{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!

{Whimsy Street Shopping District} The Final Shop: Introducing "JellyBean's Ice Cream and Delights"

 Allow me to formally introduce the final shop of the 1000 block of Whimsy Street, Miniburg, VA (drum roll please...........) "JellyBean's Ice Cream and Delights", an ice cream shop in an ice cream carton building.  I actually officially started work on the shop towards the end of July (and started writing a post about it, that apparently didn't get published...), but didn't really get too far before putting it aside for my Christmas Crafting in July week, and then didn't really end up getting much in the way of miniatures done in August, but after getting my August door done I got back to work on this shop and it is coming along actually really quickly (and easily  it's kind of making me worries, lol, I never have projects go this smoothly...). As a matter of fact I think there is a good chance that I could get it finished by the end of this weekend, but if not it will definitely be done by the end of the month.

*I will probably break this shop up into 3-4 posts though regardless of when I actually get it completed so that I can really give all the different aspects of it the attention they deserve and not have one insanely massively long post....

The Planning:

This shop is in a way named after my husband.  His initials are JDB, which if you say them fast enough sounds like jelly bean (or at least does when I say it) so "JellyBean" is one of my nick names for him.  So, of course, when I was brainstorming names for all the shops in my earliest planning stages it was one of the first stores I named.  What better for the name for an ice cream shop on Whimsy street? It was cute, whimsical, and has personal meaning.

This shop has also changed quite a bit from the original plans for it. For one, I had thought I would use an actual ice cream carton for the building, but ended up going with a paper mache box decorated to look like an ice cream carton for 3 main reasons: 1. I wanted a completely generic exterior with no brand visible and a simple exterior that wouldn't distract from the interior, or the shop name and such on the outside. 2. I wasn't sure I could really get it clean enough to not have any remaining residue from the ice cream. 3. I wasn't sure I could find quite the right size.

I didn't really have a clear idea of my color scheme in my original plans, but I did have plans for some of the interior design elements (flooring, etc.), but as I was finishing up the bookstore and getting ready to get started on the ice cream shop, and getting to the point that I really needed to start making color decisions so I could get to work, I was going through some scrapbook papers and cardstock that needed to be sorted and put away and came across one that ended up not only giving my my color scheme (dark pink, light orange, mint, and navy blue as an accent color), but also ended up changing some other interior elements. (what I had originally planned would not have worked right with the new "look" at all)

The Structure/Building:

To make the paper mache box look like an ice cream carton I spray painted it with a gloss finish color (its actually the same spray paint I used for the displays for the door series), then added a striped scrapbook paper around the edge of the lid. A decoratively shape cardstock tag, with door and windows cut out, serves as both a design element of the ice cream carton and to frame the door and windows.  Letter stickers spell out "ICE CREAM" on the front of the carton. 

For the door I used the piece I had cut out to make the opening for the door.  This way it fit both the opening and the curve of the wall perfectly.  I haven't attached the door to the building yet, partly to protect the door and partly so I have at least a little access to the interior from the front of the building still.  I am so in love with how the door turned out though! Which, I know sounds funny to say that about a door, but I love little details that really bring scene to life and tie in with a theme, and I was able to get two elements on this door that fit that bill.  The first was the door handle, which is an ice cream scoop shape!  I made the handle from a tiny tiny punched piece of cardstock glued to the tip of a toothpick (which I sanded a little flatter/thinner on one side of the tip), with two small seed beads as the posts/brackets/whatever they would be called?).  And of course I spray painted the ice cream scoop part of the handle silver.

The other element was the ice cream shaped open sign.  I cut the scoop of ice cream shape from a piece of pink cardstock and used craft paint and pencil to add the details and lettering.  I wanted it to look like it was hanging from a suction cup on the door glass so I did something that doesn't happen a whole lot with miniatures (especially in this scale), and broke out my hot glue gun.  I placed the tiniest dot on the top edge of the sign and pulled it out into a string and held it until it cooled to make the string part of the hanger.  Because the "glass" of the door is actually a thin plastic I, of course, couldn't put hot glue directly on it, so I used sticker paper backing to put a little dollop of hot glue on top of the string of glue to make the suction cup.  I then used my regular tacky glue to attached the whole thing to the door once the hot glue had cooled.

  For the inside of the door I just used pieces of an adhesive metal sheet for a push plate and kick plate.

I knew that my scrapbook paper was not only going to be my color scheme inspiration but that I wanted to use it as a wallpaper on one side of the shop as a statement wall.  The floor I made by scoring "grout" lines into cardstock cut to the shape of the building, and then coating it with a coat of gloss mod podge.  The rest of the interior is just the same paint as the exterior.

