"Wee Christmas at Kenmore", the miniature/dollhouse show I'm involved with each year at Historic Kenmore here in Fredericksburg, VA, opened for the 2023 show yesterday, which seems like the perfect opportunity to get back to actually posting on this blog. But before I introduce this year's Christmas project project, a little background info.....
I actually haven't really done much this year miniatures wise, and because I didn't have a "big" project for Wee Christmas my original plan for the show this year was going to be something a bit different. I have some 1:48 scale Christmas scenes in various ornaments and I thought maybe I'd make a couple more and maybe some framed collections of Christmas themed micro paintings/art and display them on a tabletop Christmas tree, but then at some point this fall a different idea popped into my head - a Christmas she shed - which I decided should be "Mrs. Claus's She Shed". I did have a moment of hesitation though because a 1:48 scale she shed would be so tiny to display on it's own (especially amongst full size dollhouses), but then I remembered I had a 1:12 scale kit that I had bought for the Miniatures.com "creatin' contest" a couple years ago, and hadn't actually done anything with, which I thought was a shed of some sort. So, I pulled that out and sure enough it was a perfect structure for a she shed for Mrs. Claus, and a better size for display at "Wee Christmas". I've also been wanting to do a dollhouse with a gingerbread looking exterior for a while and this seemed like the perfect opportunity for that.
"Mrs. Claus's She Shed" is where Mrs. Claus goes when she wants to escape the hustle and bustle of the North Pole and work on some projects of her own and relax. (It's also a great place to hide presents for Santa and the Elves.) Mrs. Claus loves her little shed so much she is making her own miniature version of it.
I knew that my Mrs. Claus needed to be a crafter and so would need a work table and storage in her she shed, but I also wanted her to have a comfortable sofa or chair where she could just sit and relax and read. Initially I actually thought I already randomly had all the furniture I would need for it, but after playing around with it some I decided it needed a loveseat (rather than the sofa or chair I already had) so I got the robin's egg colored loveseat as part of a living room set from Hobby Lobby. I also ended up going back and getting a dining set just to use one chair for her work table because I realized I didn't have a chair for that. Before getting the new loveseat for the room though I had picked out a wrapping paper from my collection/stash of Christmas wrapping paper to use as a wallpaper. I knew from the beginning of the planning stages that I wanted to use real life wrapping paper as wallpaper in the interior. I had though on all the walls, but after picking a few options from what I had available I chose to just to the back wall as an accent wall, and chose a paper with a Christmas tree print, and colors that I thought would be nice to work with in this space. (And fortunately that the loveseat I was looking at would coordinate with)
Once I had a good idea of how it was going to be inside I got started on the "gingerbread" exterior (I wanted to wait until I had the inside planned so that I could have the structure taped together to test things out without damaging the exterior). My first step was to paint the exterior walls a gingerbread brown and then the trim, windows and doors white. The "frosting" decorations and trim on the exterior where done using caulk from Dollar Tree. they sell both a full size tube of caulk, like you would use with a caulk gun, or a squeeze tube of it (that has less in it). I initially got the full size tube because I was getting more for my $1.25 and because I planned to put it in an actual piping bag with actual decorating tips, which I did for the trim around the doors and windows, but when I tried to switch to a smaller tip, it was having trouble getting through it (because it is a little thicker than real frosting), and I was having some other issue with it as well (which I don't honestly remember what that was now...), so I went back to the store and got the squeeze tube version and actually just piped the rest of the decorations straight from that.
Before I could glue the structure together I had to glue the wrapping paper wallpaper to the back wall and make the flooring (wood grain shelf liner, also from Dollar Tree) cut into "planks" and attached to the floor in a herringbone pattern.... which I need to remember using the shelf liner for flooring because it was so easy to work with. It stuck down on it's own, but I was able to get it back up to reposition it if need be perfectly easily. If it was going to be something that was going to get a lot of handling or something, I'd maybe put some ort of top coat over it to help it hold better once it was done, but for this project it was fine on it's own. Oh and of course I painted the other two interior walls. Once all that was done I glued the structure together and piped some more caulk onto the exterior corners to finish them. Before I attached the front of the building though where the floor and walls met needed some sort of trim to make it look finished and I was just going to put some appropriately sized strip wood on and call it a day but I found some trim that I had that was already white, that is meant to be chair rail I believe, but looked really cute as baseboard in here (and happy accident bonus, it fit perfectly into the curve of the leg of the hutch so that that still sat flush against the wall when I put it back in).
Because this structure is open from the top and not the back like most dollhouses and I wasn't going to put the removable roof that it was supposed to have on it I felt like it needed something to finish the top edge, so I got some cute scalloped trim (once again from Hobby Lobby) and put it around the top edge of the walls, as well as as a crown molding on the interior on the back wall (I didn't do the other walls because I didn't feel like they really needed it and honestly I didn't fee like trying to cut the angle correctly, lol.
Before putting the project away for Thanksgiving I did get somewhat started on the inside.... I painted the hutch a nice deep green, and made the "in progress" miniature she shed that Mrs. Claus is making. The structure for that was cut from Balsa wood and I just used my printer to copy and reduce the wrapping paper for the wallpaper and cut the shelf liner into even smaller pieces for flooring. I hadn't actually planned on making the whole floor for that, I was just going to have the cut out pieces next to it and maybe a couple pieces on there to make it obvious what they were for, but after putting a few on I just kept going and did the whole floor. The exterior details for the miniature shed are a combination of just white paint (for anything that didn't need to be too 3D), and caulk piped using a syringe (for the areas that needed to be 3D)
The one other thing I just couldn't wait until after Thanksgiving for was this cute little cutting machine I found in the miniatures section at Michaels. I just had to add it to the scene, but I wasn't thrilled with how not quite realistic it looked because of how the paint had been done on it, nor did the color really go with the rest of the decor, so I decided to paint it to match my real life Cricut machine, which made it match much better in the room, be more visible on the hutch and look more realistic.
