My unexpected bargin!

Well, I have been really busy in the real world recently, so I haven't had much time for creating, but I did want to take a second to share my unexpected bargain that I found this past week. I was browsing through Craig's list one night for used camping equipment for my Girl Scouts to get, and I decided, just on a whim, to do a search on dollhouses. Well, most of them were for the plastic/pink/Barbie houses, but there was one listing for a wooden dollhouse and a box of furniture for $80.00. $80.00!!! I HAD to go & check that out, so I called the lady first thing in the morning and it happens that she lives about 30 miles away. Not too bad of a drive, so we made plans to meet around noon right off of the interstate. Now the photo's that she put online mad it look like a fairly small house. Maybe like a 2 room house with a small attic. It was cute, but it looked small. I was really more interested in the box full of furniture. She told me over the phone that it was all wooden and her grandfather had made it all. Well worth the drive to investigate. Well, I get there and the house is HUGE! it will not fit in the back seat of my car no matter how we tried to fit it in there. So we ended up barely fitting the base of the house in the trunk & tying it down with bungee chords. I got it home safely, but now have no where to put the dang thing!!! It is about 3 1/2 feet wide & 2 1/2 feet tall and about 2 feet deep.

This is the front of the house, the front door needs to be fixed, but she did have it in the box.

This is the inside of the house. On the first & second floors, the rooms go all the way through from front to back, but on the third floor- the larger room on the left goes all the way through, but the smaller room has a wall splitting that section into 2 smaller rooms.

This is the roof side access to the small room on the third floor.

Inside the roof side room, the door needs repair, but it does lead to the balcony on the front of the house.

The stairs on the second floor need to be repaired, they keep falling out.

Now for the furniture......

These are all of the dressers and nightstands that came in the box. All of the drawers and doors open.

These are all of the chairs and tables that came in the box. The two tables with the white tops are actually marble top tables.

There were 3 beds in the box. All of the beds came with foam for mattresses, & 2 of them had hand made crochet coverlets.

Here are the remaining items. A wall shelf, a corner shelf, a grandfather clock (the door opens and the weights are in there as well) and an oven for the kitchen that opens and the shelf comes out.

There are a few more misc. pieces that were in the box, but they had legs that were broken. All of the broken pieces look to be simple repairs so over all I am very excited about my find!

Well, I have finally gotten a chance to take photos of some of my creations. The photos are not that good, but it should give you the general idea. I desperately need to learn how to take photos of my miniatures with my regular digital camera. Hopefully it will get better as I go along!


These are some little caramel creame candies, it looked simple enough to try. I think I need to get a littel more "creame" in the middle, but otherwise I am happy with them.



This is my bowl of potato salad. My favorite part is the egg slices.




This is potato salad with bell pepper topping.

I had so much fun doing these! When I started searching online for the "how to" for fimo & sculpey clay, this is the result of the first tutorial that I found. The tutorial was great & easy to follow, so my bread came out pretty good for someone who has never played with clay before. They may not be quite to scale, but they are not too huge. here is the link for that tutorial in case you would like to try...

http://cdhm.org/tutorials/learn-to-make-miniature-bread.html

a close up of my french bread. So cute!!

Well, That is all of the photos I have for now. The kids started school about 3 weeks ago, so we are adjusting to the newer/stricter schedule of the school year. I haven't had much time to play with all of my mini's. When I found all of my stuff in storage, there was a toy store that I had done 14 years ago, so I have been restoring things on that building. I also came across 2 other scenes that were half finished. I will try to photograph those when I get a chance and get them posted. One of them is a little window scene, and the other is a garage. The window scene is done, & the garage is only built, not decorated at all. So I figured before I start anything new, I need to get those other projects done first.

Well, I guess this is my first post to this blog. I will start with a little background. I started doing miniatures in 1992. I have done a victorian/old time toy store and several different roombox scenes that were gifts for friends. In 1996 I had my first child and shortly after packed up all of my miniature stuff to be put in storage. (all of those little choking hazards, not to mention the damage that little hands could do to my miniatures).

Now fast forward to 2009, my first child is now 12, my second child is 10. Now all of this time my stuff has been in storage at my mother house, well, she is retiring & moving so I am forced to clear out all of my storage stuff and figue out where it will go. I came across my boxes of miniature stuff which my children were really facinated with. So... after some thinking and talking with them, we decided that miniatures will be a fun craft that we can do together. So I did some calling around, and the miniature club I had belonged to in 1993-1996 was still meeting, so we decided to go. The club will normally do a "make-it take -it" project, and this meeting we learned how to make potato salad and potato chips. Well, the kids were hooked! They were so excited and proud of what they had done, they could not wait to go back.

Now we are planning on doing minature picnic scenes to display our newly made treasures in. Of course we will have 3 picnic scenes, because you simply can't have 3 bowls of potato salad at the same picnic. :)

I have been doing a lot of playing with fimo & sculpey trying to come up with some more food for our picnics. So far I have learned how to do miniature bread, fried eggs, bacon, and caramel creams. O.K., so fried eggs, bacon & caramels are not normal picnic foods, but I saw them & HAD to try it! They are so cute! I will get some pictures posted as soon as I figure out how do miniature photography on my digital camera.