Please Bear With Me and My Camera(s)....

 This may be a bit of a messy post, as we're experiencing camera woes once again. The camera I was using has developed a mind of its own, and is flipping photos I want to import to the blog from horizontal to vertical;  no amount of editing is fixing the issue.

This little rug is now done; it was partially done, but I ran out of the background floss colour, which had no number or band on it, and finally broke down during my recent vacation and pulled out the entire previous background. I don't like pulling out! The colour scheme is interesting; it is from a very old (50 years or so) pamphlet I picked up second-hand some years ago. The size makes it useful for both 1.12 as a small rug, or in half scale as a full-size rug.

Now, this is the photo that absolutely WILL NOT behave! I have flipped it numerous times, and even cropped it to get rid of the stain on the surface to the left, but nothing works. It is from the book that I was given recently, and I did it first because I really like this blue and cream colour scheme. It is also a smaller rug - I worked it in 22 ct. instead of 18, as the pattern recommended - and will also suit both 1/12 and half scale.

This is where the mess really took off. The old camera was replaced by a new-to-me camera, that has more pixels. It came to me without a manual, and although we have managed to get it to show the thumb-nail photos on the old card, it will not allow me to take photos yet. It appears to take the photo, the flash goes, but then when I go to download it to the computer, there is no photo there. So, you'll just have to trust me when I say that I also finished a lovely Bokhara rug, in browns, reds and cream. When we figure out the new (old) camera, I'll post a photo.

In the works also are grapes; they are still too purple for my taste, which means discarding that batch of clay and starting over. I've "lost" my recipe for lovely red grapes I made a few years ago, and suspect that the instructions I tried to use this past week just gave the wrong quantities of clay to mix. I'll try again!

Baskets are also on my work table; I'm making a wooden basket with two bail handles, hopefully for the grapes when I make them. I'd also like to try making woven baskets out of card, as with a bit of patience and paint they can be made to look a lot like ash splint baskets.

Hopefully we can figure out what is going on with the cameras soon!

Here's Hoping This Works!

My camera isn't responding well, which means the following photos are likely over-exposed or out of focus, but I thought I'd try anyways!

Last Wednesday, I did some clay work for the Autumn vignette, and these are freshly dug potatoes, which I think came out fairly well.

The apple photos are very sad, in that I can't adjust the flash mechanism; we're at the tail end of the current tropical storm, which is leaving us pretty much in the dark and the camera won't work without the flash, and with the flash the colours don't show at all well. However, I'm quite pleased with the apples, they were coloured with chalks before the polymer clay was baked.

On Friday, we spent the day at a huge outdoor flea market, but it may be the last time we go, as the offerings were very very boring! It used to feature lots of antiques dealers, but nowadays seems to have personal garage sale stuff, discounted stuff, lots of homemade bath products and endless piles of crocheted novelties. However, I did find a couple of things that can be used for minis.

Although the pictures aren't that great, the frames are very nice and in 1/12 scale; I'll fill them with my own paintings one of these days.

These rather thick little 1/12 scale containers will work well in prep board settings; I think the two-handled pot will work for something like baked beans, while the little pitcher might work for pancake batter. They were very inexpensive, and small porcelain items are hard to come by locally.

Wednesdays are still "Mini Days", and I hope to make grapes for the Autumn vignette tomorrow. And I hope the endless rain stops soon.....

The Autumn Vignette So Far....

 The vine has been re-leafed, and I do like this better. The apple basket has been aged (outside only, as it will be "filled"). At the outset of this project, I stated that I hoped to make as much as possible myself, mostly out of cardboard and the like, just to prove that anything can just about become something else. 

So far, the structure is 1/4" (1 cm) foam core, doubled for the floor. The wall and door are made of packaging cardboard over foam-core scraps; the window and door frame are more cardboard.  The apple basket is made from an old school binder divider and a bit of wire. The birdhouse is a shaped scrap of 1/2" square basswood, with a roof from a bit of moss ribbon. The vine leaves are painted paper, in 4 different sizes, each shaped individually. The window glass is a piece of packaging plastic, while the box of fertiliser  (I think!) in the window is a scrap of wood and a cut-out from a gardening magazine. The stone doorstep is a strip of builder's foam, while the grey basket is a painted plastic bottle cap. 

The tools and watering can are commercially made, from my stash. And the shingles are left-overs from a very old project, each shingle cut in half to look more to scale, while the door-handle is a bit of carved and painted wood. The weathered bench is a left-over kit from a course I taught pre-Covid,while the trunk of the vine is made of floral wire and floral tape. It still needs to be "planted" on the base.

