This is a picture showing my husband next to the Grosvenor Hall Dollhouse, a gift that he gave me for X-Mas

In fact, it's just to show you how big this house is, it stand's on a 10 cm high base and my husband is 1.80 m tall, so it should give you the idea

This post is just to share these 2 little cups I found in New York City, they have our names on them, mine and my hubby's.

It was just so cute, I wanted to show them to you

:-))

THE KITCHEN THAT DIDN'T FIT

Look at this beautiful modern kitchen. It has absolutely everything a contemporary kitchen needs and I got it from www.miniatures.com, especially for my summer retreat. It has a center island too, which is not shown in this photo. I was all happy to have a kitchen ready to be decorated, but then ..... ups ..... IT JUST DIDN'T FIT  :-(( 

So, there wasn't much left to do here ! I did not wanna spend more money on another kitchen and I was pretty sure that the one I bought would most certainly find a place in another house some day.

I then made a huge decision : I wanted to build one all by myself !! I had never done this before so the first thing I did was drawing a plan for a kitchen that would fit this time. I had these nice black/white tile sheets and also the white material to build the kitchen, so all I had to do was trying to figure out how to get something together that would look (at least more or less) like the kitchen I had bought previously.

This is a view of the other side of my kitchen and I must say that I am quite proud of myself, although not every detail is perfect, but at least I know now which mistakes I should avoid next time. And once it was decorated, it looked really cute.

THE LITTLE CONSERVATORY

I ordered this tiny little greenhouse a few years ago at some online dollhouse store and when I unpacked it, I realized I had probably forgotten to read the dimensions when I ordered it. It was (for what I intended to use it for) definitely too small. So I put it away and went on with my project, using a bigger greenhouse. And 2 or 3 years later, I remembered that I still had this little thing and I wanted to do something with it. This picture here shows you the view from the top ..... it is really SMALL !! but not too small to make something nice with it.

So once again I went through all my stuff and put together a cute little garden, including my tiny greenhouse. I didn't have to buy a thing to finish this project, I either went through my stock or made some items myself. This is to show you that you should never ever throw things away.






I also added some lights, working with batteries, all around the top of the roof and it's very cute when I turn them on :-))

GREEN PLANTS from kits

Some dollhouse shops carry these laster cut kits, which are of course a great alternative to making the entire plant yourself. Usually they have to be colored, which I would recommend doing before cutting them out. The florist wire is included in almost all these kits and once the leaved are glued to it, you should allow the glue to dry for at least 2 hours. Since florist wire in bendable, once you start planting, you can easily shape your leaves the way you want.

This one here was also made with a laser cut kit, all the required pieces came within the kit and to make this kind of plant look as realistic as possible, I had to use 3 different kind of green color (allowing to let the 1st coat dry of course before applying the next one)

This wonderful palm tree has been made from a kit too, if I do remember correctly, I think it was from Jeannetta Kendall. If you wanna take a glimpse at what such a kit looks like, here's a link, just to give you the idea

http://www.cottonridge.com/servlet/the-2167/Miniature-Palm-Leaves-Kit/Detail

FLOWERS & PLANTS : Flower Soft

Hi

A while ago I discovered this wonderful product flower soft, very helpful for any hobby miniaturist trying her or his hand at making flowers

I will describe several techniques in others posts (search for the posts with the label FLOWERS) you can try out if you're going to make your own flowers or plants for your dollhouses and miniature scenes. It's mostly cheaper, it's fun, but it also takes patience and a calm hand. But the 1st thing you should try to find out is what kind of mini-gardner you are going to be ..... meaning : try out the different ways to make your flowers and plants and then go for the technique that you'll like the best.

One of the greatest inventions is FLOWER SOFT, so that's what this post is going to be about.

It's a great and really easy way to make your own flowers. The one's you see in this picture were my first try with flower soft and they don't look bad at all. All you need to to is dip your florist wire into some glue and then into the flower soft and that's it.

Here's another one I made with FLOWER SOFT, using only the lavender color and a few tiny little leaves (cut from plastic aquarium greenery). As for the planting, you can fill your little pots either with left-over fimo (not the air drying one !!), or with florist floral arrangement foam, push in your flowers, add a little glue one top (best is a transparent one like UHU f.ex.) and cover with tea to simulate potting soil (I had some tea in the kitchen that was definitely too old to be used as such, so I emptied all the little tea bags and I had plenty of potting soil for my mini plants)  

Below are just a few more examples of what I've made so far using Flower Soft

In case you might wanna take a closer look, here the link :

http://www.flower-soft.co.uk/Cart/EC-Categories.php?PRICategoryID=67