A New Year Long Series

Now that I'm all caught up with posts of last year's series, I think it's time to talk about the series I will be working on this year. (which actually kind of started last year but literally in the last week of the year, so....). I'm tentatively calling it "A Year Of Doors" (which might stick or might get changed, I don't know yet lol).

  I really like the idea of having a series that was made up of small projects that I could (at least in theory) work on and finish all in one weekend/a day or two, and thought I might like to do another similar series.  The inspiration for this series actually comes from a couple different places.  One of which is one of my Pinterest boards that I had been pinning to for a while, but wasn't sure I'd ever really be able to use most of the ideas.  I love making wreaths, and decorating the front door and around it on our porch for various seasons and holidays, and I had been pinning wreath ideas for quite some while, but of course I only have limited doors in my real house (and limited storage space for wreaths) and I pretty much already have wreaths for everything. I don't think I'll be getting rid of any of them anytime soon and changing them out for a different one, because I still really like them all and they are all still in good shape, so it doesn't look promising for much full size wreath making in the near future.  The other inspiration was that last spring we visited my aunt and uncle in Georgia who live in the Atlanta area and one of the things we did while we were there was to spend part of a day looking for some of the installations for the Atlanta street art project Tiny Doors ATL.  Which is just what it sounds like tiny (dollhouse sized) doors in various location around the city. Which were so cute and awesome! We weren't able to see all of them, but we definitely plan on taking a day to find as many of the rest as we can next time we are down that way!.

  So towards the end of the year, between Christmas and New Years as I was starting to think about this year, the idea came to me to do a series of tiny doors of my own. I wanted to have another series of quick little projects, and also it would give me an opportunity to make some of the wreath ideas I had saved on Pinterest.

I first thought to just do holidays, but then I decided I would do one for each month and work on them one at a time throughout the year in the month they represented. (which truth be told it's now mid April and I've yet to completely finish any of them, but I'm hoping to take some time out later this week or next week and get caught up lol).  I debated a bit about what scale I wanted to do them in, I knew I didn't probably want to go as big as 1:12 just for the sake of not taking up so much room to display them all together when they are completed, but I did consider if I wanted to do them in 1:24 scale to be a little bigger and different than my typical 1:48 scale work.  In the end I did decide to just stick with quarter scale, with really two major reasons for making that choice.  For one, along with all the other planning decisions, I was contemplating how they would be displayed when finished, keep in mind they are just going to be front doors and the surrounding facade/house front area so they needed to be mounted in or on something for display.  I toyed with the idea of frames and a couple other things (frames being the leader) until I came across a piece I had purchased quite a while ago at Michael's, thinking it would be good to do some sort of miniature scenes in.  It is an unfinished wood tray/shadow box with 6 compartments and I decided that it would be perfect for the doors. (I do have to get a second one though since there will be 12 doors)  The size of each compartment pretty much limited me to 1:48, but along with that the other main factor that played a role in the choice was that I would be able to possibly use items/supplies I already had.

So once all that was settled I started looking for more specific ideas for each door scene.  I wanted to kind of have a basic idea of what each month was going to be from the get go so that I could plan ahead a bit and make sure each door was different and unique. (which actually was another thing I took a little time debating.  I wasn't sure at first if I wanted all the doors the same and the decor just changed for each month or if I wanted each one completely unique, obviously I decided on each one unique.... I thought certain decorations would look better with certain style and colors and also couldn't decide what one style of door/facade I would want).  I decided to get started on the project right away and go ahead and do the December door in December 2019 so that the series would be completed by the end of November this year so that if I wanted to use it for the miniature show I participate in in December it would be ready to go...... and also because I was excited about it and wanted to get started right away..... And I did get started on it right away, but did not get very far immediately because I needed to get a few things for it, and then as typically happens to me I ended up getting wrapped up in other things and have only sat down to try to work on it again for a couple minutes here and there since then.  Of course now its April and I'm 4-5 months behind on the project, but we're also in the middle of a global pandemic and all supposed to be staying home as much as possible and social distancing, so, what better time to devote a few days to getting caught up. (good thing they are quick projects haha).  But for this post, if you've made it this far with practically no pictures, here's a few quick sketches I did for the plans for the first few doors, which should be fun to see how much changes in the actual making of the door.... (Also these aren't the best quality images for viewing over screen because the original sketches were just pencil on paper.... I did copy them and color them in some, partly to get a better idea of how the colors I planned actually look and partly to give a better idea for people seeing them on here or through other types of digital media.  If you click on the picture to view it full size it might make the original sketches a bit easier to see, but if not than just ignore them and enjoy the colored ones lol....)