I was able to find a very simple, warm brown wooden picture frame, which the box will be set into. At the moment, I'm working out how to make a woven basket from file folder cardboard, a bit of a challenge although I do think I have instructions somewhere in my (far too many) magazine stash. 

I'm still looking for beads for the grapes, but if I can't find the right colour this week, I'll make up a batch of polymer clay grape bunches to hang on the vine, with some tiny tendrils made from fuse wire wrapped over a sewing needle.

It's coming along! And the weather has cooled, although that may be temporary; we were in the tail end of tropical storm Debbie here. And much to my chagrin, the trees are beginning to change colour and the birds are flocking. Winter is coming but not for a couple of months, I hope!

Still Working Away on Things....

 Back from a short vacation by the sea, and mostly recovered from working at the Provincial Highland Games, I'm working at finishing things again. Today (Monday) is a holiday here, and as it is nice and cool for a change, I've been able to reach some progress on my various bits and pieces. First of all, I want to show you a photo that I took to help me make an espaliered tree or two for the eventual Apothecary Garden. This is from Kew Gardens, and will have to serve me in making a mini version, as it seems next to impossible to find the Dutch dolls' house version that prompted the idea of espaliered trees:

You'll likely have to enlarge this, as the trained branches of the trees are somewhat obscured by the brickwork. It will be an interesting challenge to make a "flat" tree in miniature, and it will likely have to be glued here and there to the eventual wall. The foreground planting looks like lavender or rosemary, both of which tend to be found in Apothecary gardens.

And yes, I've begun to re-leaf the grape vine; the humidity has slacked today, and the paper is taking the creases properly again! I'm using four different sizes of maple leaf punches to make the leaves, made from hand-painted papers with appropriate autumnal speckles on them. The vine is about half done, which means more punching is needed, as I've used up all the third size leaves punches.  The basket was started yesterday (Saturday), allowed to partially dry overnight, and had the last banding and the handles attached today. I have super glue on my left index finger....

The basket was made from old binder-divider cardboard, following a tutorial in the Nov. 2014 issue of Dolls House World. The wire handles were formed over a block of scrap wood, and that's where the super glue came in. I think it looks pretty good for a first effort, and "filled" with apples or the like, will make a nice addition to the vignette I'm working on.  It still needs aging, though!

On the needlework front, three of the rugs are "done" except for hemming and fringing; I'm waiting to do several at once, as soon as the rest are done. There seems to be an oriental theme here!

I did work on rugs on my little vacation, sitting on the rear veranda of my sister-in-law's house, which looks out over a lovely lake and tends to have a nice breeze going, as well. The rust/gold rug is a colonial style, but I misread the pattern and it will be a wee bit more colourful than planned; the pattern called for two rows gold and one rust rather than what I began to do. As the back is worked in a labour-intensive stitch (diagonal basket-weave), I didn't have the courage to pull things out yet again to do it according to instructions. The Bokhara-style rug is all half cross stitch, due to the dense pattern, and will need blocking as that stitch tends to pull needlework on the bias.

A close-up look at the leaves on the grape vine....

Well, back to work!

We're Not Used to this Heat and Humidity

 ....and it is taking a toll on us. We more or less live in the family room or out on the lower shady patio, as the parts needed for the heat pump to produce air conditioning "are not available right now". I guess that they will magically show up this fall, when it really isn't that hot and humid any more, unless it takes until after the winter, when we depend upon said heat pump. 

That said, it is taking more time than I expected to get the little rugs going to the point where I can take them on vacation next week, but here is a progress report:

The blue and white Chinese rug is ready for the cream-coloured background work, then the hems and the fringing on the ends. It's the most advanced rug at this point. (It just printed out lengthwise, and by madly pushing keys it suddenly became horizontal again - why and how?)

And I can't duplicate the previous operation, as this one just turned itself vertically, from a horizontal position. This is a Colonial-era hooked rug design, the perimeter is complete except for the hemming, but the blocks need filling in.

I give up! This is the problem rug right now, the Bokhara design is absolutely gorgeous, but in the heat and with a hot cat on my lap I have to put it aside for a while! I'm doing more pulling out than actually embroidering. The poor cat doesn't realise that she is only adding to her humans' discomfort.

