Bits and Pieces....

 ...on their way to becoming something.

We have had to cancel three mini meetings in a row, which means I haven't actually made anything in that time. I have completed several pieces of sewing that had been sitting for months, and sent them on their way, and have begun some knitting to tide me over a two-day meeting I was supposed to attend. Covid is quite bad here right now, so I begged off those meetings. However, I did do some of that knitting.

So be patient, my mini friends, I hope to be back in the mini groove in a couple of days!

Making It Look Used

The floor has been finished to look like an earthen floor, and the walls are being aged and dirtied to show evidence of  long-term industrial usage. We didn't have our meeting today, but hope to get together on Monday to make up for it. By that point, I hope to have the aging finished.

At this point, the windows have been fitted but not yet fixed. I need to make the corner wall and the wall with the stove rather more cream in colour, to match the other wall but will have to check it out in daylight to determine just how much colour to add. The bricks need mortar lining and colour washes to make them more realistic.

The paper clay shrunk rather more than I had planned for around the curves of the windows, so I filled in with paper clay "worms"; it wouldn't do to have light showing around the window frames. Soon I'll have to work on the lighting....

 

Oops, I Did It Again....

It takes me far too much time to get up the courage to do certain things, and one of those things was to do the remaining stucco walls for the wooden shoe workshop. Yesterday, I decided enough was enough, and I put stucco on the remaining walls. 

Only the wall holding the stove needed doing, but the chimney of that stove is made of a plastic drinking straw, dowel, and cardboard. It was difficult to get it to stand straight, as I was worried about messing up the paint job if I tried to bend the straw in a bit. I said a prayer or two, stuck my tongue in the corner of my mouth, and just did it. 

Today, I did some small touch-ups, like filling in a little paper clay around the chimney where it goes into the wall. That dried quickly enough that I was able to paint this afternoon. And I will explain the oops for this entry; I forgot to allow a clear space for the beam at the top of the wall, which meant I had to cut, pry and sand the dry paper clay just as I had to do with the corner of the dividing wall. Guess I didn't learn.....

The floor in this part will be painted rather than done with dry wall compound, as miniature things have no weight whatsoever and would not stand straight on what would undoubtedly have been an uneven floor. The sealer will go on today, and I'll try to get the painting done tomorrow. The doors and windows haven't been placed yet, they are where they're supposed to go only. In order to install the door between the buttresses, I have to take the slanted beam and reed wall section off. That will happen probably after the floor is done. And I just realized that the door would have been difficult to open on a floor that was even a tiny bit higher than the bottom of the door....

The walls will be dirtied and aged once the floor is painted. Stay tuned!

A Repair I Would Not Have Attempted Until Now....

This is the head of a wood chopper's ax I picked up many years ago, at a Craft Fair in Duncan, B.C., where I was visiting my father and my younger sister and her family. I don't know who made this ax, and I don't actually know what the axe head is made of - possibly polymer clay - but the haft of the ax went right through the blade. Naturally, it broke while this little scene was at a show. 

I am proud of myself; I drilled out the stub of the haft, carefully made the pin in the haft a tiny bit longer with sandpaper in order to give it a bigger holding point, and glued it in place. Into the other end of the ax head I inserted a tiny peg sanded down from a wood toothpick (not a bamboo one!), to look as if the haft goes right through the ax head.

Where, why and when this little scene was made has escaped me; I think it may have been at Camp MiniHaHa, or perhaps at a miniaturists' get-together. The lichen and moss on the stump are real; the turkey-tail fungus on the side are made of pine cone scales. The logs are scattered about, some quartered or halved, others whole. The landscaping includes mosses, grasses and tiny yellow flowers, as well as sawdust. I just love this tiny vignette! A miniature doesn't have to be BIG to be good! I do, however, still have to find a permanent home for it, to prevent further ax handle disasters.

Making the tiny tools for the wooden shoe factory has made me more confident in how I use my pin vise drill. I am now comfortable changing drill bits as I go along, to enlarge a hole if needed, and miraculously for someone who is straight-line challenged, I can drill straight!

