Flower basket

My recent post in which I reflected over the amount of time and energy required for miniature-making has had a record number of views, but to my surprise also led to many indignant comments on Facebook. Apparently some people had not read the blog, just the title, thinking that I was outraged by pricing. Some comments said: "If you ask this question you will not understand the answer", or "Try for yourself and you'll see" (which is exactly what I did in the blog). When I asked one of the critics whether they had read my blog, they replied: "I don't read blogs". To be fair, I also got some praise from people who had read the blog.

Anyway, I decided to repeat the experiment today, without asking rhetorical questions in the blog title. For my florist shop, I want some hanging baskets because they will look nice in the foreground, and I had never made a hanging basket, so it's about time.

I found a good tutorial, but almost from start I adjusted it to my materials and methods. I had previously made topiaries, and I thought I could use the same technique for a ball-shaped basket arrangement. So I painted three felt balls green.

I abandoned my principle of making just one item to test because I wanted to clock my work, and also because I had three thingies I thought would make good baskets. (They didn't - more below).

The tutorial prescribes moss for the basket, but I don't have moss and I like recycling so I used a green fruit net I had been saving for the occasion.

Then it was just a matter of covering the balls with glue and dipping into a bowl of "moss". People always ask what kind of glue - ordinary all-purpose PVA. Up to this point, it took me an hour.

While the balls were drying I started making flowers. The tutorial does not show how to make flowers, and I won't show it either, because I have already shown some techniques in a previous post.

In a hanging basket, you have a mix of flowers so I made a little of everything, and I also cheated and used an old plant I am no longer happy with, made from grated hard foam. It looks like a generic flower and is easy to just glue on.

Meanwhile, I tried several constructions for baskets. I took pictures, but since none of my ideas worked there is no point in sharing. This was learning time, a lot of it, as I tried this and that, painted, decorated with stencils, even considered making real baskets from string, and I cut chains and found chain links, and then as I was looking for something I suddenly saw perfect hanging baskets, all ready to use. This is what happens when you have your miniature glasses on.

After that, it was just patience, and patience takes time. Gluing on flowers, making leaves. And I only finished one of the three baskets. I believe it took at least two more hours. Bit it was worth the trouble. Don't you think?

Why are handmade miniatures so ridiculously expensive?

 

I am sure all of you have at some point asked this question. I don't make things for sale, so I have never had to decide how much my work is worth, but I have seen what other people ask, and sometimes I wonder who is prepared to pay these fancy prices for a basket, or a crocheted antimacassar or a fluffy cat. But obviously people do, and obviously they see a value in a unique item.

Making flowers for my florist shop has been a good reminder of how much time and effort goes into a single object. As I am not interested in make more of the same, I decided to try and make a geranium (aka pelargonium) because I have seen them made by people I know personally, and they are not gods, so I thought if they can... I found this tutorial that proved helpful, even though I adapted it a bit, and since it looked tremendously time-consuming I decided to see how much time it would actually take to make a bunch.

I started with just one stem, to see a) whether it worked b) whether I liked the result c) whether I was prepared to repeat it.

Well, it sort of looked what it was supposed to look like, and it took the time it took. So I embarked on a larger scale. The flower pot in the tutorial has eleven flowers, so I cut ten stems and attached beads to them for heads - this is the first short cut I took.

I thought that if I used pink beads it wouldn't matter if it was slightly visible. I was right.

The tutorial says you need 15 petals per flower so next I punched 150 petals over a wet kitchen towel (go back to the tutorial to see what I am doing).

No shortcuts here: each petal had to be curled individually. And before that, picked up, one by one, with tweezers.

I don't have the tools recommended in the tutorial so I simply used the end of a small painting brush. The foam is a coaster upside down.

And here are my 150 curled petals.

Of course it took considerably less time than with the first stem, because I knew how to do it, and also because I did it step by step, not on a conveyor belt precisely, but surely faster than if I made one flower at a time from beginning to end.

Then it was the precision work of gluing the petals. I like this kind of tasks because they need total concentration, and I cannot think about my students' theses, or the journal review I need to write, or even what we are having for dinner. My children often wonder why I don't listen to music while making miniatures, but I tried and found it distracting.

15 petals per flower turned out to be inadequate estimate, so I only made six flowers. All in all, from a piece of paper and some wire to six flowers, it took about two hours.

And you can see how much better the new flowers are compared with the first one. So I think I need to add at least an hour of learning time.

But the project is far from finished. Flowers insist on having leaves, and pelargonium leaves are very prominent, and I don't have a punch. So I will have to cut them out, as I did with daffodils and irises. The tutorial suggests two-three leaves per stem plus some filler leaves. Twenty maybe? And the paper needs to be painted with several shades of green to look natural. 

Some hours later: 

 

I think this is the best miniature I have ever made from scratch.  

So all in all, how much would this project be worth? Even calculating with a minimum wage, there are hours of work in it, and that's not counting materials and tools. Of course, if I had had a punch it might have been faster, but not a lot faster. And each leaf is unique. I would say, a full day of work. How much would you be prepared to pay for it?