After that I put it away for Thanksgiving thinking oh, the rest of the accessories and decor won't take me very long to do I'll have plenty of time to get it finished up the week after Thanksgiving, before drop off that Saturday....... {spoiler alert, I should never trust myself when I think things like that because I am always going to take longer making decisions than I think and/or keep adding more things that I then have to make.....}
So here we were the Monday after Thanksgiving, my plans for the week were take a day or two to finish up the accessories and decorations, and then finish decorating my real house for Christmas and at some point go grocery shopping, because the last time I went to the store I apparently forgot that we needed to eat other days too not just Thanksgiving..... So I ran a few errands Monday and got some lunch while I was out (still thinking it was only going to take me a day or two to finish this up), then came home and decided the hutch was going to be the biggest part of what was left to do so I'd go ahead and get started on that..... you guys this hutch took me most of the rest of the week to finish, between having trouble making decisions for it and some stuff taking longer than I expected.... but.... I am really happy with how it turned out. I made the fabric storage bins, the craft paints and glues, and the rolls of ribbons from scratch. The 3 compartment tray on the second shelf and the round tray that the paints and glues are on I already had, and I filled the 3 bigger bins with a combination of just some random little pieces of stuff from my own craft room and little cards of embroidery floss that I made from single strands of real embroidery floss (in the white bin). The little white bins I just left empty because I had no idea what to put in them and you can't really see into them to tell they are empty that well anyway (the bigger ones you could)
The rest of the room also took a little longer than I was expecting (and also I was running out of time), but definitely went quicker than that hutch! I decorated the tree (which was one I had made a few years ago and not used for anything), made art for the wall above the loveseat (the "joy" embroidery was hand stitched and the embroidery hoop was made from a wooden gear I got from Hobby Lobby that I cut the teeth off of and sanded smooth, with silver cardstock and the end of a sewing pin for the closure, the tree I painted, the big round piece is a gift tag from Hobby Lobby that I printed the words and then painted the wreath around them for the inside, the sign beneath that I just designed and printed, the little present wall hanging was a leftover piece of wrapping paper from the presents in the she shed "loft" (I'll get to those in a minute...), wrapped around a tiny piece of wood and ribbons added, and the gingerbread man was just something I had that I stuck up there because the wall needed one more thing to look balanced. I made red square and green Christmas tree shaped pillows for the loveseat and a plate of cookies and a cupcake (paper gingerbread people cut from cardstock with my Cricut - that I had leftover from a project last year, that I just glued a few layer together in a stack to make them look thicker - and a cupcake I already had that I just repainted the liner), and a mug of tea (mug purchased from Michaels and the tea is nail polish top coat with a little bit of brown paint mixed in, and a teeny tiny tea bag (which you cant see very well with the tea in it, but I know it's there lol). A simply decorated tabletop tree and a couple tiny presents that I found in a bag of random Christmas craft supplies finish the round table in the corner.
And then there's the presents the Mrs. Claus is hiding on a shelf/loft above the door..... these also took me WAY longer to do than I had planned and at a certain point I was like nope, not doing ribbons and bows and decorations on all of them, she can have some she hasn't quite finished wrapping yet...... but they did turn out looking really cute and festive all lined up on the ledge, so they were worth it. a few of the wrapping papers are just straight up real wrapping paper (the solid gold and green, and the red snowflake design) the others are wrapping paper or Christmas scrapbook paper that I scanned and reduced to be an appropriate size.
By this point, it was about 11pm on Friday night (keep in mind the set up for the show was Saturday) and the she shed itself was done, but I still needed some landscaping around it, so before I went to bed I painted the plywood base white and once that was dry (or mostly dry) used spray adhesive to attach some batting (as a blanket of snow on the ground), and figured I'd finish it up real quick in the morning before taking it up to Kenmore..... which I did..... after having to make a Walmart and Dollar Tree run because I did not in fact have any trees that were big enough... (which worked out because I ended up finding some bigger and more whimsical looking green ones for the sides of the building and some cute pink yarn ones for the front and then decided I wanted some "oversized" ornament yard decorations out front so slipped in Dollar Tree real quick to buy a set of small ornaments to use for that), so I got all of that glued to the base, made some gingersnap cookie stepping stones from craft foam and white paint to make a path to the front door and glued those down, and decided it needed a little something more..... thought I had some small unpainted wooden nutcrackers, couldn't find them and could only find one that my friend's daughter had painted when she was like 2 probably that looked like it had been through some sort of bloody battle (didn't quite fit the vibe), so I made quick run to Hobby Lobby (and managed to get the last set of them), because by then I had it in my mind that I needed that nutcracker as part of the outside decor, and glued it on when I got to Kenmore to drop it off..... phew..... but I'm really happy with how it turned out, and it is there for everyone who visits Kenmore to see and enjoy for the month of December
If you are going to be in the Fredericksburg area any during December make sure you check out the Wee Christmas at Kenmore show (visit their website at Kenmore.org for admission hours and prices), and....
Have yourself a merry "little" Christmas!