And that is where I will leave off for now..... in my next post I will talk about the ice cream and other delights that will be in the shop, but for now I'm going to get off my computer and get to work on the last few things I still need to do/make for this shop so that I can possibly have it finished in the next couple days!

{Hello! : A Year Of Doors} August

Yes, Yes, I know it's not August any more, but I did actually finish the august door in August.... barely (I finished it on the 30th)... I'm just a little behind on blog posts.  I did post pictures of it on Facebook when it was done, but hadn't gotten a chance to post it here until now.  I also forgot to really take many pictures while I was working on it (except I have a few of making the porch railing), so it wont' be a long post. Lol.

This was one of the months, that from the earliest planning stages, I was most excited for, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.  It's definitely one of my favorites (if not my top favorite) so far.  (Although, I'm pretty excited for the rest of the months I have left.)

I had such a clear picture in my head of how this would look (and also ended up being so late in the month working on it) that I didn't actually do a planning sketch for this one (although I will probably end up doing one after the fact, just ot have it to keep with the others). And, as I said, I didn't take many pictures while making it so this will be more about the details than the actual making of.  So instead of ending with the finished picture like I normally do, let's start with it:

I did actually have a few more pictures of the process of making it than I thought so to start with: putting on the siding. The clapboard siding is strips of pink cardstock glued to a foam core base/wall

Starting to figure out how I'm going to so the porch railing.  I had been thinking about buying a premade railing, but had never completely decided, and of course by the time I actually got to work on it, it was so late in the month that I didn't want to wait for something to be delivered anyway, so I did decide to make my own.  I could have just used plain square dowel for it, but I decided to try using the turned end of fancy toothpicks.

The ends of the toothpicks were just the perfect size, so I glued them between two square dowel pieces and then cut two posts out of slightly bigger square dowel.

Checking the size and look of the railing after painting it white

All of the decor just sitting in place to check the layout

And with the railing held in front

To attach the porch swing I poked hole through the porch roof and used eye pins (from the jewelry making supplies) as "screw eyes" to hang the chains from. The top of the roof piece ends up looking like a bit of a hot mess doing it this way, but it won't be seen anyway and it is nice and secure and at no risk of falling out eventually, lol.

 

So now on to close ups of the details..... porch rocker with a side table with a picture and 2 glasses of lemonade.  Because you can't have an August porch without lemonade!

The kit for the porch swing cam with the forms for the seat cushion and bolster pillows, I just covered them with fabric.  I also added a book (which was leftover from The Librarian and The Bookworm Used Books), because you also can't have an August front porch without a little reading.... especially on a porch swing!

The wreath is tiny butterflies punched from scrapbook papers and details added with paint.  The house numbers are plastic numbers I spray painted with an oil rubbed bronze spray paint. 

The door mat for this month is a little different than most of the others, I wanted something with a more "farmhouse" look to it, so I used some tiny braided trim that I had (it was actually meant/sold as a scrapbooking embellishment) and glued it to a piece of paper to make an oval (-ish... it ended up a little rounder than I meant it to) shape.

And of course, can't forget the "hello".  This one I wrote on a piece of paper with an ultra fine tip sharpie and then hand cut with a craft knife to look like a flat metal sign, and then hung it above the decorative flower element, which also started life as a scrapbooking/paper crafting embellishment.

The one thing I do still need to do that I haven't done yet is finish off the under porch area.  The foam core board needs to be painted to look like a foundation and then I need to decide if I'm going to try to put lattice under the porch or just make posts for it.... I also don't have room for stairs since the porch takes up the whole depth of the display, so I need to figure out if there's a way I can give the impression of the stairs being there without it being 3 dimensional and with me still being satisfied with it, or whether I'd be happier just leaving it as is.

And then one last little adjustment.... after looking at it for a day, I did decide to raise the porch swing.  It makes it pretty high in scale, but you just couldn't really see it well shoved behind the railing (and I do mean shoved, it technically didn't quite fit, but I made it fit lol), and I kind of think it looks more "right" higher even though it was actually more "right" at the height I had it before.  But that happens sometimes in miniatures, especially small scales like this, that it looks more pleasing to the eye to actually be a bit out of scale.

Oh, and I don't  think I talked about the windows any, so last, but not least..... they are plastic windows that I painted white and the curtains behind them are cut from a scrapbook paper I found at hobby lobby that has a crinkled tissue paper layer on one side..... makes the perfect quarter scale curtains.... although probably only if you're viewing them from one side... although you might be able to separate the crinkled tissue paper layer from the backing paper and use them as sheers that both sides of the window would be visible....