Creating a Miniature Garden Part 3 - Final

Finally, the side garden portion of the Camp MiniHaHa '12 project is done. I added the last bits this morning, now all that is left is to put up the bird shelter and add the as yet to be repainted cat. This is an overview of the completed garden.

The newly added plants in the right side of the garden include bergamot, dusty miller, leucanthemum or crazy daisy, astilbe, and the ageratum and alyssum at the very front. The sunflowers have had some leaves added so their stems didn't look quite so bare. I wish I could still get the heavy gauge covered flower wire I used for the sunflower and hollyhock stems, but I can't, locally. Hopefully once I figure out what gauge I was using, I can order it via the internet.

The right side of the garden has also gotten a dusty miller, and some ageratum and alyssum along the very front edge. The ageratum was made with railroad foliage clusters and custom-mixed flocking for the tiny fuzzy purple flowers. The alyssum is reindeer moss with the tiniest white flower punchies, cut with a custom cutter from Ruth Hanke, of Hanky Panky Crafts. I still need to add some leaves to the hollyhock stems, but have to buy the punch first!

Some of the flowers I developed for this garden will also show up in my Apothecary Garden, which I will be working on in October. Bergamot is what gives Earl Grey tea its distinctive flavour, it belongs in a herbal garden. Dusty Miller is an Artemisia, the family from which wormwood, the dangerous ingredient in absinthe and a flavouring for vermouth, is distilled. And I think I've figured out how to make a fairly convincing camomile plant....

All in all, I am very happy with this garden. It was more work than I had planned, and got fancier than I had planned as well. Now on to decorating the front of the shop, then it will be the inside. I need to make lavender, pansies and possibly a hydrangea, as well as making the prototypes for my gift exchange items and tidbits for this year's Camp MiniHaHa, the end of September.

By the way, most of the plants in the garden were made with scrapbooking-type punches; if anyone wants a particular tutorial, let me know and I will add it on the blog. The flowers are mostly paper, both commercial coloured paper and hand-painted, much of the foliage is also paper, and I also used coloured sand and ground foam, as well as flocking, to make some of the plant parts.

Feedback is always very welcome!

Creating a Dollhouse Garden Part 2

A few days later, and the garden is starting to fill in. The left side has a mauve petunia plant, and in front of the hollyhocks are day lilies. Below them are pinks and pansies, and next to them peonies. Then there are the gaillardias, some blue and some white delphiniums with purple hearts, and a medium-size hosta with a stalk of blooms.

The side of the garden nearest the fence needs shade-loving plants. I have a mauve astilbe ready to plant, but need to come up with something the height of the delphiniums before planting them. I'd also like to add a miniature version of the very large, blue-grey hosta in my Real Life garden. And my mind is trying to create bergamot or ragged robin, as well as some very low-growing edging plants for the very front of the garden, like purple ageratum and white Artemisia. (For some reason, that word capitalized itself!)

The hollyhocks at the edge of the garden need some more leaves, so I have to pick up a geranium-type leaf punch a size bigger than the one I've already used. I'd also like to try some dusty miller plants, as I have two sizes of punches for them; the challenge will be in creating the right shade of dusty gray foliage.

The foliage for the day lilies was made with dollar store plastic grass, cut to a point and the ends curled over. It works very well for this type of foliage. I used to use painted green paper twist ties, but those are now scarcer than hen's teeth! I have a few left, and some red ones, and am saving those for plants where plastic foliage just can't be used. Fortunately, the plastic grass comes in three colours, and I still have two darker, unused ones as well as the remainder of what I used for the day lilies.

To allow Real Life to intrude for a bit, I went river tubing today with my husband and daughter. The rivers here are running quite high, due to all the rain, so it was a lovely drift through a mostly rural countryside. I'd hoped to see some kingfishers (my daughter had seen them on the same trip two years ago), but they weren't out. However, the fly fishermen were - the river is salmon habitat and also supports trout. Lovely day! Next on my bucket list of things to do is zip-lining a short drive away from here - at one point you fly over an inlet of the Saint John River. Just have to hope for more sunny weather....