Florist shop

If you have followed my blog for some time you may have noticed that I easily become obsessed by my projects. One time I made all kinds of things from junk jewellery and fans. Another time I spent a week or so making wooden crates. Or miniature books. Or candles. Or curtains. Or shoes. Or whatever. I don't make anything for sale, and I am not much interested in making many of the same, but I like to explore various ways of making the same or similar things.

A couple of weeks ago I started making some flowers and after making paper flowers I made some from oven-baked clay:

 

I was quite proud of them to begin with, but then I realised - it also so happened that I had bought real tulips for a friend - that tulips are always hidden in leaves, and I spent some time making leaves, using the technique I learned when making daffodils and irises:

You need to curl the leaves to make them look realistic. I found a foam-lined coaster that served the purpose, and I used my nail file, as suggested in the tutorial. Each flower needed four leaves, so it took some time.

These are the colours I happened to have. Tulips come in every imaginable colour, and some are multicolour or speckled, but I will save that for later.

I got so excited that I decided to make a florist shop. This coincided with an urgent need to glaze my room boxes, and in the process I dismantled my old tea shop to use the box for florist's. Once upon a time you could get wine boxes at wine merchants for a small donation to charity, but not anymore, because, I think, many shops and cafes use them for decoration. I know I can buy a room-box kit, but I am not there yet. I have made several environments in shoe boxes and small cardboard boxes, but wine boxes look so much neater.

I did try to put all flowers I had in a cardboard box. Mainly just to see whether I liked the idea. I dug up Poundland furniture that I once bought in great numbers for upcycling.

 I liked the idea, but I definitely felt I wanted to use a wine box.

I tore down the wallpaper and the floor from the tea shop. This was one of my early room boxes, and I hadn't decorated it very well. And the wallpaper wouldn't have suited a florist shop anyway. I lined it with white lining paper and made a floor with a self-adhesive shelf lining.

I added wainscotting, using my old faithful 1:1 wallpaper. I still need to add moulding.

Meanwhile, I needed to do something with the furniture. This is the recurrent thing with room boxes (or any project that has an environment): you are eager to make whatever you are making - flowers in this case - but you have to prepare the environment first. Luckily, I like upcycling too.

I did a low table and two sideboards. The dresser in the centre moved from the tea shop - it isn't in scale, but I don't think it matters. I distressed it a bit. The fancy table on the left is made from a Chippendale kit. If you have a fancy piece in the foreground it catches the attention, and the rest is less noticed.

I am not sure about delft tiles - they were fine in the tea shop, but perhaps not in a flower shop. But that's easy to replace. Maybe with an old-fashioned flower pattern.

I also wanted a kind of multilevel display arrangement as they have in florist's, and I spent some time trying different options, including steps made from jenga blocks, but they looked too crude. So finally I built one from craft sticks.

 

When it was time to make more flowers it so happened - I swear, I hadn't planned it! - that a friend asked me to take her to a shopping centre, and while she was doing her shopping I ran over to my favourite hobby store. In my previous post I stated confidently that I wasn't buying a paper punch any time soon, but since I was there anyway... and they had a special offer... So it was meant to be.

I also bought two sets of tiny flowers in the wedding aisle. One just went in as it was. The other was a bundle of closed roses, and I first thought I would just put them in a jar, but then I thought that wasn't much of a challenge so instead I made some bouquets, adding flowers I made with the punch and with a set of scrapbooking daisies. (Scrapbooking and weddings have some amazing resources for miniature-making).

I punched various papers I had at home. 

The punched flowers were easy to attach to stems: I did exactly the same as with daffodils and irises: dabbing the tip of the wire in yellow paint, then adding a bead underneath the flower. I used three layers for each flower. They need leaves, but I don't really know what kind of flower they are and what kind of leaves this flower should have.

  


Then I had these prefabricated daisies some of which I left as they were and some painted in various colours.

 It wasn't until I started painting that I noticed they were also different shapes, which added to the variety.

Now, these were tricky to attach to stems because they already had a bead in the middle, too small to make a hole through. I prepared the stems with a bead glued on to one end.

 

I used strong glue and let it dry properly before gluing on the flower.

I made several pots: 

 

The ones on the left could be anemones. The ones on the right look very authentic, but I don't know what they are.  The leaves are made from a Christmas candlestick decoration that I had had for years, wondering when it might come handy. The pots are bottle caps.

The rest of the daisies, with longer stems, I added to the ready-made roses, arranging them in four OOAK bouquets wrapped in paper. I had to look up on the web how to wrap flowers. There are dozens of useful sites. The ferns are tiny sprigs of live conifer.

 

I have lots of materials left, and I took time to arrange them for the future. I know there are commercial organisers (I have some), but I am a recycler, and I have saved this chocolate box precisely for this occasion.

Lots of space for more.

I have got so far this weekend, and I won't have time to do more until next weekend, so here is the result up to date.

Some plants and flowers I had before, both ones I have made and some that came with various job lots. I plan to have a rail with hanging baskets and maybe some wall units, so do come back soon.

