{Hello! : A Year Of Doors} June

June's door is finished!

After finishing May's door I got back to working on The Librarian And The Bookworm Used Books for Whimsy Street, but as I think I had talked about before I wanted to do June's door early in the month since I wasn't sure exactly what the later part of the month was going to look like with things opening back up and people going back to work and everything, and fortunately it worked out that that coincided perfectly with waiting on an order to arrive for something I want to try doing for the bookstore that, if it works, will need to the next thing done before I really go any further.  Then my timing on getting June's door done has actually turned out perfectly too because I finished the door on Sunday and Monday I'm supposed to be getting my order according to the tracking.... if only all my miniature adventures worked out that smoothly and timely. Lol.

So here is the planning sketch for June so that you can see what the initial plan was:

This one, like last month I never did a colored version of (although I probably will still do a colored version just for keepsake purposes since the beginning of the year had both, I'll just color it based on my original plans). This one I also had trouble getting to scan so that it showed up well, but if you click on the picture to view it full size hopefully you will be able to see it okay...

And here we go from start to finish:

The first thing I worked on for this month was the "stained glass" both in the door and the window (which you will see in later pictures).  I used a technique that I had seen multiple tutorials for, both for miniatures and life size faux stained glass, where you swirl acrylic paint into glue that will dry clear and you end up with a stained glass affect.  In this picture the door is sitting next to my planning sketch for it.

This picture shows off the stained glass effect better with light behind it, of course in this scene there won't be light behind the door so the effect won't be quite as cool, but I still love how it turned out, and it really would look amazing in a setting where light could shine through it to really show it off! If you are interested in exactly how I did this I posted a video of working on the stained glass in the door on my Joanna's Dollhouse Diaries Facebook page.

You can see the finished window in this picture, but the main point of the picture was the bottom half of the picture.  I decided to use some Wilton cupcake liners that I happened to notice sitting in a box to make the pinwheels for my wreath.  The colors were perfect and I thought that the paper would work really well because it is a thinner paper, but still has some body to it.  In this picture I am scoring my cutting lines, I didn't want to mark them with pencil or pen since both sides of the paper will show, but I wanted to cut it with scissors not a craft knife so this gave me lines to follow to cut without leaving marks.  The pinwheels were made from .25" squares, which would be 12" in real life

Once I had a couple of each color pinwheels made I punched a hole in a piece of paper and glued the pinwheel around it and then cut off any paper that showed behind the pinwheels.  There may have been a better/easier way to do this, but this was what I came up with. Lol.  I really would have probably like more, smaller pinwheels, but this size works and honestly I'm not sure if I could make them any smaller, even at this size they drive me crazy (and yet I keep making projects with them... hmmm....)

And the finished wreath on the door.  Originally I was planning to hang it over the center of the window section of the door, but it ended up blending in too much and detracting from the effect of having the stained glass so I decided to hang it lower on the door instead

Making plantation shutters for the lower part of the window.  I basically had to figure this out on my own, based off of the one single picture I could find on Pinterest of someone making, probably, 1:12 scale shutters, in which the shutters were almost finished, but from what was shown I was able to figure out a plan of action.  I started by marking my edges and cut lines (which in the future I won't mark the lines all the way across where I am actually cutting because I think you could see the pencil a little on the edges of the finished product, but that's okay it was my first set)

I cut each louver by cutting along my cut lines and then cutting the sides about half the distance between them, and then shaped them by pushing the cut edges out at a slight angle.

Here they are in the window.  They aren't perfect, but I'm really happy with how they turned out for this project!

Once the door and window were done the next step was to put the siding on.  The siding is strips of cardstock cut to look like shingle siding.  I really didn't measure any of this as I cut, just kind of eyeballed it, because I wanted a more "casual" look to the shingle siding, and as I was looking up real life shingle siding I noticed that there were quite a few with unevenly sized shingles and decided that was the look I wanted to go with for this door.  I do have to say at this point I was not sure I completely liked everything about the door and how it was coming together.  I was starting to question my choice to not paint the window white with the door frame being white (I tried painting the window white on my test window when I was testing out the stained glass method and I just really didn't like it with the stained glass), but I knew there was a lot left to be done still and that I should just trust myself and keep going (plus I wasn't going to redo anything anyway, I would have just not liked the door that much lol), of course once everything was said and done I ended up loving how it all turned out together. {*phew*}

