Almost a New Year Already......

Well, this month has really flown by, I had grand plans of doing an entire Christmas tree this year with all miniatures as ornaments, tiny dollhouses, scenes in ornaments, etc., etc., and of posting all of the projects on here as tutorials, but, as you can see that didn't end up happening.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about that, I always have grand plans for December and it always ends up being such a jam-packed month of activities and such that most of them don't end up getting done, unless I manage to do them before December (well actually probably before October really, its all busy from that point on lol), or after the new year.  Which I may possibly do in this case, but I make no promises as this January is turning out to be kind of a busy month too this year.

But for today I don't have anything really going on (well except for lots of dishes that need to get done lol) until this evening, so I'm taking the opportunity to kind of recap on this past year and plan for next, as far as miniature projects go......

So as far as recapping 2016 goes:  I really only ended up getting two projects that I had planned for this year completed - my "Backyard Art Studio" 1:12 scale dollhouse that I made for the Miniatures.com "Creatin' Contest", and "Flutterby Bakery" a 1:48 scale bakery in a cake.  There are multiple posts about each as I worked on them so I wont put links here for any specific ones about them, but if you go back through my older posts, they are titled so that you know which projects are featured in which.  I had also gotten started on the planning and starting to collect materials for a 1:48 scale beach cottage called "Mermaid Cove Cottage" and then I have my little 1:48 scale attic roombox, which is an ongoing project to use leftover and broken materials from other projects.  I had plans/hopes for a few other projects that i didn't even really get to beyond vague early planning, and I also have my big 1:12 scale project that I have mostly planned and started getting stuff for, (but haven't actually started physically working on it yet) the townhouse I am doing in a vintage dresser.

So having said all that, on to my plans for next year:
- For one I of course want to continue work on Mermaid Cove Cottage, hopefully to actually get it finished within this year. Since all of the planning for the most part is done and I already have some of the materials and furniture for it and most of the rest of it that I don't already have I have sourced, it's just a matter of actually purchasing it, I'm hoping that while it will be one of my "main" projects this year that it will be relatively easily and quickly completed, at least compared to my other "Main/Big" project I have planned for this year......
- My second big/main project is going to be a 1:48 scale street of shops, but rather than being in normal store fronts their buildings will be related to the type of shop that it is.... for example I will have a book store in a book and a toy shop in a toy chest.... other than those two I haven't decided for sure what the other shops will be.  I want to have probably 4 or 5 of them and I want them to sit up against each other like a downtown street in a city, so that somewhat limits the shapes of the buildings, ideally they will all have at least semi straight-ish sides and such.  Apparently I have a thing for doing themed shaped structures (a tea room in a tea pot, a bakery in a cake), but I think these will be a little different being all together on a "street" and being a variety of different kinds of shops.  I'm particularly looking forward too (and at the same time dreading lol) making all sorts of teeny tiny toys for the toy shop.
- as well as those two main projects I'm hoping to be able to get some of the other projects that were on my "hopefully to-do" list last year.  Two that I definitely want to try to get done and I think probably can as long as I plan ahead a little are two more little bakeries.  When I was trying to settle on a name for the "Flutterby Bakery" I asked my friends on Facebook for suggestions and while i actually ended up going with my original idea, I really loved the suggestions everyone gave and so a couple of them are becoming their own projects (and the other names will be used somewhere in other projects).  A fairy bakery called "Buttercup Hollow Bakery" and a Halloween bakery called "Little Bakeshop of Horror" since I already have all the supplies for a bakery, I'm hoping these two should be relatively quick little side projects.
- I also want to do a couple of seasonal/holiday projects.... for example a little Easter scene in an "Easter egg" and I have a dollhouse that I want to decorate as Santa and Mrs. Claus's house, but we see how well I get holiday projects done, lol, if I want to get them done I'll definitely have to do them, not near the holiday they are for haha.
- and of course I'm hoping to get started on the physical work on the townhouse dresser



I'm also tentatively planning on starting my design/stationary/art/crafts business on ETSY, that I've been thinking about for a couple years now, so that will take up a fair amount of time as well so I'll have to really plan out stuff ahead of time and schedule work time for different projects, if I want to have time to get miniatures projects done.  Having said that though, if I do "open" the "shop" this year I might have a section for miniature items for sale, so keep an eye out for info about that.


Well, I'll be going into more detail about these projects as I get into them individually, but for now I think this is probably a long enough post, for one without pictures ;).  So for now I'll just say I hope everyone had a great  Christmas (or any other holiday you were celebrating this month) and a happy New Year!