 

Bits and Pieces and a Door

The "glass" is in the Dutch doors, and the two little L-shaped items in the foreground are the lever door handles of tarnished "brass"; actually, they were made of a slice of dowel and a piece of wood, with paint to make them look somewhat like brass. In my memory, Dutch door handles were always of the lever of the thumb lever type, I have no memory of round door knobs at all!

The log will have a hefty slice taken off, and become the cylinder for the little 2-burner gas cooker on which factory staff can heat water for tea or coffee. The round wooden item with bits of brass tubing is destined to become the top of this gas cylinder. And I did finish a tool, the T-shaped item, which is a pre-borer type of tool used to start hollowing out the quarter section of log that will become a wooden shoe. The other tool-like thing is the spade handle; I have to cut some heavier aluminum plate to make the blade for the spade, which belongs with the wood-stove; it is used to shovel the ash out.

When I was a kid in The Netherlands, we used to use coal ash from the living room hearth on slippery walkways, much as we use sand or grit these days. Waste not, want not! 

 

A Set of Wooden Shoe Tools

 

I had begun a set of tools for the wooden shoe workshop some months ago, but being caught up now with other projects, decided to make a few more and "age" the lot.  These are all various knives used in the shaping and hollowing out of the wooden shoes, and I don't actually know their names; they are collectively referred to as "knives". The blades were made from aluminum printing plates, which I begged from a local printing firms some years ago. The metal is thin, bare on one side and coated on the other. As the tools are meant to be hand-forged, they were eventually painted black (and gray and pewter!). 

The handles are cut from hardwood skewers, with holes carefully drilled in the shaped bottoms and through the tops, to run a piece of "rope" through to hang the tools up. The rope loops were made with natural linen thread that has been in my stash for years. It was  a bit of a production to get the loops through the wooden handles, requiring the aid of a needle threader and a crochet hook. I do like the looks of it.  The pencil sharpener is there because I cheated and used it to make the nice little pointed ends of the handles, much easier than carving! The ferrules (rings joining knife to handle) were made of thin strips of card, painted with black, grey and pewter, like the blades, to look like worn iron. The wood was dirtied up with dirty paint water, a small amount of water with a dollop of dark burnt umber paint. They were then finished with a coat of satin varnish.

The finished products are pretty good, I think. Two of the knives are in the little white wall rack, while the other five will hang on the boarded wall. Also in the photo is the little stove that warms the workshop in winter; it started life as a pencil sharpener in white or pot metal, but a few coats of a hammered metal spray paint made it look more "real". I touched up the raised surfaces on the ash and fuel doors with gold wax, as well as the knob on top, to add some dimension to the stove.

Decision Time!

While working on my trash to treasure project and the floral arrangements recently, I was mulling a decision over in my head, and have decided to go for it. 

Above is the photo in the magazine with the plans, of the wooden shoe workshop I'm building. Growing up in The Netherlands, only one room in our house was heated, and that was the living/dining room. It had a coal-burning unit in the centre of the interior wall of the row of houses we lived in. Our house was free-standing on one side, with large garden there, while on the other side were perhaps four houses with front gardens, while the rest of the row houses on the street fronted straight on the sidewalk. 

It had occurred to me that heating stoves are usually placed in the centre wall of a room; think fire places in North American homes. So why is the heating stove in the workshop right behind the door in a corner? It just didn't make sense to me.

My decision has been to put the stove in the centre of the right-hand wall, and place the wooden shoe painter, currently in the cramped little hallway, by the window to the right of the door, so he'll have natural light as well as heat from the stove in winter. The coffee and tea making table will move to the front of the roombox on the right, on the other side of the heating stove, along with the quartered log sections. That way they can be cozy while having a tea break. So that means that the other equipment, along with the log sections, will move next to the wall dividing the workshop from the hallway. The bench currently in the hallway will move to the stair wall, and there will be some shelves on the interior wall to hold finished wooden shoes. That way, a customer coming in the invisible door in the imaginary

 "front wall" of the box will have a choice of klompen sizes, as well as a bench to sit on while trying them on.

It makes much better sense to me! Now I'll have to see how it all works out in the newly arranged wooden shoe workshop....