It's time to bring you up to date on progress before this silly bronchitis interfered with things. I decided to concentrate on the kitchen, first of all adding the handle to the door. Then I worked on the kitchen sink unit, putting the tap on and the little edging on the shelves at the side. So for the fair I would have had the kitchen basically finished except for the pantry.
The tiles behind the stove section are actually white, though they look blue in this photo.
Starting on the accessories, I made two cookbooks. I'm not sure whether they'll go on the little shelves beside the sink or on the small shelf beside the stove bench on the other side of the room. These are readable books, with each of their pages having recipes on them.
Fortunately when I went googling for a calendar I quickly found one that suited the room really well. It took a bit of experimentation to print it out small enough but I got there. I have it showing the month of May 2013 since that will be the month it was meant to be completed - maybe I'll remove that page and leave it for the month it
does get finished.
No kitchen is complete without some kitchen utensils and here they are
And two cutting boards from a set of 3 (from sdk miniatures).
And a breadbox (kit from
mj miniatures)
There is a pewter kettle but I'm looking for one with a more modern profile. And I have some pretty crockery to fill the cupboards and the kitchen is complete except for the cornices. The pantry will have shelves filled with some groceries - I would have put a door on it and kept it closed for the fair but now will go ahead and do it properly.
The bathroom suite arrived on the Thursday before the Fair. Below are all the things in place - rather a tight fit in such a tiny space. This is the best arrangement I could come up with, if I didn't want the toilet right opposite the doorway, which I don't like. There is just enough room for a mirror on the wall, maybe a little shelf for toiletries, and a small rack for towels.
Since then I have made a little toilet roll, winding some facial tissue around a piece of wire then inserting it into a small piece of balsa that I shaped and painted. That was the easy part - getting it to stick to the wall was the hard part, and it became quite squashed while I held it until the super glue took hold. But it has resumed most of its shape now.
The lights for the attic floor bedrooms didn't arrive until the Thursday either, so they have not been installed yet.
I made a camellia bush for outside the lounge room bay window. I wanted it to be taller than usually results from planting the stems directly into the soil, so I made an armature from wires as though I was making a tree. I covered the trunk of this armature with texture paste, and when that was dry I painted it with a couple of shades of brown. Then I started adding the branches of leaves and flowers that I had previously assembled from kits that I bought from
sdk miniatures. I hooked the ends of the wires around the trunk and stuck them (and me) with superglue. In this photo you can see the start of this process.
After putting on a few of the leaves I decided to space out the flowers and buds first, and see how many extra leaf branches I would need to make up from another kit that I had.
Being so much larger than the usual bush I expected it to take extra kits and extra leaf pages, and of course it did. But I am really happy with the results.
It's not quite as tall as I would have liked at first, just 4 inches from the roots to the very top, but I went for a good thickness of branches and flowers rather than spread them out for extra height.
While I've been so ill I haven't been able to do anything that requires much effort so when I can I've also been making an hydrangea bush. I used two kits to do this one because again I wanted a fairly substantial shrub rather than two smaller ones.
Each of these flowers are made up of around 25 little florets, measuring about 1mm before you rub them with the little ball tool on the mouse pad. This makes them even tinier - about 0.5mm, and they are glued all around the small bead that has been glued to the wire beforehand. You can see one of the petals/florets on my finger below, and I am holding a flower in progress of construction.
And here is the completed bush. It measures 3 1/2 inches across.
I went to the doctor again today because I'm still not improving much. I don't see this house being finished completely before the end of June, if you consider cornices, skirting boards and shingling are all pretty big jobs.. Then there are the curtains. I have bought a lot of the furniture and have some of the accessories but there are quite a lot of accessories still required.
