Sink Under Construction

The little sink for the wooden shoe workshop has been built, drilled and sanded, and has its first gesso coat. I think it will need a couple more of those, although I do intend to use appliance touch-up laquer for the final coats. 

See, I am working!

It measures just over an inch (2.5 cm) in width. Fortunately, I had a faucet as well as an S-bend to stick under it. The drain hole will be finished off with a belt rivet. I still have to think how I can dirty it up just a bit.

 

Klompenfabriek Update

As our province went back to the orange phase - no visitors, no travel, single family only - rules this week, due to the spike in Covid infections following Christmas, we had to cancel our planned in-person get-together this week. More is yet to come, as another huge spike is expected post-New Year's gatherings. However, we did meet electronically, and I did manage to get a little more done on my wooden shoe factory. It is so much easier to work on projects when you can bounce ideas off your mini friends in real time!

I am very wary of pin-hinging, but I bit the bullet and finished the bathroom door, installing a working swivel door lock and handle, a tiny nail at an angle for the newspaper toilet paper (not visible, as it is on the back of the door), and painting the hall side of the door green. Then I (gulp!) drilled into the top and bottom of the door, as well as the top of the stairway wall and the base of the floor. My dry-wall compound "clay" floor had extended a little too far, so the clay had to be cut back; as well, it was necessary to sand just a little off the slanted roof edge with the reeds. Now it all pretty much fits; there is a tiny space at either side of the buttress (the white block with the slanted top), but that can be neatly masked with the paper clay stucco that will cover it.

I gave the bathroom a duck board in front of the box, as the floor is supposed to be clay and I didn't want the users of the privy to get wet, muddy feet....

Another thing I managed to drill and put into place is the tiny slanted white shelf on the workshop side of the hall wall; it has two holes for some of the tools used in the workshop, which I still have to make. This little shelf was to be placed at a slant, so I chamfered the wall edge, again (gulp!) drilled two tiny holes into the edge of the wood, inserted cut-down sewing pins, and then glued and pinned this shelf to the wall; just gluing the joint didn't seem very sturdy to me! Another successful drilling operation, thank heaven. I am, after all, straight-line challenged and fully expected my drilling to go off at an angle and wreck door and shelf. I will confess, however, that I initially drilled the holes for the tiny shelf on the wrong side of the wall....

Here is the current overview of the room box. Now I have to make a small sink and janitor sink, put the stucco on the walls, and the drywall compound on the floor. I also made up three sections of exposed brick that I will insert into the wall stucco, which is paper clay. Once everything is dry and painted, I can then add a few tiny painted cracks in the walls. After all, this is a workshop with sections of tree trunk and some rather alarming tools being shunted about, right and left, so cracks and flaking stucco have to be expected over time, right?

 

Happy New Year!

My sincere wish for all of us is that 2021 will be a better year all around. It has been a horrible year, and it needs to be over. 

The reeded slanted roof portion is in place; the next step is a small sink and a mop drain in the hallway of the klompenfabriek, to be followed by "stucco" on all the remaining walls and "clay" on the floor areas. When that is done, I can install windows and doors, and then this room box should look more like what it is supposed to be!

Thank you for reading the blog, I hope it inspires you or simply gives a few minutes of enjoyment at the joy of tiny worlds.

 

Season's Greetings!

May 2021 be a lot better for all of us than 2020 has been! Minis have kept me sane, and my mini friends report the same thing, but I would sure like for everything to be normal again.

The work on reeding the roof of the wooden shoe factory is on-going, but at this busy time of the year Real Life has to take precedence over hobbies; that said, my sewing machine is probably happy to have a bit of a rest, after all the work it has done the last several weeks. That includes, a week and a half in the repair shop, which kind of put my schedule right off course! (The Christmas tree skirt I decided to make at the last minute, in a quilting design with endless bias seams, finally got finished at about 1 a.m. on Christmas day.

The slanted factory roof portion is nearly done, I still have glue and corn broom straw to work with and probably enough to eventually finish the entire flat section of the wooden show factory roof....

This year here the weather has been very atypical; usually I have a lovely photo of snow and ice to share with you at Christmas time, but it has been 15 Celsius here for several days, and there has been endless rain. It has been looking and feeling more like a Dutch or German Christmas in terms of weather, and the rain is the Scots mist kind, fine and nearly invisible except when it hits the windshield of your car. 