Follow-Up to Designing a Dollhouse Garden

So here is the garden as far as it is planted today - the back row of tall plants and the rose bush are in place. Next is the middle height row, for which I will have to make some more plants. The area right next to the fence is in shade, so it needs some shade-tolerant plants, like astilbe and hostas. I've made some of the former, but have yet to make the hostas. My real life garden has a large area that is in shade quite a bit of the time, and it contains half a dozen or more different astilbe varieties and at least a dozen, if not more, hostas. So that will be part of my plan for tomorrow - unless the weather is warm and sunny, in which case I may do something out of doors. The rose bush still needs a number of buds, for which I have to go through my supply of mustard or other seeds. Painted the right colour, with a sepal of painted paper, they make very convincing buds.

I don't know what happened to the previous picture, the computer just wouldn't recognize it. So I took another one. At least in this one the dirty dishes in the sink don't show up! Just egg cartons, baby wipes and scissors and other stuff used to build this garden.

Creating a Dollhouse Garden Part I

For the last several very rainy, gloomy days I've been back at work on my Camp MiniHaHa '12 (CMHH'12) project, and I'm quite happy to this point. The first thing was to pave the street side of the shop, and I used egg carton stones for this, using a number of tutorials on the net. My stones are intended to be slate, so they are gray primarily; to add a bit of life I dry-brushed Pewter Gleam paint here and there, to mimic the reflective inclusions in slate. Three colours of gray and a dry brushing of beigy-gray were used to add depth to the stones. Then I planted moss in the cracks. I really am happy with this, see photo below.

The next step was the ultramarine blue fence, made from popsicle sticks, of course. I had seen a photo of a fence painted this colour on Pinterest, and really loved the look, so added it to my setting. Then I placed the little bench, and realized the door would look so much better if it was painted the same colour as the bench, a wonderful light turquoise or robin's egg blue. Love it! I will add some faux door hardware to it once the garden is finished. The two blues really liven up the whole scene.

In a previous post, I had mentioned that I would need to add some height to my planting on the side of the vignette. So I added the trellis, and twisted some brown paper-covered flower wire to create the framework for a climbing plant. It was a toss-up between clematis or roses, and as this setting is intended to be the flower fields of Provence, I opted for roses. My favourite rose is the raspberry-scented wild rose that grows on beaches and seaside areas around the Bay of Fundy. It comes in white, pink or raspberry, and has large, single blossoms.

I used a five-petal cutter for the roses, and shaped each blossom 3 times. Some of them are intended to be just opening, some have been open for a couple of days, and some are pretty much blown. The centre of each flower was coloured with white pencil. The centres consist of wires double-dipped in glue and yellow sand, and then with a ring of orange-y floral foam added below that. I like the result, and my husband recognized the type of rose immediately. I still have to make up some buds at various stages. The leaves were punched with a five-leaf punch using hand-painted paper. It is hard to see, but the leaves aren't  perfect; some of them have been chewed by insects, and like all roses, there are some rust spots on the leaves. I love roses, but don't grow them!

The leaves go on first, of course, and the blossoms are added later. The rose vines are attached only to the trellis, the whole garden area slides out for repairs and maintenance. The base is pink builder's foam, painted, and the tea leaf dirt is being added as the flowers are planted. I shifted some of the larger bottom leaves lower down, and added some of the smaller leaves in their place, as I wanted the vines to be a  little airier. Also, there was a small detail on the trellis centre that  I hoped would show.

There is a problem uploading the last photo, so I will publish this and hopefully, add the last photo later.

Attempts at Miniature Woodworking

It's been an interesting week or so. Last week Friday my car was totalled while my younger daughter was driving home from work; fortunately, she is fine except for some soft tissue injuries, pains in her neck and back. It took several days before the body shop was ready to do the estimate, and on Monday afternoon I got the word that they had stopped the estimate as they had already exceeded $15,000 in parts and labour. Goodbye, little black Echo, I had hoped you and I would fall apart at the same time!

