddings to a young lady visiting my table at a show; she had a fiance who loved the stuff, and wanted to give him some in miniature. Hey, why not? So I sold her some. Angie Scarr's book once again provided the how-to's for most of the meats. Now that I have the idea, I can also copy meats from photos of the real thing.

The brass bars between the uprights hold slabs of  bacon and larger sausages, hanging on S-hooks. One of the fun things with these market stalls has been finding different scales for the various stalls. This particular scale reminds me very strongly of the scale used by my childhood best friend's parents, who had a butcher shop in Maastricht, The Netherlands. I'd really like to find a nice, in-scale meat slicer one of these days, the sort that delicatessen stores use to slice up the cold cuts.

The legs of lamb and the hams in this photo are caned, with the bones baked separately and inserted in the main portion of the meat before baking. This is a really good way of giving the impression of real raw meat.

One of the funnier stories in preparing this stall had to do with getting butcher's paper, the pink sort, just visible below the table surface under the hams; I went to a local deli, explained what I was doing, and asked if they could spare me a sheet of butcher paper. They gave me that and threw in some parchment paper as well. Total strangers are quite prepared to help miniaturists achieve reality in their settings, they don't even ask questions.

The butcher himself is another later doll; he just needs a straw hat to really look like an old-style butcher. The sandwich board is painted with real blackboard paint. The dogs, however, are vinyl dollar store finds. Every self-respecting butcher's stall should have a couple of dogs or cats hanging around waiting for a lucky spill!

Miniature Delicatessen Market Stall

The lady womanning this stall is Margery; she has a little bit of history. Originally, she was going to be a Tudor cook, and was dressed for the period. However, the market needed another stall, Margery was unemployed (her setting wasn't finished), so off came the Tudor gear, her shoes were replaced with chunky heels (to be comfortable standing in the market the whole day), and she got a brand-new wardrobe.

She is pleasingly plump, wearing a white blouse, tweed skirt, hand-knit sweater, apron, and a silk head scarf made from a piece of tiny paisley-patterned neck-tie. Her gray-streaked hair is in a bun under that scarf. I quite like her twinkly smile and dimples. Margery was made once I discovered doll Sculpey, and fits between the Fimo dolls and the later dolls, in terms of "birth".

The stall is the standard Venus Dodge design, with the addition of a sneeze guard made from styrene painting blanks, which used to be available from dollar stores. Most of the stock was made based on designs by Angie Scarr, and once I was comfortable with making cheese and sausages, I borrowed a world cheese book from the library and created some of my own. This stall and the butcher's, yet to be featured, have brass bars between the uprights, from which sausages, bacon, cleaned fowl etc. can be hung with S-hooks made from pieces of paper-clip. You need the old-style clips for this, the new scored paper-clips will break rather than bend.

The butter deserves a special mention; it is simply pieces of 3/8" square balsa, wrapped in textured foil begged from a friend who smoked. Looks just real butter!
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 I'd like to figure out a way to do a stand for eggs; flats of wood padded with straw stacked upon one another. The eggs would only have to be around the outside edges, as no one would see the middle of the stacks.

Welcome to my new follower from Australia!

Miniature Baker's Market Stall

The baker's stall was added when the market scene was being showcased at the library where I used to work over the Christmas period. It was exhibited  several years in a row for a month or more, and I tried to add a new stall every year, until the glass-shelved cupboard ran out of space. The food was all made by me, and the wedding cake and petits-fours are an indication of further familiarity with the wonders of using translucent clay. As far as I am concerned, it adds so much dimension to miniature food crafting.

The chocolate cake in the little showcase is a miniature copy of a wonderful cake I ate at a local hotel on some special occasion. It has little chocolate nests on it with pecans nestled into them. In the box is a fruit-topped cake with nuts on the edges, again based on a real cake I had somewhere.

The baker is a later one-of-a-kind Sculpey personage, who actually ended up looking like one of the university professors I saw regularly at the library. I don't know if he ever realized he had a miniature near-likeness, but I thought it was kind of fun.

This chap's hands are quite large, I was attempting to follow Jamie Carrington's instructions for modelling them - not quite successfully, I admit. The hands of all my little personages are bent to enable them to hold things, and my old technique didn't work quite as well with hands with separate fingers. Since then, I've gone back to "mitten" hands, with the fingers indicated but not separated.

Hands are very difficult!

Miniature Fruit Seller and Market Stall

The old computer has died, R..I.P. This is coming from an ancient laptop, plugged into the wall. For some reason, it works better than the regular computer....

The market stall design is from Making Miniatures by Venus and Martin Dodge, David & Charles Publishers, 1993. The design is deceptively simple, and can be changed into any number of configurations, depending on how you do the table top. It will show up in more of the market stalls to come. Again, the crates are balsa, and need to be replaced, as they are falling apart, kind of. The vendor is one of my later dolls; this gentleman has a comb-over, not quite visible in this photo! The items in the stall are from a number of years of making foods, and some of them need replacement as they are very opaque rather than translucent; I have to thank Angie Scarr for teaching me, via her articles and books, on using transparent Fimo to make very realistic fruits and vegetables. This stall sells strawberries and raspberries, very labour-intensive, but really nice, as well as very easy blueberries; poppy seeds with a coat of matte varnish. Doesn't get much easier than that!

Miniature Between-the-Wars Market

Something did work finally, so I can start with the next batch of photos. This market barrow with its vendor was one of the first minis I ever made. The barrow came from the Venus Dodge book, and was finished in 1997. The wheels were a gift from a gentleman from Prince Edward Island I met at a miniature show; I was looking for wheels, there were none for sale, so he just asked for my address and sent me some. You certainly meet some very nice people in the mini world!

Having made the cart, it needed to be filled, so I turned to Joanne Swanson and my old Nutshells, invested in some Fimo, and began to make fruit and vegetables. This market barrow is old enough that the crates are made of balsa wood, and the labels on them were saved from real-life human fruits and vegetables.

Bruno is the vendor; the third doll I ever made, and for whom I used Fimo. Never again once I discovered Sculpey II however, as this Fimo wasn't translucent and far too pink for my tastes. The Sculpey II comes in l lb. bricks, and I have a supply of it handy at all times. It can be tinted to various skin tones with the addition of very small amounts of Fimo or other clays.

To dress Bruno, I turned to Sue Atkinson's book. I knit his vest, using a set of antique lace needles, very fine, and the type of thread used in punch-needle work. Miniature knitting can only be done in full daylight, and if you drop a stitch, just dump the thing and start again! As well, the acrylic thread is quite fuzzy, and all the fuzzy bits grip like spider web. His pants were made from a small sample of men's wear suiting fabric, a godsent for anyone dressing miniature people.

This was also my first experience with DAS/Prang air-dry clay,used for the cobbles of the base. As I didn't realize that it could be tinted with light washes of watered-down paint, I used full-strength acrylic paints. And you can't use mini-hold wax on it, as it lifts the paint. So all my dolls have to be able to stand on their own.

The rest of the market will show up in subsequent posts; the market isn't finished, of course. None of my miniatures ever are, as I always end up adding to them. I've begun on a flower cart, and intend to add a fish stall, a second-hand book seller, and a Christmas stall for seasonal displays.

By the way, the burlap bag is the inside of a bag that came with a bottle of sherry; you never know where you can find good fabric for minis!