Mini Parade Float

Our town puts on a huge Christmas parade every year at the beginning of December, and this year my husband was going to be in it as part of a group driving their RC cars in the parade.  Well, a while ago he got his hands on a car trailer for his RC to pull and asked me to make a mini Christmas parade float on it for him to pull.  The parade's theme this year was "the Sights and Sounds of Christmas" and when I thought of the sights of Christmas two things kind of came to mind.  Outdoor Christmas lights displays (one of my personal favorite parts of Christmas), and a living room with a fireplace with decorated mantel and a Christmas tree with lots of present under it.  So my two possible float designs were a "yard" full of light up decorations, or a "living room" with a fireplace and arm chair and tree with lots of presents under them (with lights on the tree and mantle garland of course).  For this one I really wanted an adult figure to sit in the chair and some kids to sit on the floor and wave to the crowd, but finding dolls or figured in this scale (1:10) that would work for this scene proved to be pretty much impossible.  I really couldn't decide between the two designs though, even with not being able to have the "people" for the living room float the light display float had some cons too (mainly the logistics of making mini light up yard decorations in the time I had to do it and the expense of the amount of lights I would need, when our budget was already really tight this fall...... although it would have looked REALLY cool, so I'm keeping the idea on the back burner for the possible future).  My husband really liked the living room idea though, so we went with that for this year.  (If they do it next year though, depending on the theme it may be lights lol).

This technically isn't the first time I've made a mini float.  A few years ago we started a tradition (that we actually have ended up not doing for the past year or two, but hopefully will get back into this year) of having our own mini Rose parade on New Year's day.... except ours is the Sweet Pea Parade... (The real Rose Bowl parade is my absolute favorite parade... and I love parades lol).  We would make floats to fit the real parade's theme and since it was in miniature (and winter, and we weren't trying to go broke making them) we decided that we could use artificial flower parts in place of real plant material, but other than that the big parade rules applies, that everything had to be made from/covered by "natural" (or fake plant lol) materials.  It was a really fun thing to do, so I do hope we actually do it again this year, but I'm getting a bit off topic here lol..... So while technically not my first mini parade float, it was the first one I was making to be in a real parade.

I wanted it to really be like a scaled down version of a life size float, so in planning the float I had to first think about how I would decorate a life size float (fortunately I have some experience in that too lol) and then translate that to miniature.  So for exmaple, rather than making a super realistic fireplace forn the mini float, I made it out of cardboard and drew on the bricks myself, as I would do on a full size float.  The "wall" behind the fireplace and the floor of the float were "plywood" (basswood), with the back wall painted with gloss craft paint in a manner to look like someone bought a gallon of paint and painted it in life size.  Stuff like that.  So, not a fireplace you would put in a dollhouse, not a perfectly finished wall, but exactly what you might see scaled up on a real float.  The tree was a bottle brush tree that I upgraded with Princess Pine to make it look real, and the "tinsel garland" on it was tinsel pipe cleaners (which were perfect!).  I actually found scale christmas lights at Michaels (I thought the only option I was going to find would be either the type with the little dot on a wire - which I did use on the sides of the float) or the type with a tiny bulb, but really long back to it, so I was super excited about these). They aren't a bright as I would have liked but they looked great on the tree, and the mantel.  The mantel garland and the garland on the side rails of the trailor and the wreath above the fireplace were tinsel garland that came off of a christmas tree shaped ornament from Dollar Tree that I pray painted to look like miniature faux greenery (they had the perfect sized little flat "needles" like real faux (haha) greens do).  The presents were ornaments from Dollar Tree (which I thought about re-wrapping with real wrapping paper, but coulnd't find any with small enough print and then decided that for a real float you might wrap boxes in bright shiny wrap anyway), and then of course I had to put a dollhouse on it lol.  Oh and the chair I threw together real quick from foam core board and fabric..... not my best work because I used hot glue for it (I was really running out of time lol), but it worked well for the float.  The tree skirt and stocking I just cut from felt and  glued together.  So without further adieu, here are the pictures.......... And also a little video of it in the parade at the end (there's no sound on it just fyi, so no, there's nothing wrong with the sound on your computer/phone/tablet lol)

working on the fireplace..... this was really the only thing I got in-progress pictures of lol...

the finished float.... although in retrospect, probably somewhere without so much distraction in the background would have been a better place for pictures.... lol

attached in place behind the Hubster's RC truck

{Backyard Art Studio} & {Flutterby Bakery} Finished!

Phew..... its been a whirlwind of a couple weeks! If you read my last post you'll know that I was in a {desperate haha} rush to get both the Backyard Art Studio and Flutterby Bakery done before yesterday (December 3rd).  What I didn't mention was that the reason I really really had to get them done before then was that they were going to be in a dollhouse and miniatures exhibit at the Historic site that I work for........ (although the Art Studio also had to be done in time for me to send in my entry for the miniatures.com contest, and lets face it I just wanted stuff done before it got too far into the Christmas season because I need to work on stuff for Christmas now lol).