I am so grateful my daughter wasn't seriously hurt, or worse.

So yesterday I picked up my nearly new car, a repo 2012 Hyundai Accent with less than 4,000 km on it. It is bright red, which pleases my daughter no end - much more youthful than plain black. She shares my car with me to get to work, as we live outside the city and thus have no public transport available.

I've been working on UFO's some more, as well as making some new things and repairing some broken items. My confidence in my ability to do woodworking isn't that great, but I do enjoy trying smaller woodworking projects.

The red and green "antique" boxes and the dirty white garden carrier are going into my things for sale, along with the barn-red  small bench. The bird-house bench and narrow planter are pieces I'd like to decorate somewhat like what I saw in one of my many old mini magazines, the problem is that I can't remember which one! So I am sort of re-reading most of them in the hope that I will stumble on the correct ones. My memory tells me they were photos featured in show reports, hope I am remembering that correctly.  I have yet to tackle my years of the smaller old Nutshell News, because I think I got the idea from one of the larger format magazines. Re-reading them feels sort of like a waste of time, unfortunately, I'd rather be making things.

 The Versailles planter boxes are going to be white over a light stain, in order to antique them a bit. I'd like to try making an orange and a lemon tree to go into them. The blue bucket bench needs to have water stains and rings added to it. And the robin's-egg blue painted bench will go with the CMHH '12 project, it goes very well with the ochre wall tones. The design for that came from one of the Dutch doll-house magazines, and I've wanted to try it since I first saw it.

While waiting for paint and glue to dry I've been working on a gorgeous  Aubusson carpet in 1/24 scale, for the auction at Camp MiniHaHa '13. The design is from a German website, an amazing lady who works in 1/144 scale, Anna Carin Betzan. My version of the carpet is done on 22 ct. canvas. I'll post a photo when it is done, as I only have the baby blue background left to do.

Next on the list of things to do is to try eggshell carton paving for the CMHH '12 project; it came with small pieces of real slate, but there isn't enough to do the whole front of the vignette, so egg cartons will have to do. I saw the Victoria Miniland example while I was in Victoria in March, and it was very impressive. If the paving works, I may do the chimney stack in my Tudor house in egg carton bricks - I need something that won't stick out as much as bricking, and some of the items I've seen done on blogs lately look really good. Tudor bricks tended to be larger in size than modern brick, as well as being orangey and brownish rather than brick red.

 While visiting Windsor Castle last year, I found a whole compound of wonderful bricked Tudor buildings below the chapel on the grounds; I believe they used to house the clerical staff of the chapel originally. One of these days I will post some photos of them, they were built in a circle with a gate, and a street with larger buildings leading off it. Private dwellings now, I was allowed in to take

photos by one of the residents, for which I am most grateful.

One of My First Minis, a UFO: The Artist Studio

If you are going to have an artist's studio, you need paintings to go into it; these are 10 small paintings I did many years ago for the studio. The coin for comparison is a 10 cent piece. I am not really an artist; I cheated with this, borrowing books on learning how to paint from the library and doing the steps in miniature, on pieces of matboard. My favourites are the scene with the cows, as the water looks very much like water, and the seascape with the rocky shore. My least favourite is the winter scene in the top row, as the bushes are too red for my liking.

Some five years ago I did some more miniature paintings, 5 of them, as gift exchange items for the Camp MiniHaHa attic roombox scene we did. Those were all portraits in the American Primitive style, worked from illustrations in an art book. So somewhere out there are 5 more, probably unsigned, paintings!

The furniture for studio came from a couple of sources, with the artist's working furniture made from Helen Ruthberg's book, Miniature Room Settings. I love the drafting table, which has a metal rail and knurled knobs (old watch parts) on the sides, a metal edge on one side and a stop at the front. She also designed the tabouret, easel and work table, and many of the tools on top; T-square, set squares, brushes, sandpaper paddle, cleaning brush, etc. The little tabouret contains a rubber brayer, sticks of Conte crayon, a portfolio, and as yet unfinished paint jars and a turpentine can.

