{"'Hello!' : A Year Of Doors"} September, October, and November

 I know, I know, I am really late/behind getting these last 3 doors posted (but I was also late getting some of them finished, so I guess that tracks lol).  Again, I didn't take a lot of pictures of my progress as I went along, but I suppose since I'm posting all 3 in one post that's probably not a bad thing...

So, without further ado....

(*note: I was having trouble getting my computer to cooperate and then I don't know why it posted the photos in the opposite order of what I wanted them on here, but after fighting with my computer already I didn't have it in me to try to fix it/redo it lol.....)

September:

    This was actually technically the last door finished.  I just finished the landscaping earlier today actually (or I think finished anyway..... I'm not sure if I might add a little something to it, but I don't know what yet), because I kept forgetting and/or not being able to get ink for my printer to make the garden flag (Which *spoiler alert* was one of the most important elements for this door, which you'll see why in the pictures). This door was fun too, because it is one of the two doors that the compartment it goes in has a portrait ratio rather than landscape (tall rather than wide) so I was able to really add plenty of craftsman detail with the portico woodwork.  I also finally figured out a way to make a fluffy wreath bow that actually worked out really well and easily for me.  I used thin washi tape folded over on itself and then made the bow like I would a real life bow.

October:

    This door took me a while to actually get finished because I really didn't have a clear picture of how I wanted it to look.  I pretty much had just bought/gathered a bunch of Halloween themed stuff and just kind of picked and chose as I went.  Which of course meant I took forever making every decision (and of course left me with leftover Halloween decor, but that's totally okay because I still have a Halloween bakery and possibly another Halloween mini to make at some point). By the time it was all said and done I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

November:

    I don't really have much to say about the November door to introduce it... Being the last of a series, especially one that included 12 individual projects, is always a little bittersweet, and at one point I wasn't sure if I was really going to like how this one turned out, but I'm happy to say that once it was all together I was definitely happy with it as the note to end on.

   Oh! By the way.... did you remember to look for the "Hello" on each of these door scenes?..... The garden flag in September says "Hello"; one of the ghosts in October has "Hello" written on it; and the turkey wreath on the November door is holding a banner that says "Hello".

 

    I do still need to put hangers on the back of the display for these and then permanently install them and then I need to figure out how I'm going to do the plexiglass cover for both display boxes, so I will be doing the finishing up stuff still into the new year, and once I get that all done I will probably post one more post for them with all of that taken care of and maybe a few pictures of them hanging on my wall (I think I'm going to hang them by my front door).

 

 I really loved having these monthly little projects to work on through the year (even if they didn't always get done on time), so I have another monthly series planned for 2021, but this time it will have some differences.... without giving too much away (you'll have to wait for another post for that), I will say that it will be a different scale, and each month will start with the exact same scene and just the decor change..... Which I plan on getting started prepping tomorrow, so  I will post more details soon!

{Whimsy Street Shopping District} JellyBean's Ice Cream and Delights: Furniture, Fixtures, and Functional Accessories

This will be a long post, since it will cover a lot, but I will *try* to keep the “talking” to a minimum and focus on the pictures

First, I’ll start with the most important part of an ice cream shop - the ice cream cooler.  I made this from scratch using foam core board, clear plastic, basswood, and some white glossy tape, and a piece of waffle cone patterned/embossed cardstock as a decorative panel on the front. 

The Ice cream cooler also holds the ice cream toppings (sprinkles, walnuts, and chocolate syrup), as well as glass dishes and paper bowls, and an ice cream scoop sitting on the edge waiting to scoop some ice cream. 

