And here's the next one....

But first I must welcome Pacqui and Sherry.  Thank you both so very much for becoming Followers.  I really appreciate you taking the time to visit my blog and for signing on.  Please do feel free to leave comments - it's such fun to share with other miniaturists!  I truly hope you enjoy reading my ramblings and that you'll visit often.


And now here it is – China Cottage, the 10th of the Town Square series and one of the prettiest, I think! Yes, again. The beauty of miniatures is that you can use colours that you can’t use in real life – just as some real life colours don’t work in miniature. For the China Cottage I used Folk Art ‘Rose Garden’ which is a rich but soft rose pink, and exactly matches the darker print on the wallpaper. I am disappointed that the colour hasn’t come out true in these photos of the cottage first built.

There was no greenery supplied with this cottage, the model had the base painted to match the green used on the trim. But the plastic ornamentation for the apex of the roof and the verandah more than made up for it! I chose to do the verandah section of the base in brown to resemble timber, and painted it to try and get a wood-grain effect. I decided not to highlight the posts on the verandah because by now I was a bit ‘over it’ all, having made a big boo-boo with what was supposed to be the second coat of white. As I was spraying it on, it looked rather odd and so I checked the can again to find that I was spraying not another coat of paint, but another coat of primer. It was making the first coat of paint all runny.


Several fiddly, sticky and frustrating hours later I had removed the gluggy mess and was able to start again. Then to top it off when I did the highlighting on the front door it would not go nice and neat like it did on the French Knot. So I left good enough alone vbg!


And here’s the interior of the completed basic shop (with the dresser straightened up – did you notice in the previous photo that it had fallen over?)

This second view of the interior showing the left side in has my hand to again give an idea of the size (or lack of size) of these shops. Even for quarter scale they are tiny.

The little dresser is lovely, and was part of the kit supplied. The next photo, of the right interior, shows the shelves that were also supplied. I decided to ‘offset’ mine on the wall. I was undecided whether or not to use the shop counter and till, but put it in these photos anyway because they came with the kit.

So that is what the shop looked like once it was constructed. The next step of course was to add my own bits and pieces to it.
 And here is the interior, after I added the bits and pieces. I ended up putting more wallpaper in the top section because the white looked a bit stark. And I put some of the flooring paper on the ‘floor’ as well. I made a shelf out of bits of left-over siding used in reverse, painting it brown to give contrast to the plates, and put four left-over plates on it instead of using them on the shelves inside as I had at first intended.

Here on the left you can see the dresser, with mainly blue plates on it. And I have put the blue teaset on this side, with those mischievous little cups sitting innocently in their saucers as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths! More about those shortly.

On the right I ended up with mainly pink – not by design, at first I was going to put the teaset in front of the pink and white plates and put something else on the lower shelf.

The plates were easy to make. A while ago by a stroke of luck I had found that some embroidery floss cards that had come with those plastic boxes divided into little sections that I’d bought to store my assembled quarter scale furniture in, had holes punched in them. But the punched-out pieces were still in them. And they were exactly the right size for plates. So I had painstakingly removed all the little circles and stored them away, and now they came in very useful.
 I found some photos of plates among my files and printed them out on normal printer paper. I had previously tried doing this on photo paper then punching them out, without a great deal of success. This time I cut the circles out (which I don’t do terribly well) and glued them to these perfect little rounds of card. When totally dry I gently rounded them a little with a stylus on a computer mouse pad then painted them with a semi-gloss fixative (didn’t have gloss or would have used that).


The teasets weren’t so easy. Why do I say those cups are mischievous? . They are plastic and come nicely attached to a stem, with the teapot on the top and four cups and four saucers on the sides. Painting them was easy enough, and I even did a gold rim around the cups and a gold handle and knob on the teapots. Then came the tricky part. They are the teeniest, tiniest little cups you ever did see, and trying to get them to sit on the saucer is a true exercise in patience! They do it beautifully for you at first, just to lull you into a false sense of security but they are only teasing! As soon as you put that little drop of glue on the saucer those cups show their spirit of mischief and get up to all sorts of tricks and you begin to think they’ll never stay put. In the end I did get them to stay but not necessarily in the positions I wanted them in.


I’ve taken a couple of close-ups of the dresser and the shelves. Looking at the dresser I realise that I haven’t put the tiny knobs on the drawers yet – I left them off while I was adding the plates so they wouldn’t be dislodged by the handling. Now I’d better put them on.

And here are the shelves on the right side.

I’ve used the same pink as I used for the exterior, and you can see that it matches the pattern on the wallpaper exactly.


So the interior is completed except for a couple of things to go on the counter – I rather think it looks a bit bare.

I did add some grass to the exterior, but haven’t added any greenery to this shop. I will end up with three (yes, three) of these darling buildings, but they won’t all look the same by the time I mix and match the bits with the two extras of other shops I will also have, and one of the differences will include the use of vines – so keep watching this space lol! It’s only ten weeks to the Sydney Fair so I have a lot of work to do.


In this photo the colour is more true, but a tiny bit dark.

And where is the cat, you ask? Well, even if you didn’t ask, here she is:

Sitting on the grass enjoying the sun, in the way that cats do!