Coca Cola

At a garage sale I picked up a Christmas ornament that was already in a bad way.  My plan was to just keep it whole, take off the bottom, and have a few cartons of Coke bottles in the corner.

To put it in perspective, originally the top portion was full of tiny bottles.  Then, after some wiggling, I realized that the Coke bottles could be removed!!!  (Two snapped in half, but that's the peril of yanking glued-in plastic out of more plastic.)

In-scale soda for everyone!  Here's a pill bottle full of Cokes.

Lemmons Aid

My friends, Sam and Wendy Lemmons, are going on a mission trip to Nepal for two years!  I'm so excited for them.  I made them a sign for their fundraiser yesterday! 

It was a huge hit!  Here's a tutorial on how to do neat painted lettering on wood.  Print out what you want the sign to say.  Tape it onto your wood.  Etch each letter in using a pen that no longer works.  The indentations that you make with the pen will keep your paint from making the letters look sloppy.
I also did some killer facepainting!  So much fun!  I could have sat there and painted faces all day!

As for writing updates... I have a writing blog, too, now!  Check it out!

I wear a sombrero now. Sombreros are cool.

Over spring break I went to Mexico and I got a few magnets... basically just cloth sombreros with miniatures hotglued on! 

Check it out, yo. 

The most amazing thing is the little green basket... it's truly one of the smallest, most intricate things I've ever seen.  The picture is pretty terrible, but imagine a basket woven with plastic strands no bigger than a thread.

Pretty soon I'm going to try to decorate the hat... make it truly groovy, but I figured I'd put this post in there to show you that I'm still kicking.

Speaking of kicking-- my book is out on Amazon now!
http://www.amazon.com/Five-Items-Adeline-Stein-ebook/dp/B00BF6CBAK/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1361199001&sr=1-1&keywords=one+out+of+five
If you like what you see, even if it's just the sample on the Amazon page, send the link to everyone you know!  Word of mouth is so, so important.  And you don't need a Kindle to get it... just an electronic device that you can download a Kindle app onto.

Anyway, it's had some great reviews, and since you guys are so important to my art life, I want you to be a part of my writing life, too!

ALRIGHT PARTY PEOPLE.

Today, I tried to make dollhouse candles with real wax, and failed miserably.  I found out that the reason is that I'm not double-boiling the wax... just trying to stick (unweighted) sewing thread into a candle, and not waiting for it to cool before I dip again.

That's why no picture yet.

But.  If you boil a heat-resistant container with wax in water, weigh down the bottom with a small bead, and are actually patient, you should come up with a tiny candle!  Don't try to light it, though, because you need to use borax, salt, and water to soak your 100% cotton wick in for at least a day for it to be functional and not a disaster.  All the same, I wouldn't light a tiny candle anyway.  A waste of a llllot of work if you ask me!  Happy arting!

leaf your problems at the door

Today I'm taking full advantage of autumn.

I made a wreath by taking fallen leaves, taking off the leafy parts and using the veins to weave together.  The trick is taking fairly flexible leaves.  I really like the different colors in it!

 

Not tiny stuff, but I made the first rose for my sister's bouquet!  I'd been putting it off because I was intimidated, but I think this turned out pretty well.

The trick is to curl the petals beforehand, and make five different sizes of petals.

Happy arting!

Terrarium

This isn't exactly dollhouse, but it sure is dollar.  I'm still working on Wolverine; I can't seem to cut his legs off... but that could be the healing factor.

I wish the picture was better quality.  The guy inside is a little old man with a cane who I painted with a safety pin.

But I will tell you how to hollow out a lightbulb!  Use pliers to take off the little metal thingy on the end of the bulb.  You'll be stuck with a thick black glass plug with a hole in the middle of it.  This threw me for a loop for a good long while.  I tried to hit it with something heavy and metal to shatter it, but it was really hard and it just flaked off bit by bit.  Then I stuck a dart in the hole and pushed it to the side, and it cracked right in half!  Then it's just a question of breaking up the glass inside and shaking it out.

At the bottom of terrariums you should put activated charcoal or those clay balls they put at the bottom of lizard habitats.  Then there's mesh, not metal mesh (which will rust), but fiberglass.  Then the dirt and the plant.

Happy arting!

Oh, Wolverine, what did they do to you?

I've been kind of busy lately, helping with my sister's upcoming wedding (I love you Kimberly!)  So fewer tiny stuff and more regular-sized stuff.  But I did manage to pick up a new arrival.

The saddest Wolverine ever.  I got him for ten cents.

Yes, he is missing two of his claws on one hand.  Yes, he's in a permanent sitting position. Yes, a lot of the paint is worn off of his body (even, scandalously, his rear end).

I want to show you what he looks like now, because hopefully I'll be able to give his legs some joints and spruce him up to better-than-new!  Happy arting!

Rapunzel Rapunzel, how many bottles of shampoo do you use in one go?

I got this Rapunzel at a garage sale, basically for free because her hair was so messed up!  Look at this!!  I've always wanted a Rapunzel in my dollhouse, so much so that I tried to make one myself!  I'm not crazy about my sculpting, so I'm not going to relink to that, but it's on the blog!  Somewhere!

 

I used a little bit of fabric softener and a lot of water and brushed it all out with a wide-toothed comb.  The tutorials all say to use a wire wig brush, but... I'm a rebel.  No, I'm not a rebel.  I just didn't want to buy it. She did lose some hair, but that's okay!  That's the magic doll detangler.

 

I might get someone who's a prettier braider to rebraid, but basically it's pretty awesome, huh?

Happy arting!

