Judy Mitchell

Our dear friend and fellow miniaturist, Judy Mitchell, had a table at the St. Albert Indoor Farmer's Market last Saturday.

Judy is one of the dealers at our annual Show and Sale...and will be next year.....

These are the wonderful things I bought from her last Saturday...

A multi-coloured tea light with a little house and landscaping built around it

It's hard to describe this but when the light is switched on, the windows, door, and chimney take on lights of different colours.

A ;lovely table centrepiece

Beautiful floral display that I gave to my Mom

The cutest pair of slippers with Teddy faces

She also does a pair of slippers that are yellow duckies!

Judy will be giving me a supply of the tea light scenes to sell at the M.E.E.Christmas party.

She will also be at the St. Albert Indoor Farmer's Market at City Hall on December 8.

A little pond...

Shoot! FINALLY got this blog written - then it disappeared! Not a happy camper...

As a club, M.E.E. is blessed to have members who teach the most incredible classes! And Jillian is one of the best!

I painted my pond (supplied by Jillian)

Took it home, repainted the edges that had chipped off during the trip home, then filled the pond with "water" and the water lily.

This pond is really plain but Jillian taught us how to add moss (flocking) and paint to suggest other things about the pond.

For instance, Jillian is from B.C. so she added moss and different colours to her pond....as did many others in the class.

This will eventually appear in my "Secret Garden"...

Ta-Da!!! My workroom is clean!

From this on November 15th:

To this at 7:00 p.m. on November 21.....

That is not to say that I'm finished. I still have this shoebox of things to be put on my bulletin boards. Most of it has been bagged but a lot of sorting to do.

And I have two boxes of papers to sort through, file and shred.

But the room itself it cleaned!

YIPPEE!!!

Cleaning coming along.....

Tina, both a friend and follower of this blog sent this to MEE and I took it as a comment on my cleaning efforts. If it was, I love it!

A crafter clearing their work space is like a kid trying to clean up their room. You find things you forgot about and stop cleaning to play with them.

A lot of that is true! But what I have been finding is that I keep coming up with things that I haven't dealt with yet. Such as these things that were left in one of my meat trays that I keep projects in.

Had one full tray of strips of paper that needed to be dealt with, a copper end cap that needed a handle added, knives that needed to be finished and 4 sets of salt and peppers!

Still so much to do but it's coming along.....

Off to a good start but then RL interrupted my cleaning!

The cleaning is coming along pretty well. As well as it ever does :-)

As always, I keep coming across things that need to be completed, or started (such as the bowls from yesterday), or set aside to be worked on sooner rather than later.

After visiting Mom this afternoon and having something to eat, got a call from a neighbour who wanted to come by to visit. So while I was waiting for her to come up, I started a little item to go with the Meals on Wheels tables....and add to my stash :-(

Got 15 little laser-cut trees from Dollarama for $1.25. Large ones are about 1 1/2" and small are about 1 1/8".

I had this nail embellishment kit in my stash with 120 tiny 'jewels".

Here you can see four of the trees "bedazzled". The second one from the left, I used super glue for the jewels but that gave me no wiggle-room in placing the beads so switched to Aleene's Tacky for the others. I used a piece of spaghetti (wetted the end) to pick up and place the jewels.

I 'think' I will probably use my Pilot pens (very fine tip) to edge the trees in either silver or gold. For the larger trees, I may also add a star with the Pilot pen - if my hand is steady enough. (I bought my Pilot pens from Staples - the marker types in the store and the fine lines online.)

I have some 'laser poop' from Tina: little circles that will become the bases of the trees so I can set them on the mini tables.

A couple pieces of wood covered with pieces of thin foil from candy wrappers as presents under the tree and that's a great start to decorating a wonderful little mini table.

Unfortunately after my friend left, so did my get up and go....

So tomorrow will be another day.

Last year at a Mini Day Out, we decorated 42 mini tables for Meals on Wheels to accompany meals in December. You can read about it and see the basic instructions here. They only need 8 this year so I'll just do them myself. BUT as a club, we thought that we could make more tables to include in our children's grab bags for the next show and sale on September 15, 2019.