Glazing

Our beloved cat died a few weeks ago. We have now been adopted by two kittens. We have never had young cats before, and we have never had two, and it's like having two toddlers: thinking of what is lying about that they can break or injure themselves on. I have moved my Tudor dollhouse from the corridor into my study, that is already overflowing with dollhouses and supplies. There is no way I can move all my room boxes that so far have been neatly displayed in a corridor shelf. Our old cat never climbed on shelves and always walked very carefully over and around my miniature chaos. She never tried to get into a dollhouse, as many cats do, judging from hundreds of pictures on Facebook.

Anyway, I need to protect room boxes from cats and cats from room boxes (I will still have to decide whether my study will be forever out of bounds for them). This necessity has inspired me to do something I had been planning to do for a long time and for a different reason: glaze. Anyone who has open dollhouses or room boxes knows how much work it is to dust them, particularly if you have hundreds of tiny objects. So, for my cats and for my own convenience, I ordered Plexiglass sheets cut to measure (I had to measure carefully because the boxes are of different sizes). They were inexpensive, and I decided against pre-drilled holes since each hole cost more than the sheet itself. This speaks volumes about my self-confidence. I was sure I would be able to drill holes in 2mm thick acrylic. And I was. It was a lot of effort, but I did it, hole by tiny hole. In fact, they turned out to be so tiny that I didn't have small enough screws. Temporarily  - or perhaps permanently if I see it works - the sheets are attached with thumbtacks.

There are many disadvantages with glazed room boxes. For me, no project is ever finished, and I keep adding objects and borrowing them for other projects, or simply moving them around. Once you have sealed a box, you would have to take off the glazing if you wanted to change something. Therefore I opted for removable glazing. I know some people use Velcro, and perhaps double-sided tape would work as well.

Before I added glazing, there was some preparatory work to be done. I never fix anything with tack or craft dots, still less with glue, except maybe the tiniest things likely to fall off and get lost at the slightest movement. But if I seal the boxes, I must attach almost everything so it doesn't fall off if I - or the cats - bump into a shelf, or even simply when I move the box from my workbench to the shelf. I don't like attaching objects because even the best kind of tack or sticky dot leaves stains, and if you have a valuable piece of furniture you don't want to spoil the surface. (All those moments when I cursed the previous owner when trying to get the cups and plates off an antique table).

Yet I had no choice, so I spent most of the weekend going through all room boxes fixing every little object.  

Another disadvantage is of course that glass produces reflections. I remember this well from when I tried to take pictures of dollhouses in the Museum of Childhood in London. They were in glass cases, and taking a good picture was virtually impossible. And it took me a dozen attempts to take a somewhat decent picture of my van Hoogstraten box. You can see my hands and the back of my real room reflected in the glass.

 

This was the first box I glazed, so with the others, I took pictures after I had fixed all objects and before glazing.

The Borrowers box was easiest, and I didn't change anything in it so it was just a matter of attaching objects to each other and to the floor. The yarn shop has been moved around, and quite a lot of it was in disarray, so I first tried out some versions before deciding how I wanted it.



I didn't spend a lot of time on it, but it looks nice and neat now. I made this box for my daughter who is a passionate knitter, but she hasn't collected it so far and may never do.

The clockmaker's shop took longest. This is the box that I change constantly, borrowing clocks for other projects, adding clocks that come in job lots and moving in commercial clocks that I replace with my Chippendale miniatures.

There are some rare vintage pieces here (tall Barton clock and the plastic Marx clock, next to the corner cabinet), some upcycled, and quite a few I have made from buttons and other rubbish. I like this box, it is probably my favourite. But it took ages because I had to make sure that all items were displayed in the best possible way. There was an incredible amount of dust in this box, so now it is well protected.

The most radical changes happened in the Swedish kitchen. It was originally built around a traditional Swedish kitchen sofa, which I have given away to someone building a traditional Swedish 19th-century dollhouse. I have been adding and borrowing from this box and have even considered dismantling it, but I like some of the features, not least the stove that won't go with any other of my current projects, and the doll is Swedish, and so on. So I kept it, but before I glazed it, I removed the sink that was slightly too large anyway, and put in a vintage Swedish sofa, a famous and rare brand, and a vintage Swedish dresser that I had, completely inadequately, in the Victorian house, just because I like it so much. But it fits much better here. I also moved the iconic Swedish kitchenware, Kockums, from the Victorian kitchen where it was totally anachronistic. 

I haven't glazed the Jane Austen box because I am not sure I want to keep it. It was made for a specific purpose, and several pieces and both dolls are borrowed from the large Victorian house. But I like this box so maybe I will add some details and then glaze. It is large, twice as large as the other boxes, so I am not even sure where to put it. So far it has been on my window sill, but it cannot stay there forever.

I also have my antique shop that is the most dynamic box. Most things I had there initially have been used elsewhere, and right now it looks more like a junk bin than a room box. I have tons of spare furniture and stuff so maybe I can make something interesting of it again.

I have dismantled the tea shop. It was one of my very first boxes, and I hadn't added much to it, perhaps because there isn't much to add. Instead I borrowed more and more from it, and now I will use the shell for a new project that I will show in due time.

Meanwhile, there is no risk that the cats will tear down a box or choke on something, and all my displays are protected from dust. It was a great investment and definitely worth the trouble.