Here is a less cluttered photo. The box with the tubes of paint needs a little colour added to it, time to get out the marker pens. And that easel and table  are far too clean for a working artist!

The living furniture came mostly from Carol and Nigel Lodder's book, Making Dolls' House Interiors. The two chair seats were made with hemp jewelry cord, and were inspired by Vincent van Gogh's bedroom chair. I am very fond of the warm golden brown colour of my favourite stain, Ipswich Pine, and use it for just about everything. The two shelf units are unpainted, as I need to decide on my artist's colour scheme.

The photo above is a closer look at the living furniture. There is a roombox for everything to go into; I wanted it to look like a factory loft conversion, so had put a roof skylight in, with textured glass. Unfortunately, the framing let go, I re-glued it, and now the glass doesn't fit. My intention was to make a removable front with mesh wired glass windows and brickwork top, bottom and sides.

The roombox for all this stuff (and more that I purchased) is the one Ms. Ruthberg suggested, with a raised area at the back, where the artist lives, and the studio space at the front. It has a door, but it is too short, so needs to come off. (I suspect I made it with instructions for a 1/16 scale scene!)  I am having a hard time with that, as I made it myself with laboriously sanded panels in it, and glued-on items rarely come off without damaging the MDF they are glued on. It is huge, and lives on a shelf in the basement storage area, until such time as I get the courage to take it apart and re-do it. There is a bed, but the mattress has yet to be made. I've already got a wonderful, aged oriental carpet to go into this scene. Oh yes, the raised area needs a railing, something else I have to make as yet.

By the way, any decorative work on the furnishing was done with files, knives and sandpaper. I am not really comfortable with power tools. My husband gave me a Dremel tool years ago; it lives in his workshop and he uses it....

I am working away at the Camp MiniHaHa '12 project, as well as finishing off some small UFO projects, like antique boxes, a couple of small benches, Versailles planters, bucket bench, flower box, and a birdhouse bench, all items that have been sitting around for years. Some of them will go into the CMHH project, others will go into my box to take to shows and, hopefully, sell.

Designing a Dollhouse Garden and Making Plants

Last year's Camp MiniHaHa project has been tidied up a bit, reinforced by wooden framing on the edges of the vignette and along the interior floor. The edges of the walls were framed with wood veneer strips to hide the pink bufoam, but were unable to correct the bowing of the uninterrupted wall; you can see the shadow created by the bow in the foam. I've decided to live with this; really, I have no other choice, if I try to bend things I'll wreck the whole structure, most likely.

These are some of the flowers I've prepared to landscape the outside of the vignette. Some of them were from the kits we were provided with, some are my own design. The next step will be to plant them to see how they will work best. I am hoping to have a wrought-iron fence along the edge of the setting, but have to see if that will hide the flowers too much. I kind of think I will need something like a clematis climbing up the wall by the chimney to extend the garden upwards a little. Designing a miniature garden is almost as much work as designing a full-size one! And of course, there is the birdhouse with the robin, and the cat, to fit in as well.

The areas painted dark brown are going to be garden beds, along the chimney wall, and a slate walkway in front of the shop. The bare section is where I hope to put the polymer clay "granite" footings for the fence, as you can see there isn't all that much space. I think there may be a shabby chic wrought iron plant holder by the window, and some other planters and pots as well. This little scene needs lots of colour.

It is intended to be a little shop in the area of France where they grow flowers for the perfume industry, primarily lavender, although I will have other scents available as well. This means making lots of bottles, all of which will need nice labels, which I have yet to find. Also, soap and bath salts and toilet water and other pretty scented items. And of course, furnishings for inside the shop. I did buy some very nice pieces at Victoria Miniland in March, but am leaning towards making my own after all; I visualize this place as being rather shabby chic in appearance, so somewhat worn off-white or white appeals to me for the furniture finishes.

While in Arnhem last March, I bought a wonderful sheet of printies from Iris Arentz, which will inspire the interior of the shop. She did a soap market stall, which is the inspiration for my project.
Lots of saturated colour, like deep gold and purple....