Next step was to make the portico to go over the door, I used scraps of the shingle siding strips for it's siding

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do for a roof, I wasn't sure I wanted regular shingles with the shingle siding, and I wanted a light color, but solid white didn't look right, and I definitely didn't want more tan/brown, but then while looking through some stacks of papers and cardstock to see if I could come up with any ideas I found some corrugated cardboard sheets, which I separated the actually corrugated part from the base and glued in onto the white cardstock I had already put on there and then dry brushed some white paint over it.  I gave me the lighter brighter color I needed along with some added texture and without it being to bright/stark of a white 

I added posts to hold up the portico, made my door mat and a small area rug to go under it and attached the wreath to the door

My next project was the house number plaque.  I wanted the background to have a pattern made with colored strips so I cut a piece of paper out to fit inside the plaque, then cut that into quarters and then laid individual strips of cardstock at an angle on each quarter and the cut the excess off

And the finished result.  I didn't get the two halves on the right side completely perfectly lined up, but honestly it wasn't really noticeable at all once I got the numbers on

Here it is with the numbers on.  I painted the numbers with white craft paint, which is really hard to get smooth on the plastic that these numbers are made from so I opted to pat it on and get a slightly textured finish to them with full coverage.

House number plaque attached to the facade.  As with all the doors, the house number is the month and year combined: June (06) and 2020 (20).  Next up was painting the bicycle...

I expected painting this bicycle (from True2Scale) to be really, really difficult, but it actually wasn't too bad. I did take a break from it at one point because while it ended up being easier than I expected it is still stressful to be be doing that much detail on something that small, which then kind of wears you out, which then means you start to have more trouble keeping all your lines perfect, so it did take me quite a bit of time to get it painted and finished, but it really wasn't as difficult as I expected. Lol.

With the bike done and glued in place, all that was left was to do the landscaping, but before I could do that I needed to get the step and the posts for the deck attached to the base so that I could landscape around them, so I glued them in place with the base under the deck, but only glued the step and posts to the base so that it could be pulled back out to work on it

Here are my gathered supplies for the landscaping, I decided I wanted this house to be on the beach and pulled out 2 different colors sand to choose from, a seashell (which obviously is way to huge for this scale... I actually crushed this shell up to make little tiny shell pieces to use around the step and deck posts,) as well as a little clump of dried grasses.

I decided to go with the lighter sand and glued in onto the base and added some of my crushed shell around the step and deck posts, and also added a clump of grasses growing next to the deck

Close up of the crushed shells

Close up of the beach grass

At this point the door could have been done, but I felt like it maybe just needed a little something else in the front right corner in front of the beach grass

I ended up making a couple little pieces of driftwood and they just finished it off perfectly! (I made them by cutting the bark off of a little piece of stick that I had leftover from the stick I used to make the logs for my winter scene from last year's series and then sanded it smooth)

Oh! I almost forgot..... did you find the "Hello" on this month?... It's on the doormat, which says "Hello Sunshine"

As I said this ended up working out perfectly timing wise for me to now clear off my workbench again, and get the bookstore back out and get back to work on that this week.  I'm trying to really work as much on this as I can and get as much done as possible while I still have all day every day to work on it (which I do have a couple bigger projects around the house that I had wanted to get done this spring while we were on quarantine, but at this point I'm not going to have time to get them done in the next couple weeks anyway so I'm just focusing on miniatures instead).  I will also probably be getting started a little bit on the ice cream shop pretty soon here, I don't want to slow down too much on the bookstore by starting another shop at the same time, but I also will most likely need some breaks from the bookstore, especially when I get to the point of making all the rest of the books, so I figure if I'm between monthly doors I'll start working on the building and more detailed plans for the ice cream shop so that once the bookstore is done I can just jump straight in to the interior of that shop, but I'll get more into that in another post...

This also finishes off the first of the display frames for the door series, so I really am at the point now that I need to make a definite decision on whether I am happy with the finish on that or whether I want to do anything else to it, and then actually permanently install the doors, but that also will be for another post....