Goodbye, Little Sink!

....and hello, janitor's sink! I made this today. This is my 500th post!

So yesterday afternoon I discovered that two more years' worth of Dolls House Nederland had been added to their on-line, free archive; 2016 and 2017. I made a cup of tea, and sat down to a little break from designing a baby doll's hat in knitting. And there, in Issue #139, I discovered a photograph of the original (I think) wooden shoe workshop, now in a miniature museum in The Netherlands. The photo is not all that large, but it showed me the brick janitor's sink complete with iron grid, at the end of the hallway. No sink, just a faucet, with the bucket under it on the grid.

The bricks are poor! Painted plaster, which comes off all too easily. I had tried to make a sink like this before, but it now resides at the bottom of my garbage can. For this one, I mixed up a sort of mortar from dry wall compound (for fixing holes in walls), white glue, gray and ochre paint, and applied it with a small metal spatula. It isn't perfect, a bit rough around the edges, but better than the previous effort by a long chalk!

Now I can drill a hole for the faucet in the buttress, and start rolling out the paper clay stucco. Once that is dry and painted, the dry wall compound floor can go in. Then it is on to the main part of the workshop. It was a good day....with snow, of course!

 

Zaagbok, or Sawbuck in English

Today's completed necessity for the wooden shoe workshop is this rustic sawbuck. It is the first step in the wooden shoe manufacturing process. The log will be cut into a number of identical pieces, each sized for a particular wooden shoe size. Once the log is cut, with a two-man saw (which I still have to make), the sections will be quartered. Each of the quarter sections is the raw material for a single wooden shoe.

The Dutch word translates, literally, as saw billy goat;  this may be because the shaped end pieces of the wooden supports look sort of like a pair of goat horns. I just love the origins of words in various languages, kind of a puzzle to sort out.

That's all I managed to put together during my electronic mini meeting today; I am still working with bits from my scrap pile. However, the log is a branch from one of the trees that had to be cut in our garden two years ago; we have lived here nearly 30 years, and the trees had grown in to make to garden very shady.

 

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....