The holder for the ice cream cones on top of the ice cream cooler is made from a piece of thin plastic with holes punched using my smallest hole punch for the cones to sit down into.  (originally I had planned to make a clear plastic case for these to be in as well, since in real life they would get stale sitting out in the open like this all day, but I decided that it would be way more difficult to make than I was willing to do, and you wouldn’t be able to see the cones as well either.  I figured we can all just pretend that the cones won’t go stale sitting out like that, or if you’d rather, pretend that there’s a cover that goes over them that if off of them at the moment and just sitting somewhere out of sight…….. lol)

Next to the ice cream cooler is the counter for the cash register.  The counter itself was made form a kit that I had ordered years ago and then not used for whatever I had originally planned it for (I don’t even remember at this point), and it was actually already put together and had been just sitting unused in a drawer in my craft room.  When I was trying to figure out how I wanted to do this counter I came across it and thought, Oh, perfect.  The cash register was also a kit, and one you may recognize from my North Pole Tea Room, Flutterby Bakery (which now that I think about it, might be what the counter was originally ordered for), and The Librarian and The Bookworm Used Books.  I did finish it a little differently this time, with “enamel” for the surface and a little more detail than some of the others with the 3D buttons and details drawn onto the drawer.  Since this will be right next to the window, and highly visable I felt it needed a little more attention to detail.

 Along with the cash register itself, this counter holds a tip jar (with money in it… not that you can really tell once everything is on place, but, details lol), napkins, spoons, and straws. 

Displayed hanging on the front of the counter are some of the cotton candy.  On the back side of the counter the bottom self holds boxes of extra napkins and straws.

Next to the register counter is a display fixture with the rest of the cotton candy in the bottom bin and  the taffy/candy in the top bin  

Along the back wall is another counter with "storage" underneath.  The counter top is made from wood painted navy and edged with a silver paint marker, and the door for the storage area are just cut out pieces of paper edged with the silver paint marker and glued to the surface of the foam core board that makes the base of the counter.  The handles are even tinier strips of silver painted paper glued on and a few touches from the silver paint marker add the idea of hinges.

The back counter holds a lot of the functional components of making all the offerings on the menu.  One of the most important, and also of the things that took the most effort to figure out/make is the vintage style milkshake mixer.  I really wasn’t sure how I was going to have a mixer for this shop (but obviously you can’t have an ice cream shop that doesn’t serve milkshakes), I tried to see if I could find one 3D printed to buy and didn’t really find anything for this scale (I think I did actually find one or two that were cast metal, but at least one of them was part of a set of a bunch of different soda fountain accessories, none of the rest of which I needed and I wasn’t willing to pay what the whole set cost for just the mixer), so after looking at a bunch of real life pictures on line I decided to try to make my own.  I ended up using two different style push pins – cutting the pin part off of a round one and gluing it on top of the other type (sorry I have no idea what you call the different styles of push pins, but hopefully you can tell from the picture what type I am talking about).  Once that glue was set, I spray painted that a vintage blue/green.  The silver details around the body of the mixer were drawn on with the silver paint marker and the mixing arms are little pieces of wire glued on.  Now of course a real mixer would have actual mixing blades at the end of the arms, but I didn’t really have anything to use for them (or at least couldn’t think of a way to do them) that wouldn’t have just made it look weird, so I decided that in this scale you get the idea of what it is well enough as is and, surprisingly for me, decided to stop at that point instead of trying to take it further and ending up just messing up the whole thing. Lol. And I do really love the way it looks sitting on the counter!  Next to it are a couple silver mixing cups.

  Between the milkshake mixer and the soda machine (I’ll get to that in a second) are two sizes of paper cups, that are literally tiny paper cups nestled inside each other. 

The soda machine itself I made from scratch, using square dowels, thin basswood and little strips of paper for the part that you push with the cup to make the drink come out (again, I have no idea what the correct name for those are haha).  The sodas are, cola, rootbeer, lemon-lime, and orange. 

On the other side of the soda machine are the syrups for Italian Soda that I talked about in my last post, and they are sitting on risers made from plastic. 

The sink is made from the blister packing from allergy pills, cut in half and spray painted silver, and the faucet is a bent piece of wire, with a handle made from narrow gauge wire in a seed bead base.  Sitting in the sink are a couple dirty ice cream dishes waiting to get washed.

The other side of the shop is furnished with tables for customers to sit and eat their ice cream.  The tall tables are made of wood disks and dowel, with a hot glue base, painted blue.  And the stools are the head of a paper brad, attached to a piece of thicker wire, also with a hot glue base.  The seats are painted the 3 main colors of the shop’s color scheme, and I sprayed the bases with chrome spray paint to match the wire once the hot glue was completely set. 