To speed up the process of cutting the cups, I decided to use the hot wire styrofoam cutter that my late BIL gave me when he quit model railroading.  The heated wire cuts through styrofoam very quickly and cleanly. In order to keep the cut perfectly straight, I taped it to my 3 hole punch which fortuitously was the exact height I needed.

I first tried it with the bottom of the cup down but there wasn't enough room between the wire and the base of the punch to cut all the way through.

So I turned the cup right side up and that worked perfectly!

I bought four different packs of cupcake liners at Dollarama to use as tablecloths and here you can see four mini tables that resulted.

In a story for another day, I'm actually tackling cleaning my workroom! While doing so, I came across two childproof pill caps. Using pliers, I pulled back the edges of the caps and removed the clearish plastic inserts.

I trimmed the thin rim of plastic around the bottom edge and ended up with a bowl 1 3/8" in diameter and 7/16" deep.

Voila! A salad bowl.

Saturday All-Day Workshop

Got so busy that I didn't think to take any pictures but....

I love the days when a number of us get together...there is a certain magic that happens. The ones who have been doing minis for a long time and the newer ones share their ideas and methods. Someone mentions a problem or idea and the ensuing conversations just bring up SO many new ideas!

Gilbert was the first to present in talking to/showing us about making a clock/radio/soap container into a miniature display. He explained the different tools he uses to do that....for wood and plastic.  He was showed us the different Dremel tools he uses for plastic and tin. He demonstrated the tools for cutting through plastic but because of the noise, he didn't demonstrate the tools for cutting through tin although he did emphasize the necessity of safety tools (safety glasses, ear protection and face mask).

I talked very quickly about  reinforcing a gift bag to make it into a "room box". Although, in the past, I have done each wall separately, I said that I thought it might be better to do it in one piece by scoring the corners from the back and folding them. We agreed on that then Tina mentioned that Brooke Tucker had suggested that for making a curved wall, you score the material vertically along regular intervals across the back...which gave me the idea of how to cover my wall in the miniature in a circular box that Tina would be teaching later in the day.

Marg, our resident artist, spoke beautifully about making a scene in a book box. She showed us how to make a leather-look cover for the book using tissue paper and paint and showed us how to age book pages with chalks. She also spoke about making scenes more like-like by using chalks to develop shadows, etc., in corners and along other lines. She also spoke about sometimes seeing things from a different prospective after it's been done and perhaps changing how you would have done it.

Tina showed us how to put a "floor" in a round container - including a method of hiding a battery under the floor so it's out of sight and easily changeable.

I also quickly demonstrated making knives from the ends of turned toothpicks and we discussed using a quilling tool to make cans of spray paints and cans of foods for a pantry.

Almost 40 years ago, we took our two children on an extended trip through the western United States. We, of course, went to Anaheim, CA, to see Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. At that time, the Mott Miniature Collection was displayed at Knott's Berry Farm. And I absolutely fell in love!

Then I discovered Casey's Wee Littles, my first miniature store.

When we returned home, I started trying to make things on my own and the next Christmas, Vern and the children gave me my first dollhouse kit.

As the years passed, I amassed quite a collection of books on making miniatures and learned to make more and more things.

Then at some point, I discovered the on-line miniature group "Small Stuff" and my world expanded.

Daughter Leanne moved to Garland, TX, for two years and while she was there I attended Dallas Mayfest where I took some classes and attended my first big miniature show. One of my delights there was finding a stack of Nutshell News magazines that gave me endless ideas on what and how to make even more things.

In 2002, the big search for turned toothpicks was exploding on Small Stuff. Joanne e-mailed Small Stuff and said that she had checked out WalMart and they didn't have them. I e-mailed her to thank her for saving me a trip to check them out and we discovered that we only  lived a few blocks from each other.

She took me to the summer get-together of M.E.E. (held at Judy Mitchell's that year) and I joined the club in the fall. 

So I've worked on my own, with the aid of on-line groups and as part of a club.

And to my mind, with a club is best. While I certainly could have continued on my own, especially after so much became available on the internet, the knowledge, ability, and immediacy of those things in a club has made me a much better miniaturist.

Thanks to all my fellow miniaturists over the years.