cynthiahoweminiatures.com

We were out of town for a few days, attending a beautiful wedding in San Diego California. My friend Avis, from Daisy’s Dollhouse Miniatures daughter Jennifer was married in a lovely ceremony at the SD marina. I bet you thought that once again I had abandoned my resolve to maintain a blog, didn’t you??? Well, no, as a matter of fact the wedding reminded me of a project that I did late last year that i have not shared with you yet. Another dear friend had twin granddaughters who got married in the same year. I was given photos of the girls, and their gowns, bouquets, and cakes.
I made each of them a small box with a porcelain doll costumed in a replica of their gowns. The boxes were made on the back of picture frames, and included the doll, a lit chandelier and a cake table. Each scene had a fabulous replica of each girl’s cake, made by the oh so talented Carolyn Brown of Maple leaf Miniatures. WE also framed a photo of each couple for the wall, and reproduced their invitations to set on the table beside the cakes. The girls loved their special boxes, a wonderful Christmas gift from their awesome grandmother.
Here are photos. Consider next time there is a special occasion in your family, making a miniature keepsake to commemorate it. It can be displayed and appreciated long after the gown is put away, the flowers wilted, and the champagne bubbles gone!

I have to assume that if you are reading this blog, that you are a computer user.  I hope you are taking advantage of that asset in your miniature projects.  Every day, I find myself doing several miniature projects that involve my computer.  I wonder how we did minis before we all had these wonderful machines.  Oh yeah.. I remember now, a zillion trips to Kinko’s for xerox copies and reductions, right?

I have three beautiful granddaughters, all of whom are of the age that having a dollhouse was becoming a bit of a necessity.  Last Christmas, Larrell and I finished three Real Good Toys dollhouses and shipped them to each of the girls.  Rather than use ready made wallpaper and floor coverings, I created them all on my computer.  This was partly out of necessity, as the girls all chose very very bright colors for their decor.  But the other part was that I wanted really fun and unusual things that tied in with the furniture that I selected. I do a bit of digital scrap-booking and work a lot with paint shop pro, so I had tons and tons of images on hand from which to make wallpaper and borders.  But the most fun was making the flooring. Some rooms had “tile” floors, which were created and printed.  Most of the rooms had painted floors in bright colors with printed rugs that were decoupaged on.  My thinking is that this would be a bright and colorful toy for now, and in later years, these floor and wall coverings can be removed or covered with more sophisticated materials.

Here are couple of photos of just two of the rooms.  Between the three houses, there were 19 rooms all together..  Thank goodness for large capacity ink cartridges:

Printed Rug, borders, paper in child's room

printed tile floor and rug, wallpaper and borders

A couple of things you will want to remember when you do your own printed minis… use a spray sealer that has a UV protectant.  Preserve It is perfect. This will also strengthen your paper a bit so you don’t have to be quite as careful when applying it.  It’s most important to use the correct glue when applying.  YES glue or Grandmother Stovers’ are a must.   The thick paste sticks like crazy but has so very little water that you will have NO wrinkles in your paper as you apply it.

For the rugs on the painted floors, we painted with the same paints we used for the rest of the house, which was interior satin finish latex paint from the hardware store. It holds up much better over the long run than craft paints.  The rugs were printed and sealed, and then glued down with Yes glue.  Then, to protect the rugs and the paint both, a coat of satin mod podge was applied.    This is a good idea for your overall printed floors too.  It makes the floors a bit washable.  You can be sure that there will be a bit of something spilled, dripped or drawn in there eventually, so plan ahead!  Look closely and you will notice that some of the wallpaper border was cut apart and used on the furniture in the bedroom too.  The sky is the limit!  There are tons of websites out there with great graphics.  Check scrap-booking blogs too. Many offer free scrapping “kits” that contain just tons of fun coordinating elements, like bows, flowers, balloons, you name it.  Plenty of fodder to create walls and floors for dozens of rooms!

Have fun!  Till next time…

Cynthia

Today was one of those very exciting days when I get to cast, clean and fire the first castings from new molds.  This is how I check them before the masters are made to make sure that all the detail is there, and that there are no flaws that would be reproduced by the masters.   So today I got to meet Miss Felicity, Madeline, and Abagail, three lovely new lady dolls, a special new pair of arms for the 200 lady doll series, Katie, a darling new child doll, a new Santa and last but not least, Mr. Hooper, my new shopkeeper.  (Yes, my kids were Sesame Street Fans!) The new sculpts  are presently in the kiln, and I can’t wait to get them all painted, assembled and costumed.  We hope to have these molds available mid July.

I have been selling the handmade mulberry paper roses like crazy. I wonder what you all are doing with them?  I know some of them go on hats, and some in gardens, but I have to wonder what other interesting uses you have found for them, particularly some of the more unusual colored ones, like the chocolate brown and blue roses.  Even with all the colors available, I still find that I often need a color that I don’t have.  Did you know that these roses can be dyed?  Yep, just swirl them around for a few seconds in a weak Rit dye solution and allow to air dry.  You can dye them to match ribbons and trims on your hats perfectly. I’m constantly amazed at the things that can be transformed with a box of Rit.  Did you know that inexpensive plastic pearl beads can also be dyed???  Just toss them in and leave them for several hours.  I prefer the powdered dyes and try to have a box of each of the 26 colors on hand at all times.  And lets face it, 26 colors is not a whole lot, but guess what?  You can go here:

http://www.ritdye.com/Create+Custom+Color.9.lasso

and access the coolest blending chart from Rit that gives you the recipes for another 62 shades!!!  Of course, for minis you will be making small quantities, but just using the proportions and not necessarily the exact measurements will work just fine.  You can print out the chart and keep it handy for inspiration next time you are in the mood for a new color combination.

Till later,

Cynthia

I used to make my own cold porcelain. I’ve done it that way for years.  I hated the sticky mess, and the time over a hot stove.  (I don’t do that in order to eat… why would I do it to sculpt??)  I have just found a wonderful new product that I have ordered for my website.  It’s ready made cold porcelain.  Manufactured in the US, it is more affordable than the small packages I tried importing from Europe last year.  It has a great consistancy and comes in a tupper ware type container.  I hope to be receiving my shipment this coming week so I can add it to the cart.  While waiting, to inspire you, I have published my tutorial on making cold porcelain roses to the tutorial section of my site.  I have also posted the tutorial and recipe for making your own cold porcelain.  Give it a try.  Once you do, I bet you’ll want to try the readymade!  To access either of these free lessons, use the tutorial index here: TO TUTORIAL INDEX.

If you have visited my blog before you will notice a complete change here.  I originally started this blog to document progress on my Edwardian Ladies Shoppe project.  However, with very little time these days to work on my own projects, I found that my blog (as well as the ladies shop) was horribly neglected.  I decided that it was time to start over, with a new purpose.  Here, in this new blog, I hope to document and share with you the new projects, ideas, discoveries, products, tools and the like that seem to pop up almost daily in my life.  I just hope that I can find the self discipline to post daily (or even weekly???) about them!   Check back soon!  There are lots of new things going on around here.. and I’ll keep you posted on all of them!

Until next time!

Cynthia