And with all of that glued into place the shop is almost completely done.  I do still have menu boards to make, but my printer is out of 2 of it’s inks and when I went to Walmart a few days ago to get more they did not have the ones I needed and I haven’t been able to get them elsewhere yet.  I also have a couple things left to do for the outside, but I will save all that for the final post for this shop, which hopefully will be coming really soon! I also am just about finished with the September door for "'Hello!': A Year Of Doors", so I will be posting that soon as well...

 

{Whimsy Street Shopping District} JellyBean's Ice Cream and Dellights: The Ice Cream and Delights

 Of course the most important part of a shop called "JellyBean's Ice Cream and Delights" is the ice cream and delights, and that is what this post will be all about.

The ice cream tubs were one of the first things I thought about how to make for this shop. I needed to figure out how I could do the ice cream before making the ice cream shop a definite part of the overall "Whimsy Street" project.  Fortunately, this plan for making them did actually work out in practice as well as in theory (because that definitely does not always happen haha).  I did end up changing up my method slightly though by the time I got around to actually working on this shop.  I knew I would be using clay for the ice cream, and I was hoping to figure out how to put it in pieces of paper straws as the cartons/tubs, but of course I couldn't really safely put paper straws in the oven (especially since I have a gas oven which involves actual flame...). 

I ended up figuring out that one of the holes in the cake mold I have (from Stewart Dollhouse Creations), was the exact size for the opening of the straw, so I was able to form and bake the clay in that.  Before baking though I used a ball stylus to "scoop" some of the clay out in each one to make it look like some ice cream had been scooped out, and yay! it worked out perfectly!

  The flavors are: Vanilla, Chocolate, Raspberry, Strawberry, Peach, Blackberry, Key Lime, Lemonade, Funfetti Cake Batter, Salted Caramel, Butter Pecan, and Mint Chocolate Chip.

  And of course you have to have ice cream cones in an ice cream shop. These are made from clay using an ice cream cone mold from Stewart Dollhouse Creations.  To "stack" them, I just cut the top section off of some of the cones and glued it on top of the one beneath it, with one full cone on the bottom.

A shop called JellyBean's Ice Cream and Delights needs to have some "delights" other than just ice cream though.  The first thing I decided on was cotton candy.  This ended up being a really fun and easy project.  For the cotton candy itself I dyed 2 cotton balls - one blue and one pink - using food coloring and water.  I then just pulled off tiny pieces and rolled them into cotton candy shape once they cotton balls were completely dry (which I sped up by putting them in front of a fan and they really dried pretty quickly, I was surprised, I expected them to take much longer than they did).

  The "paper" cones holding them are the tips of toothpicks, painted with spiral stripes.

  For the plastic covering the cotton candy I poked a hole in plastic/cling wrap (like you would use for food storage) and put the cone through the hole and gathered it above the cotton candy and tied it off with some thread. (In real life it might be a little strange to package it with the cone poking through the plastic like that, but when I tried to just put the plastic wrap over the cone and the cotton candy all together it really obscured being able to see the details of the pieces, so I decided to do it this way.)

*also on kind of a side note, this method of making cotton candy would work for any scale, just adjust the amount of cotton ball you pull apart for each one (or use the whole cotton ball for larger scales) and make the cone part out of actual paper or a cone shaped bead of whatever you can think of based on the scale. 

 

It took me a while to come up with another "delight", but finally I decided on these candies.

  In my mind they are taffy, but if so they are pretty big pieces, but... that was as small as I could get them (at least without losing my mind in the process lol).  To make them I wrapped tiny cylindrical beads with tissue paper.

The shop will also serve milkshakes and floats, but I consider that part the the "ice cream" part of the shop's name, but I do have one other thing that falls under the "delights" category..... Italian Sodas.  To make the syrups for the sodas I used craft paint mixed with mod podge to paint 3D printed wine bottles (also from Stewart Dollhouse Creations).

But, you need more than some tubs of ice cream and cotton candy and taffy to have a functioning ice cream shop, so my next post will be about all the furniture, fixtures, and functional accessories that really bring the shop to life!