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...
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