Santa brought us food gifts this year; everything from pickled carrots and jams to international chocolate and snack foods. I think I have to begin walking again, just to keep from turning into a balloon! 

Stay healthy! Be safe! And I hope to be back with miniature progress very soon!

A Little More Done

The Christmas presents are mailed, and the only projects left to be worked on are my own, which should give me a little more time to work on the Wooden Shoe Factory. The inside of the roof of this building is supposed to look like it is thatched, which means adding reeds.

This was the sample I did today; it is a right-angle triangle that will make the roof inside look like a barn roof. The reeding has to be done on the entire length of the roof in the workshop area, so this was an attempt to see if it would work. It did, but I had to adjust the spacing in order to get things to fit into place in a logical fashion. That meant, sigh, taking off the right-hand side of the reeding in order to increase the spacing. The ochre part is the reeded area; the white areas are where beams will be glued into place.

Yes, that was only the reeded roof for the hallway; the long strip is the reeded roof for the workshop proper; I see a great deal of glue being spread upon my fingers, work area, and work apron!

The donor of the "reeds" is this old and used corn whisk; it previously got cut into to make the sleeve fence for the Japanese Garden vignette. Gradually, the corn fibres are being cut out and glued into place onto the wooden block. It will take some time....

 

It's a Matter of Go and Stop

As you can see, construction goes on, but the need to prepare all the individual units before actual assembly is driving me a little bit crazy! The toilet area is done, I just have to install a door in the partition, but I can't glue anything in place yet, as I have to finish the hallway, install the faux slanted area of the roof, and finish the back wall before anything can be made permanent. The buttress and toilet block will help support the wall with the door, and the stairs will go on the left.

A lot of the pieces are currently living in a box, awaiting their installation. The end of the hallway area is next, to finish the walls, and the floor. Right now, the wall between the hallway and the main portion of the workshop is screwed in place, but not glued, as it has to come out again in order for me to work in that area. A slanted beam goes at the top of the wall,  and it has to be covered in "reeds" - I am using an old corn broom whisk, which is nice and dirty as it is used....

So, next up, I need to reed and beam that roof slant portion, and when that is in place, I can do the buttress and wall. When those are done, I can install a small sink area and a bricked drain. Then the hallway partition will be affixed, after which comes the slanted roof portion over the workshop, with reeds and beams. Rinse and repeat - finish buttresses, walls and floors.

It will be a while yet!

 

New Colour of Cellulose Clay

 As mentioned in the last post, Das/Prang air-dry clay has a new colour, Stone. I bought it thinking it was the white clay. Anyway, I find that I like this colour for certain applications, and the photo below shows the clay freshly applied to the wall on the hall side of the wooden shoe factory:

It is quite dark when it is fresh from the package, but as you can see in the photo below, it dries to a nice concrete colour:

I can see using this to represent cement and concrete in mini structures in the future. For the klompenmakerij, it will form a very good, slightly dirty background for the walls of the wooden shoe manufactory. Das/Prang has been used extensively in my structures over the years. Usually, I apply it directly to walls and floors, over a thin coat of wood glue; as it is a cellulose product, this is the best glue to use for it. In my house, the clay usually dries overnight hard enough to sand and paint the next day.

In case you haven't used this product before, it comes in two sizes of bricks, and in white, terra cotta and now stone. I use battens taped to my surface to dictate the thickness of the finished slab of clay, and a marble pastry roller to flatten it out, on a piece of wax paper, which makes it much easier to lift and place on the surfaces. Aside from walls and floors, I've also used it successfully to make brick slips and tiles, which I allow to dry under weights (heavy art textbooks!) between pieces of wax paper and plastic wrap. This takes longer than drying it on the surfaces themselves, of course, more like 48 hours depending on the amount of moisture in the air. However, these days I usually apply it directly to the surfaces to be stuccoed, bricked or cemented.

The brick walls of the Tudor Apothecary and Workshop were applied directly to the MDF base with wood glue, and the bricks inscribed in situ. The tile floor in the workshop was dried under weights, then cut and glued to the MDF floor. Two or three thin coats of matte, outdoor varnish waterproofed the clay tiles enough that I could use spackle compound for grout. The spackle was then tinted after it had dried.