There's Glue Everywhere!

Those of who who work with tacky glues know that that stuff gets everywhere! I decided to keep a damp sponge handy while gluing the first row of "straw" down onto my roof. As you can see, you can only work a very small section at a time - the area with the white glue - and you have to hold it down as you wait for the glue to work. To speed things up, I decided to use the extra thick, extra quick stuff.

Yes, it works, but you also glue your fingers to the straw, very quickly. So then you wash them on your sponge, and you go back to holding on to your straw. As the broom straw is NOT straight or flat, it tends to want to move and/or stick to itself as you manoeuvre it into place, which is apparently easier when being manipulated by damp fingers....

I will try to do one row a day, at least! Once the stuff is really dry, I can trim it to fit the beam, using a very sharp scalpel blade to get a clean cut. Then it is on to fitting the next beam, trimming if necessary where it sits on the slanted beam, and gluing it into place. It needs an hour or more to really dry well.

This will obviously take a while, but I am determined!

 

Preparing the Beamed Ceiling

The first thing you have to do to prepare a beamed, reeded ceiling is to mark on your ceiling plate where the beams are intended to go. The Carpenter-in-Chief undertook to do this for me this morning, as I am very straight-line challenged.

Then you tape off the areas where the beams are going to go, and put a seal coat on those sections. I am "thrifty", so re-used the same pieces of masking tape for the whole thing. Well, I'll admit it, I am very low on masking tape, and we have had a severe thunderstorm warning, which means I do not want to make the drive into town! As my room box carcass is MDF, a seal coat is needed as that stuff just drinks the paint.

That done, you proceed to put ochre paint in the areas where the reeds (corn broom cuttings) will go, and the area above the toilet and the stairs in white. The painted areas have to dry before you can do the next sections of tape. It all takes time....

Once all the sections are painted, I can glue down the first beam; this will be under the piece of masking tape, next to the right-hand wall of the room-box. And once that beam is securely glued, I begin to glue on the pre-cut pieces of broom corn. Then the reeds are trimmed to fit, and the next beam is glued in place, and the whole process starts over again, for nine beams and eight areas of reed "thatch".

I will just go ahead and work away, then. 

 

Some Further Progress, But No Saws Yet...

Marilyn at Charminis and I did have a virtual meeting yesterday, and I did get some prep work done for the wooden shoe factory. As the saws are still in the Research & Development phase - I can't mimic the teeth of the saws well enough to my taste - I did some boring but necessary work towards the roof for the workshop.

The beams at the right had to be notched, individually, at the far end in order to fit into the angle of the beams on the slanted roof section, a job which required a saw, a sharp knife, a file, sandpaper and a fair bit of patience as well as trepidation, as I was cutting along the narrow end of an angle and worried about breaking the thin part of the angle off. But it is done,they fit, and they are stained and numbered and ready to install.

The stumpy thing with the yellow end is what is left of the corn whisk broom that I have been dismantling  to make the reeds for the roof; they are all cut into 2" (5 cm) sections ready to be glued between the roof beams.

That is a job which should take a while, and hopefully I will be able to come up with a method of making saws that I can live with! One has teeth on both edges, while the other is a large curved saw, with teeth along the curves. 

 

Catching Up

 Nothing to show today; it had been at least three weeks since our mini group got together, as Real Life caught up with all three of us. We finally met this past Wednesday. We are all rather pandemic-weary, just want to go back to normal social interactions!

Our house and contents are 27 or so years old, and the past few weeks we have had a number of small messes to deal with. Our refrigerator died in the middle of a serious heat-wave; who knew that you could no longer buy a fridge and get it the same or the next day? We spent an anxious Friday visiting every appliance store in our small city, and were quoted anywhere from three days to two weeks for delivery. At last we found a store that had a fridge in stock, and that agreed to deliver it, even though it was past hours and on a weekend. Thank heavens! It's not the fridge we would have chosen if we had had the time, but we can live with it.

The heat-wave left as abruptly as it came; one morning we woke up to find that our heating had come on automatically. We usually set this at 15C (about 60F) in the summer, and that night the temperatures went to 11C, in July! Two cork floors needed repairs; this is a noisy job. Then a toilet needed to be replaced. We hope all will be quiet for a while now. We also got our second Covid shots, but are now waiting to see if will indeed need a third in the autumn.

I've been trying to make two saws for the wooden shoe factory; the two I made during our meeting this past week are pretty good, but I'm not really satisfied with them. Therefore, I will continue to experiment.

Now, once I finish knitting the newest pair of socks, I can get back to minis!

More Progress on the Wooden Shoe Factory

The interior windows are in; I was able to use my circle cutter to make the missing window glass up, although I will admit it took 3 tries to get it right. The homemade window glass is in the hallway window, but it is indistinguishable from the rest!  However, confession time, I pushed it too hard into the frame and, you guessed it, wrecked the frame. But, I (fairly calmly) glued the broken wooden half-circle trim back together, let it dry, and then replaced each of the three glazing bars, one at a time, with lots of drying time in between.

There are a couple of new items; the carving brake (I don't know what to call it, it is the workbench thing the wooden shoes in the making are clamped into) is done except for a long, thin knife that I have to figure out how to create. The knife is looped into an eye that allows it to lift and swivel. I think it is a kind of shaving knife to shape the surface of the shoes.

Yes, I carved those shoes, they are rough because they are in the process of being made. (They're also the first attempt ever by me to carve wooden shoes!) Also in the workshop now is the large chopping block; as the wood was cut this spring (apple, I think), it is quite "juicy" and usually sits on top of several layers of paper towel in the hope of drawing the juice out. It smells nice, though!

Marilyn gave me the dark blue enamel coffee pot, and next to it on the hot plate is a fat little tea kettle. A  bottle of milk stands ready. Still to come are sugar, mugs, and packages of tea and coffee. The gas tank has a label, made from a chain link with a red-painted centre. Next to the table and stove is a wood box.

Now I have to figure out how to make a large two-man saw with a curved toothed edge; my thin printing plate metal won't be strong enough for this, so I may have to cut it from a sheet of thin aluminum. With scissors. Which I use left-handed even though they are right-handed scissors. And I will need to file the teeth.....

A miniaturist's work is never-ending and always challenging!

 

I Had to See What It Would Look Like

Not much time to work on minis today, but I did put nails into the walls to hang up some of the tools; I just had to see what it might eventually look like....

 

Doors and Windows Fit! Finally...

It took a whole day, but the door finally fits as it is supposed to. We still can't figure out what the problem was, aside from the paper clay that wrapped the sides of the buttresses, but even with that gone, the door would only go in on a slant, top to bottom. The sides of the door were shaved just a little, but the threshold kept moving, making it near impossible to make the thing go into the prepared opening in a straight, proper manner. Then it suddenly fit....

The door will be framed on the back of the room box with plain painted boards, as that side is not likely to be visible. I hope that the door will stay closed when the box is picked up, and if not, I'll have to fix a barrier across the back. The last thing I want is for the door to break if I ever get to display at a show again.

The window "glass" is still missing, so I'm going to try to cut a new one from plexiglass, using a circle cutter I acquired years ago, primarily for cardboard. I'm hoping that scoring the half circle will make it possible to knock the half-round window pane out with a  minimum of trouble. The windows all have arches for the back side, although another one has snapped; that will be glued up overnight. They tend to break at the base of the arch, on the grain of the wood.

That blank wall on the left is crying for some of the tools to be hung up; perhaps I'll hammer in some tiny nails tomorrow. I say hammer in, but in fact I drill the holes and then glue the nails in with a tacky glue/super glue double dip. The ones I put in months ago have stayed put so far.