Catching Up

And in the blink of an eye, summer has been and gone and we're rapidly heading towards the Yule festivities. Where does the time go?

I confess I've made very little progress on the Coaching Inn over the last few months and so it's sat, neglected and forlorn on my dining room table gathering dust.

The birth of my first grandchild, and for a while the prolonged ill health of my husband kept me pre-occupied for a number of months, but thankfully things appear to have stabilized and I'm well stocked up on Granny cuddles, which means I can now try and make a little headway with all things miniature.

As I think I've said before, this is my first attempt at building and furnishing a dolls house from a kit, which has proved how shall I say......challenging!  I have now finally managed to construct most of the shell of the Inn but I didn't find following the instructions provided particularly easy and would suggest that perhaps it's time for an update - I mean, even with the best will in the world it's hard to make out what you should be doing from photocopied images like this;

or this;

which make it almost impossible to determine how things should look!  In frustration, I resorted to the internet with a view to looking what other people had done so confess my first bay window, now nearly completed, is a bit of a mishmash though I'm quite pleased at how it's progressing;

Btw, I ended up being able to buy Triple Thick Gloss here in the UK from Amazon, which I used to give the acetate an older, less clear, glass look.  I think in the process I also managed to stick a bit of dust and the odd cat hair or two in with it, but it all adds to the effect!

Recently I saw a wonderful free tutorial on making miniature brick slips by Jennifer Kennedy of Jennifer's Miniatures over on facebook;

 https://www.facebook.com/JennifersMiniatures/

 - so decided that rather than forking out a small fortune on bought brick slips, I'd make my own from polymer clay.

I realize that they're not perhaps truly Tudor looking,  but I rather like the irregularity and they're a lot stronger and more forgiving than bought bricks. The photo here makes them look a little brighter than they actually are in real life but I might eventually end up brushing a light paint wash over them to tone them down a bit more.

And that really is about it for now. I think we're all caught up and still not quite out of the brown phase!

Hopefully it won't take me quite so long to add my next blog entry......

A Little Bit of This and That

I've had a week or two away from doing anything miniature.  No particular reason other than it's been horribly hot and humid in my part of the world which has found me disinclined to faff around much. My work table is beneath a south facing window so it sometimes feels like I'm working in a bit of a greenhouse when the sun hits our garden. The last couple of days however have been a little cooler so I decided to press on and build the chimneys, one of which is absolutely huge;

 and make a start on one of the bow windows which will be situated on the ground floor. I'm not a great fan of the acetate which came with the kit - it's very thin and in a couple of places the printed lattice pattern looks to have rubbed off, so I decided to use it as a template and originally bought some lead effect paint, which proved to be both messy and unconvincing.  Searching on the internet I came across a couple of tutorials which then convinced me to bite the bullet and purchase some 2mm lead strip tape in an antique finish, and also some 1mm acetate, strong enough to take the weight of the lead strips.

Fortunately the lead strips have a self adhesive backing which enabled me to lay them directly onto the acetate without making too much of a mess, but it's almost impossible to get a completely straight line with them as the lead is so soft and bendy.  That doesn't really matter though as the Inn is a tudor design and the slight waves kind of add to it's charm.

The photo above isn't that great but you get an idea of how it's all beginning to take shape. I'm toying with the idea of either using some Triple Thick brush on gloss, some clear nail varnish, or some Mod Podge gloss over the top of the windows, which will hopefully secure the lead further to the acetate and create more of an old tudor glass effect.  I watched a video over on YouTube which used Triple Thick and the effect was really convincing.  I'm not entirely sure how easy it is to get that in the UK yet though.

Progress on the rest of the house has been somewhat hampered by one of my cats taking up almost permanent residence there lately.

A couple of weeks ago he brought home a baby bird which he proudly presented to me in our living room.  Fortunately he's an old cat and has had some of his teeth removed so the bird was unharmed and I was able to return it outside to it's very frantic mother, who ever since has dive bombed both myself and our cat each time we set foot outside the back door.  The cat has now taken to hiding in the dolls house whenever Mama blackbird starts making a racket outside - which is almost all of the time at the moment as her brood starts to leave the nest.  I'm seriously considering drawing up a rental agreement for him soon!