I of course also am planning to finish Whimsy Street Shopping District this year as well, and am planning to get back to working steadily on the bookstore within the next month or two, but I really want to get this series caught up first....

{Four Seasons} Spring: Garden Tea Party

*the 4th project in my Four Seasons series, to see posts about the other three click here, here, or here

This post is probably going to be a lot more picture heavy than for the last 3.  I seemed to have taken a lot more pictures of this one, both as I was working on it and after it was completed, and then I also did a little photo shoot with it the other day, because it was a nice day out and after being at home for probably 3 weeks straight now with only a couple grocery store trips, and a couple trips to a local trail/park to take our dogs for walks, I felt like actually getting a little dolled up and taking some goofy pictures. (I actually do have plans to do another photo shoot wit this one with the little girl that I babysit for and setup a little tea party and have this one as one of the teacups on the table, but obviously that won't be happening anytime soon now).

When planning this project I kind of did it in two phases.... first planning a color scheme and general feel that I wanted to it and then doing a little research to make sure I was right about when certain flowers would be in bloom so that at least for the most part, what is in bloom at the same time in the miniature garden would actually be in bloom at the same time in real life. (Or at least close enough to not be completely ridiculous).  My original design on paper for the scene ended up not quite fitting well in actuality when I started to mock it up on the actual base, but the basic design didn't really change I just had to have a bit less in the front parts or the garden then I originally thought.  I had thought to have some low boxwood borders around the front edges of the plantings, but that didn't end up looking good/fitting well.  I also went ahead and put the table and chairs I had gotten for it together early on so that I could make sure I was leaving enough room for them while planning plantings and such

Once I had the basic plan I started making the plants for the garden.  While none of the plants were difficult to make they are somewhat time consuming, and (to me anyway) kind of tedious so I find I have trouble working on it for too long a stretch of time without taking a break from it.  I started with just making a few of each type to mock up one side a little more fully and then went from there.  The tall boxwood hedge along the back is foam core board bent into a curve and covered with green decorative sand from Dollar Tree. The hydrangea bushes are the material sold in the model railroad/diorama section for making bushes, trees, etc. and the hydrangea flowers themselves are tiny punched holes that are shaped and then glued to a tiny foam ball. The rose bushes are the same "bush" as the hydrangeas just shaped differently and the roses were made from pre-cut flowers kits that I had leftover from making "Willow: Florist and Garden Shop". The allium are little foam balls covered in a fine sand and painted, with a wire stem and leftover leaves from a different leftover flower kit to finish them off.

Once I had a better idea of how the garden would look more filled out with flowers I started playing around with different options for other garden decor.  I ended up putting the larger turquoise planters (which are actually beads from Hobby Lobby) with the 'iron orbs" (beads from Michael's) in them towards the back of the sides and didn't actually decide about what to put in the front until I was almost done with the whole thing.

With that decision made and the flowers finished up I glued some black decorative sand/fine gravel around the base of the plantings as mulch

With the plantings and mulch done it was time to set the table and chairs aside for the moment and glue the garden into the teacup. Oh and at some point in there I also covered the grass area with green ground foam

While the glue was drying, I got to work on the table and chairs.  I spray painted them white and made a tablecloth for it by printing a scaled down floral design onto white cotton fabric.  Like with the blankets for the fall picnic, I glued aluminum foil to the back of the table cloth to help it drape realistically (this time though I did make the foil slightly smaller than the fabric and glue the edges in a hem over it since I wasn't sure if being on the table like that if the edges of the back might show). I glued a tiny pink doily in the center and then moved on to the table settings