On top of getting them done, my husband was going to be driving one of his RC cars in our town's Christmas parade and asked me to make a mini trailor float for him to pull behind it (which will get it's own post when I'm finished posting this one)..... which also had to be done by yesterday as the parade was last night. So needless to say, I still haven't gotten everything cleared up and put away from Thanksgiving nor have I started decorating for Christmas (which I normally would have done Thanksgiving weekend lol).  Although I do plan to at least get the decorating started today before we go to the opening reception for the dollhouse exhibit.

 But on to the important part.... lol the finished projects! Now I will say there were a few things on both of them that I had originally planned to do that I didn't end up actually doing, and there's still one or two things I might do to the bakery once I get it back in January, but it's nothing that will really make a huger difference and I'm not even sure I'll actually do it lol.....

{Flutterby Bakery}

For this one I'm just going to post the finished pictures, because I think I've done a pretty good job of posting pictures of everything as I worked on them, as I went along.  But just a re-cap on it, The bakery is 1:48 scale with an empty case from a tower of CD-Rs as the structure.  This was my first time really working much with polymer clay and definitely my first time making little cupcakes and cakes and stuff, and I think they turned out really well so I'm pretty proud of myself for that.  There is one thing I made to add to the bakery that I hadn't posted about before, because I just decided to actually do it (even though I'd been toying with the idea all along) Friday morning...... Little cake pops, which I'll talk more about in the caption for the photos.  Also just an FYI cheap paintable caulk, works fabulously for fake frosting (for a real life size application), I used it on the outside of the CD case to make the exterior of the bakery and it went on and worked pretty much just like real frosting would have, so I was super pleased with it, and dried to just about the perfect frosting finish.  And it was only $1.98 for the tube and I only used maybe half of it for this size project. i probably wouldn't suggest it for tiny applications though I think it would be a little to thick for miniatures, but for life size fake cakes it is awesome! lol.  But now on to the pictures......

this little project was one I kept putting off doing and seriously considered not doing at all, because I really wasn't looking forward to trying to make little clay balls that tiny and keep them actually round shaped as I pushed wire into them (or having to glue them to the end of wire after baking them), but then as I was finally like okay, let me try this, I happened to notice my one of my sewing pins and the little ball head on them was the (almost) perfect size, so instead of having to go crazy trying to make them from clay, all I ended up doing was cutting the pin to length and painting the "sticks" white..... also the container they are in is half of a screw type jewelry closure, I just took the eye pin out of it and it was good to go.

{Backyard Art Studio}

This one there were a lot more projects for it (would those be sub-projects? lol) that got done in these last few weeks and therefor didn't in-progress posts and lots of detailed pictures, and, to be honest, I'm tired this morning and this is already a long post, so I'm not going to probably go into huge detail about them at this point, but I will try to point them out in the photo captions and tell a bit about them.  If you want more details definitely feel free to comment and ask! (and I might post more details about them later, but it is December, so I make no promises, lol). {Fair warning, there will be lots of pictures for this one, but I will try to narrow it down so that there's not a ton of almost the same pics lol}

So first for some of the stuff I made for it, that weren't posted about in-progress..... The in-progress painting on the easel is being painted from a photo taken (in real life) at an overlook on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park; the paint tubes were made from the metal part of eye makeup applicators, for the caps for them I used my 1:48 scale cupcake mold and made them from black clay and the work perfectly; the paintbrushes are hand made from toothpicks, some fake hair, and aluminum foil; and the storage cart was made from empty match boxes.

oh, and the jar is a jar that you get nail glitter and stuff in at the dollar store

more brushes in a jar over here, also, a watercolor paint tray, made from foam core board and paint; colored pencils made from shaved down toothpicks; and some drawing charcoals made from clay (in a tray made from several 1:48 scale baking sheets)

I guess I lied about not having a ton of almost the same picture.... ooops.... lol

This was another part of the project I probably should have written more about.  It took me a while to get just the right grass.  I started with a "grass" landscaping sheet, but it was just too flat and I just couldn't stand it, so I ripped that backup and was looking for ideas for other ways of doing grass and came across the idea of using a towel, and looking at one in my bathroom, I thought, yeah, that does kind of look like grass, so off to walmart I went hoping to find a grass green colored towel cut it out, glue it down and be done with it (this was Wednesday afternoon, and I had to have it all done by Saturday morning....). Of course they didn't have the right color green so I got a lighter green and some green spraypaint, but that ended up working pretty well, so I spraypainted it, then, cut it out and glued it down (with spray adhesive) and was good to go..... and I really like the way it looks.  Public service announcement here though, cutting towels makes a huge mess. LOL

this boxwood was another one of my, I just cant stand how what I could find to buy looks, so I need to make it myself things, this one however involved me cutting out and individually gluing in place over 1,000 tiny leaves..... worth it in the long run? yes.  Did I hate myself for it while i was in the process of doing it? also yes. haha