My mini friend Marilyn passed on to me three bankers' boxes of miniaturist magazines on Monday; she is downsizing for an upcoming house move. And I'm finding many things I'd really like to try my hand at in the future, but really need to finish some of the other semi-complete projects going on at the moment. As always, supply issues and fear-of-electrification are the main culprits for my not being able to get into finishing them. The new things I'd like to try are all really perfect for some of the many UFO's I have in my workroom right now....

There will be a number of duplicate publications in the boxes of magazines, for which I'll try to find homes. It's too bad that postage costs are so horrendous, otherwise I could send them to people who've just discovered minis and would enjoy a helping hand.

I'm off to the seaside for a few days, and hope that it will be considerably cooler there than it is here.

I Can Change My Mind After All

So, I really haven't been all that happy with the way these leaves looked on my grape vine, and have just ignored it for now, but I would very much like to finish this vignette. As a step towards this, I roamed my garden and found some wild grape vines at the bottom of the property, and I picked one of the leaves.

The grape leaves definitely look more like maple leaves rather than the vine-looking leaves I cut for this vine (except for the tiniest ones, which are fig leaves!) Therefore, I will now carefully pick off all the leaves heretofore applied to the vine trunk, and replace them with maple leaves in a variety of sizes. And I hope I'll like those better, and feel like finishing the vignette sooner rather than later.

Most of the activities I engage in outside of my home are currently in hiatus for the summer, and will start up again after Labour Day, in September. And I will be away for a few days later this month, as well. But I am still working away on the rugs, with the blue and white Chinese rug ready for the background stitching, another rug having the diagonal chequers laid in, and a third one ready to be put onto canvas. These I can take with me while I'm away, to keep my hands busy. With 3 days "off" from those other activities, I hope to do the denuding of the tree this week, and begin the process of cutting and shaping new leaves.

It was a nice day today, and I spent much of it knitting on my lower patio, where we recently installed a new table and chairs; I hope to spend more time working on my hobbies out there on nice days. As the patio is on the north side of our house, much of the day it is in shade, perfect for my skin type - I tend to resemble boiled lobsters after too much unprotected time in the sun....

A Friend Gave Me a Book....

 ....and it is a book on miniatures that I had never come across in my decades of working with minis. The friend was, once upon a time, thinking of getting into making minis (she's a fantastic Real Life furniture maker!), but never did. As she, like me, is down-sizing wherever possible, a week ago at my volunteer job she passed a bag of mini things on to me, including a number of books. Three or four of those I already own, and will be passed on to friends in turn. But one was new to me: Building Miniature Houses and Furniture, by Dorie Krusz, published in the US in 1977, about 20 years before I got immersed in miniatures. The book features a modular method of house building, with the example being a Georgian/Colonial multi-story house and lots of appropriate furnishings for it. 

And there were half a dozen or more charts for making miniature rugs! Well, I'm currently working on 3 miniature rugs at the same time, and have begun finding appropriate embroidery thread colours for several more. That's why it's been quiet....

Also, of course, at this time of year most organizations and groups wind down for the summer, and that has been keeping me busy also. I did, however, finish the blue and white runner - which is coming up the wrong way around, and I can't find the edit button. Hmm, the Carpenter-in-Chief did some scans for me last night, so I'll have to figure out how to get my edit button back!

I will have to redo one of the fringe rows, as I did it  upside down. That's for another day.

I also made a tiny cushion cover, on 22ct hardanger, and at some point will make a few more, as my stock of cushions and rugs/mats/carpets is getting low. This one took quite a while, as it has lots of colour changes.

Here are the works in progress, on top of a number of sheets of scrap booking paper I found on the secondary market, which will work very nicely indeed for quick vignette settings; two types of script, one of which is medieval, some nice tile flooring, and some plank flooring. The Chinese rug and the diagonal tile rug are from the newly acquired book, while the dragon rug is from a very old pamphlet; I am not entirely happy with the colours, but it is very near finishing. Currently, I'm working the diagonal basket-weave stitch for the background on this one. The tile rug is getting its diagonals done, and the Chinese rug is ready for background and borders. These I can do without having to carry books etc. around with me, and will give my hands something to occupy them as we (hopefully) get in a few short trips this summer. Each piece in a ziplock baggie with its needle and floss, and only a tiny pair of scissors needed!

Also in the bag of things my friend passed on to me were some beautiful cedar shingles, lots of plumbing-type hardware in brass, and many types of hinges, as well as some minis, tiny ceramic tiles, and a package of MagicSton. I've never tried the latter, and this may be a good opportunity to do so.

I'm still leafing out the grape vine for the vignette, as well as researching how to make convincing grapes without having to do a lot of polymer clay work, but that may be too much to hope for....