Like with all the pieces in this series there had to be a miniature version of the tea cup in it so I painted some teacups and saucers I had left over from another project to match.  I then printed plates for the place settings and plates to use to make a 3 tier server, on which I put (from top tier to bottom) Petit Fours, cupcakes with icing piped to look like flowers, and croissant sandwiches (I again used tiny stick on jewels from the scrapbooking department for the bread). I didn't end up putting anything else on the table (like utensils, tea pot, or floral arrangement or anything), partly because I would have had to probably buy something else, and partly because there was already a lot going on in this scene so I didn't want it to start getting too visually cluttered.

At that point I thought I was done, and even started taking "'finished" pictures, but there was just something about it that didn't seem quite right to me, so I ended up painting the black mulch dark brown, and it just made the garden pop so much more. (I real life I prefer black mulch so that's what I was planning on going with for this miniature, but it just wasn't quite right)

And then after a little more looking at it I decided I did in fact want something at the front of the garden on each side of the opening and went with distressed white low planters (beads again, that I painted) with round boxwoods in them.

And now for all the random finished photos, detail photos, and a couple photos from my silly little photo shoot the other day.

{Four Season} Winter:Snow Tubing and S'mores

*this is the 3rd part of a 4 part series.... check out the first two here and here

Okay, as I said at the end of my last post, after searching Pinterest for winter outdoor party ideas I came up with the idea of a snow tubing and S'mores party, but the problem was going to be if that would actually be make-able.  My biggest issue really was what I was going to use as the base.  A snow tube was the obvious, but like the picnic basket I would have to find a basically miniature version of it.  It dawned on me that maybe I could find a drink holder pool float that was just a basic tube, but for a while it didn't look like I was going to be able to find one.  They were all some sort of {cool if you're actually using them in a pool for your drink} shape, or they had summery/tropical designs on them, and/or were more than I wanted to pay for something that I wasn't completely sure would really work even if I found one.  But then good old Dollar Tree came through for me.  I found online that they had solid color ones and that one of the colors would be perfect for a winter theme, but by this point it was probably September and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find one anymore... I did have to go to a couple different Dollar Trees in my area but I did find them and as I thought the blue/green color was perfect.  Next was to figure out if an inflated item would even work for a project like this.  At one point I was wondering if I'd have to figure out some way to fill it with resin or something, but actually after blowing it up and stuffing a half of a foam ball in the middle (I had decided that would work well for support for the ''snow" base that would be going on top), and leaving it to sit like that for a while (it was probably at least a week) and seeing that it seemed to be holding the air well I abandoned the idea of filling it with anything other than air (I did make sure to leave the air valve accessible though when the project was finished so that more air could be put in periodically if needed over time) .

While I was testing the sustainability of the inflation I started working on figuring out the fire pit and snow tubes, since that was the majority of the scene.  I also went through several rounds of trial and error with the snow tubes.... at first I thought maybe I could find beads that would be the right size and shape, and then when I didn't I thought maybe I could partially flatten some Pony beads with my iron, but then realized that while it kind of worked shape wise they were still way too small.  I ended up somehow thinking to try punching circles out of paper, punching another hole out of the center of them and shaping them to form one half of the tube, then gluing 2 together around the edges.  That actually worked really well.  If you look too closely into the inside of the center you can tell that it's just open in there, but I can live with that, and honestly unless you do look really closely its not that obvious.  For the fire pit I decided to just go with a metal ring (aluminum foil folded over a couple times to give it a little more strength and glued into a circle and painted black) sitting on bricks (which I still have some leftover from my first 1:48 scale project the North Pole Tea Room).  I also started figuring out the log benches to go around the fire pit during this time and ended up using my miniature tabletop chop saw to cut a stick from my yard into logs and then to split them into benches, which also sit on bricks.

Once I was sure of the drink float as a snow tube for the base I had to make a snowy ground on the top of it for the scene.  There definitely wasn't going to be room to just have the scene in the center of the tube so I used air dry clay to make a shape for the ground and then covered it with a layer of white decorative sand from Dollar Tree with a little bit of white glitter mixed in.

