We interrupt this programme......

for a very important announcement! Work on the Fairfield has come to a halt for a short time.  To see why, click here .  Please come and visit and leave a comment - it's great to have 'company'!

Some bits for the bathroom

I'ts fun to add some little bits that bring those empty rooms to life, isn't it?  I have thought long and hard about how to store things in the bathroom and couldn't find anything much on the internet.  I searched through my odds and ends and came up with some balsa wood and some 18ct Aida cloth.  I fiddled around and made this little shelf unit that fits beside the handbasin.  It's made from the balsa wood, covered with the aida cloth and trimmed with strands of thread from the aida cloth plaited together.  Then the whole thing is painted with Regency White paint, to match the trims.  I made little toilet rolls from strips cut from Kleenex tissues, and put those on the bottom shelf, then cut towels from some baby wash cloths to fill the top two shelves.  I also cut a couple of towels, hand towels and a mat from the blue wash cloth but don't have anything to hang the towels from yet.  I'll need to search through my jewellery findings to see if I have something suitable to use to make towel racks and rings from.  At the moment I just have them draped over the bath and handbasin.

I'm not sure whether the baby wash cloths are too out-of-scale for this house.  What do you think?

Side view of shelves

Showing contents of shelves

I won't be leaving the shelves in this position, blocking the handbasin.  They'll sit on the other side, but I do think they are a necessary item in the bathroom.  Actually when it is on the other side of the hand basin you won't see the toilet rolls very well, which is a shame after all the work I put into them - I'll probably have to make some more of them :)

Now I need a wall unit of some kind, or something to hold toothbrushes, deodorant, bandaids etc.  And a little shelf near the bath for soap and bottles.

I've also made some shelves for the pantry; just waiting now for some items I've ordered to arrive, plus I have some printies to make up.  I already have some cans to put in but want to wait and put things in once I have more items.

And I've made some books for the book shelves - photos of those will come later.

Please do tell me what you think about the towels.  The ones in the shelves won't be too visible once they are put on the other side of the hand basin but the others will be.

The journey hasn't ended nevertheless!

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.

Welcome Hannah and Sandi

... to the halfscale Fairfield blog!  I am so happy that you decided to join us here.  I hope you'll visit often and leave lots of comments to encourage me along the way.  I depend on my online friends for feedback because    apart from my son, none of my family are in the least bit interested and with Nathan it is more a matter of helping by doing 90% rather than working alongside him.

Hannah, you don't list a blog.  Do you have one?  If so, please let me know.

Sandie has a blog called whimsycottageminis.blogspot.com.au and sells some great miniature fabric of her own design.  I have bought some on Etsy from her, to use in the Fairfield and in other mini projects.  Her designs were in 1:12th scale but she reduced some of them to 1:24th scale for me and has added these to her range.  This is the halfscale version of the ladybug quilt set for the girl's room.

I have a selection of the 'Trucks' fabrics for a boy's room, for covers and cushions.

And this gorgeous blue fabric with a white lattice pattern is actually the 1:12th scale version but it is small enough to use in half scale and probably even in quarter scale projects.  I will be using this fabric to upholster a lounge suite and make curtains.

I am really sorry that the lovely blue of this fabric doesn't show to its best effect in this photo - it is such a pretty colour.

Do visit WhimsyCottageMinis on Etsy and see what Sandi has for sale, and also visit her blog - she is a talented miniaturist as well.

The Fates have taken a hand.....

....and everything has come to a standstill.  Yes, the last of the lights arrived yesterday (Thursday); the bathroom fittings also arrived yesterday.  But I have been quite unwell since Tuesday afternoon and it turns out that I have a lovely little chest infection going.  I can hardly see through my runny eyes to focus, and the infection is making me so tired that I am sleeping much of the time.  

It's very disappointing, more because my son's toy shop isn't finished either in spite of our promises that it would be.  He was so looking forward to exhibiting for the first time, and is pretty devastated.  I'm not even sure that I'll get to the Fair on Sunday to buy anything, and I don't know whether he will either :(

We'll both be continuing with our projects until they are finished though, and we might be able to exhibit them next year if the dates are okay.  

So keep tuned, there'll soon be lots more to see - I'm hoping to be able to see well enough to finish my camellia bush over the next few days.  It's quite different from the usual way of doing it because I've done a tree scaffold for it to make it much taller than usual.  Hopefully it will work out!