Blue Dog Blues

I went ahead and made an imitation George Rodrigue.  For those of you who don't know his work... he's super famous for painting this blue dog, based on his own deceased dog and the myth of the loup-garou. 

I went ahead and used one of those scrapbooking frames to frame it, and a fancy invitation to paint on.  Happy arting!

Vanity Shmanity.

 

I got this vanity from the dollar store.  As you can see, the drawers are a facade.  They pried off pretty easily with a pocket knife, and left a convenient hole.  So what I did is I made three drawers that actually worked, using small glass beads as the pulls.

 

I used a elmer's glue as a crackle medium.  Now, how to do that.  First I painted the whole thing white with like eight hundred coats because the cheap stain kept making it pink (then I gave up and let it be pink).  This ended up being a good thing, because you should have a contrasting color under the color you're making it.  Then I spread white glue everywhere, waited for it to dry (mostly), and painted over it with this revolting mustard yellow.  I know the drawer is crooked... that's fully on purpose.  I wanted some dumpster-dived, well-loved vanity that looked like it was repainted in the 1950s and left out in several terrible storms. 

 

I wanted it to look old and kind of trashed up; I even included a carving, done by a friend of mine.  My initials, and a darling art friend's initials, in a heart!  Thanks Lindsey!  I painted some lace turquoise to add a little extra color to the front.

Monkeying Around

Today I made a tiny sock monkey!  I went for t-shirt materials that look like the same colors in a sock monkey, and just went to town!  I tried to keep similar construction, too, to add to the look!  T-shirt materials, if you don't sew them too tightly, remain loose and can fray a little to give the appearance of a knit. I used seed beads for the eyes and less than one cotton ball to fill it.

I think this little fellow is a tad too large for the house, but they make oversized sock monkeys too, so it can work.

Something pretty awesome I've found is that the scrapbooking section of most craft stores have tiny picture frames!  And, if people send you fancy letters they're usually in fancy envelopes, which work pretty well as watercolor paper!

Check it out, yo!  My first tiny picture for the tiny house.

Oh oh oh it's magic, you kno-o-ow.

Okay!   I am for sure getting back in the art scene, I mean it!  Right now I'm making a Murphy bed for the dollhouse, but while that's getting rigged up, I have a tutorial for something a little more full-sized.

Made of a chopstick, hot glue, and paint!  I used a satin finished paint on this one and I think it looks a lot like wood. After that I did a wash of black paint, to get into all the crevices hot glue made.

And now I'm a wizard.

So.

There's that.

Gifty Gift Gift

My sister got back from South Africa!  She brought me back exactly what I asked for: a little something for the dollhouse.

They look just like little vases, or jugs, hard as rock!  I'm so thrilled with them!  They make the perfect new additions.

Love you, Kimberly!!

Owl be Back

Recently minis have gone on the backburner so that I could plan for something secret!

It'll be in a month so expect frequent arty updates. 

Yesterday I sewed three owls for the owlery. I made them all with little pockets so that they can have notes in them!

Here's one!  I'm not crazy about them, so I'll probably make more (eventually!)

No Bones About It

Today I made a skeleton!  Rather, I took a dollar store skeleton garland that looks like this:

And fixed it up a bit.  I gave it actual joints beyond the shoulder joints and the hip joints.  This next part is a little technical... I noticed that the shoulder joints were connected to the upper ribcage, which is entirely incorrect, so I connected it instead to the clavicle (the collarbone, which, on these little plastic guys extends right to where the shoulder joint would be).

How did I do this miraculous thing, you might ask?  All you need is a piece of cardboard, a pushpin, and wire, and scissors.

Using the cardboard as a buffer, I pushed the pin through the skeleton to make new holes, one a little above the knee joint, one a little below.  I did that for the knees, shoulders, wrists, elbows, and cut the joints apart with a scissor.  At this point, I filed the edges down a little with a nail file.  Finally, I strung the joints together with wire, and painted the whole thing.  In the pictures, the eyes look darker than they are; I mixed a middle gray so it wouldn't overwhelm the rest of it.

Here he is, chilling with Poe.  Poor Poe.

Because I Need More Sugar Rushes

Today I made something so tiny that I can't get a picture of it.  I've been wearing a rubber band around my wrist for weeks thinking about this, but I hadn't gotten around to it until today.

So, you know those really thin, square-edged rubber bands?  Not the flat ones, the other kind.  I figured, if you can cut it right, you could make tiny sugar cubes, and you can!  It totally works!  I had to discard about 70% of the ones I made for being misshapen, but it's not like it's a lot of effort.

Painting them white is the challenge.  I tried coating my finger with white acrylic and rolling them around, but it didn't work as well as I wanted it to.  I had coverage, it just wasn't awesome coverage, even when I did it twice.  Then I painted the top of a Rubbermaid container (that's my workspace) with a little smear of white and rolled the little cubes through that! Much better.  I just wish I could get a picture!

Happy arting!

The Nest Big Thing

Taking the picture with my camera phone kind of wiped out all the details, but I made a tiny bird's nest!

I took twine and unraveled it and roughed it up around my finger.  After that, I picked apart the fibers in a piece of felt and rolled it up to make little eggs!   Happy arting!

Poe Gets Pwned

Today Poe watched the Notebook, and I found him later, next to the tissue box.

Poor Poe.

This is how I made the tissue box:
I took a small wooden cube, an interesting pattern from a magazine, and a tiny square of tissue.  Basically I wrapped it up the way I wrap a present (or, rather, how other people wrap presents, because I kind of... put stuff in bags or just hand it over or hide things under other things), took an oval of plastic and some tissue to make the 'opening,' and glued the scrap of tissue on top of that.