While that was drying I started working on the fire in the fire pit.  I have to say it's the first time I've really tried to make a fake, but realistic looking fire for any type of craft project much less in this small a scale, and I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I looked for ideas online for how to do it and ended up deciding to try making the flames with hot glue and painting them with glass paint (which I then decided was too expensive so I watered down regular craft paint with spray landscape glue to use instead.)  I used more pieces of a smaller section of the stick I had cut the benches from for the fire's logs and black craft paint to char parts of them.

With the base, fire pit, benches, and snow tubes done that only left the makings for s'mores.... marshmallows on roasting sticks, chocolate bars, and graham crackers.  The marshmallows are seed beads painted matte white and glued onto pieces of thin wire.  The chocolate bars I made from clay, and the graham crackers I cut from brown card stock and embossed a bit (not that you can probably really tell with them in the tray/bucket, but oh well haha).  The tray/bucket/serving dish/whatever that the chocolate and graham crackers are in I made from some adhesive copper stripping that I have (it's meant to be used for stained glass design, but I got it to use as copper flashing on a project and its a pretty big roll of it, so I imagine I will have it to use for other stuff for quite a while...). I gave it the hammered look by texturing it with my pointed end embossing stylus.

Once I had everything glued in place I dabbed a little more of the "snow" up around the edges of everything to make it look like it is really sitting down into the snow, not just somehow floating on top of it.

Sadly I don't seem to have any good (in other words not sitting on my messy workbench) pictures of this one finished other than the calendar ones I took the other day so I suppose I will have to give it it's own photo shoot sometime soon too.... not quite sure how I'll stage that yet, but maybe inspiration will strike before I get around to actually doing it.

I think it's likely that at least part of the reason I didn't get more pictures of this one finished is because I moved pretty quickly into working on the Spring miniature and that one was probably the most involved/elaborate of all of them to make in some ways, and I needed to not take too long getting it done since the series was going to be in the miniatures show I participate in every year in December.  And that is what my next post will be...... the making of the garden tea party in a teacup

{Four Seasons} Autumn: "Welcome Fall" Picnic

*the one were one little project turned into two, which turned into a series

Just as I was finishing up the finishing touches on my backyard cookout in a grill miniature, I happened to be at ACMoore and came across an unfinished small decorative basket that looked like a miniature picnic basket, which of course then just had to have a miniature picnic scene in it.  I was originally going to do a springy or summery picnic in it, but then before I had really figured out theme/color scheme/materials and such I remembered a "'Welcome Fall' Picnic" party we had had in our side yard a few years before and thought it would be really cute to recreate in 1:48 scale.  So I went through my pictures until I found some good ones to work from and got started pretty much right away.

I started by "staining" the little picnic basket (actually just colored it with marker and then used a touch of a matching color paint in some of the areas that I just couldn't get to with the marker.  I also glued the lid into an upright position because I needed a fence in the background of this scene.  I then filled the cavity of the basket with foam and glued on a cut out piece of the same artificial grass that I used for the base of the backyard cookout.

I think the very first thing I made for this scene though was the pallet table.  I did make the pallet myself rather than from a kit, partly because I wanted to start working on it right away and partly to get the exact look I wanted.  The pallet itself is make from balsa wood and painted to match the weathered color of the real life pallet table and the table's legs are the ends of decorative toothpicks (which if you've read many of my other blog posts you will know I use A LOT for a variety of different miniature bits and pieces).

The next thing I worked on was what I was afraid was going to be that most difficult part of the whole project (which actually ended up not really being that bad), the teeny tiny pinwheels for the flower arrangement on the table.  I had ordered a milk jug from Stewart Dollhouse Creations (along with a few basket kits, but I'll get to them in a minute) to put the arrangement in, and made some sunflowers using a tiny star shaped hole punch and yellow cardstock, but I was actually really dreading those pinwheels, but also determined that I really really needed them.  I took apart a couple of the real life ones that I still had stored with my party supplies and scanned them in and reduced them down to scale and printed them out, cut them out, and {very delicately} folded the tips over and glued them down in the middle to make little pinwheels.  As I said definitely didn't end up being a difficult as I thought it would be.  The whole thing is larger in scale than the arrangement from the real life party was but that couldn't really be helped. lol

After getting the table and the floral arrangement done the project actually got put aside for a while and by the time I actually got back to it it was actually Fall. Once I did get back to working on it, it went pretty quickly though. I made a fence section from balsa wood, and made the "Welcome Fall" banner with paper printed with miniaturized versions of the patterned papers the pinwheels were made from.  The real life banner was fabric, but obviously that wouldn't have really been doable for this scale so paper it was.  I painted the letters on myself to mimic the original banner.  The "blankets" on the ground under the table and hay bales in the real life party were outdoor type vinyl tablecloths, so to mimic that I found fabric with similar looking print and cut them out and coated them with either mod podge or glue (I honestly don't remember now which I used, but either should work... I feel like I used the tacky glue though for this) to give it the shinier vinyl look.  The real life party had fleece blankets thrown over the hay bales for seating so I made mine for the miniature with matching (but smaller scale) cotton fabric, which I glued aluminum foil to the back of to hold a realistic shape/drape when laid over the bales.  Which FYI worked fabulously and made it so easy, so I highly suggest it as long as only one side of the fabric will be visible.  The hay bales themselves almost stumped me.  I couldn't really find any to buy that were the right size (normally I would just use O scale hay bales but the only ones I could find were a larger size bale and ones in smaller scales were too small). I went through a couple different ideas for how I might easily make my own and eventually decided to try making them from floral foam (like the green type you'd use for an artificial flower arrangement) and painting them hay colored.  I'm not sure the color is 100% spot on, but it was a close as I could get it with what I had available to use at the time and I was afraid to mess with them too much and end up having to start all over again.  Once I draped the "blankets" over them I was really happy with how they turned out.  I also put together the two 1:48 scale picnic baskets and one oval basket kits I had gotten and stained/painted them to match the baskets I used as decor at the party.  The oval basket I filled with red and yellow landscape/brush/bush material (from the model railroad/diorama department) to mimic mums.  A Mason jar with striped "straws" (little pieces of white wire that I painted stripes on), and some glasses made from clear seed beads went on top of the picnic baskets.

Once all the larger components were finished all I had left was to make the food.  The real party had grilled cheese and bacon on apple bread tea sandwiches, bacon cheddar mini quiches, apple pie cookies, apple blondies, and caramel apple bites with apple cider to wash it all down.  This mini version had the sandwiches, quiches, and apple blondies, and apple cider. I made the trays the sandwiches and quiches were in/on from basswood and made the sandwiches from tiny triangles of balsa wood and paint, and the quiches were seed beads and paint.  The cake stand for the blondies was a tiny brad from the scrapbooking section with a tiny roll of paper to make the base a little more substantial.  The blondies themselves were little squares of balsa with a little paint.  For the apple cider I ended up ordering another lemonade kit from Stewart Dollhouse Creations but instead of doing lemonade in the pitcher I made it apple cider colored.  The napkins are cut from the napkins we actually used for the real party.

And that finished up the fall picnic miniature.  I have yet to do a "cool" photo shoot with this one sitting on the life size picnic baskets like I plan too (gotta have my husband get the baskets out of the basement, he knows where they are and I do not.... but hey maybe that would be a good project for during quarantine... lol).  But I did at least take some photos of it finished. And I made a composite with a picture of the miniature and the picture of the real life event for comparison.  I'm really happy with how close they are.

At some point in the planning/working process of this miniature I decided that since I already had summer and fall outdoor entertaining themed miniatures, that I needed one for each season, and to keep with the theme it needed to be housed in something that was a part of the scene.  I immediately thought to do a garden tea party in a teacup for spring, but winter took a little bit of thinking to come up with.  After searching Pinterest for winter outdoor party ideas I finally came up with an idea, but figuring out if I could make it work took a little extra time..... and that will be a story for my next post, which will be all about "Winter: Snow Tubing and S'more's".....