The Glow of Success

Fabulous news!  My blog has been given an award!  Thank you so much to Christine of Hollyhock Cottage for looking past the frequent spelling errors, invented grammar and just plain madness she finds around here to give me my very first award.  The award will have pride of place on my side bar from now on.  I would love to simply pass the award back to her as her blog is very deserving of rewards, but instead I'll pass it along to six other fabulous blogs.

In no particular order they are:

Daydreamer at About My Doll Houses 


 and

Dark Squirrel Victoria at Dark Squirrel's Miniature Asylum


both recieve this award not only for the wonderfully imaginative miniatures they create but also for the wonderful and charming stories they share.

Margriet at Margriet's Miniatures recieves the award because anyone who loves dragons so much deserves a reward.

Irene at The Tenement for her deidcation to so accurately reproducing such a wonderful historic property.

Dangerous Mezzo at Tudor-Medieval-Jacobean-Queen Anne Dollhouse Project for the stunning work she and her young friends create and as a chance to give a cheeky nudge: when do we get to see more of the Castle?

Linda Carswell at Une Petite Folie for her lovely miniatures and evocative images of Paris and because us Tassie miniaturists should stick together.


Still on the subject of success . . . has anyone seen the current (December) issue of Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine yet?  If you have, did you notice any Egyptian themed articles that looked a little familiar?  Think back to around April-May this year when I was working on the Dig Site?  Any bells ringing for you?  Maybe you need to think even further back to the Pyramid (two years ago).     Amazingly, the good folks at DHMS liked the Dig Site so much they asked if I would send them some photos and how-tos they could publish.  Although I know that there is something in this month's magazine, I won't know exactly what until my copy arrives in the mail (it can take ages for mail to travel from the UK all the way around the world to Tasmania). I'll let you know more about it when my copy does arrive and I finally find out just what is in there but in the meantime, take a good look and see if you can spot me.  I'll be credited under my real name, not as Alennka.  You might also want to glance at Erin Summer's article the last page too, you may just see something familiar there as well!

 Now that we've finished revelling in all the glory that is me (cough, cough), I'd better get a move on and let you know what's happened with Tilli's House this week.  As you can see, there has been a lot of work done on the exterior of the house.  First up, the weatherboards (that's clapboards for those in the US) were painted a creamy yellow.

Then the roof was covered in corrugated cardboard and painted sage green to give the impression of a painted tin roof.   This is my first tin roof and it is really effective, my only worry is what happens if a cat tries to climb on or eat it as it's not all that tough.

 Next came the front verandah and balcony.  I used extra bits of the sceond foam house that I cut up to add an extra floor to this house to make the roof and floors for the structure and balsa wood posts for the supports.  The railing around the balcony is made of fan blades just like the staircase in Preston House except this time I used the top edges of the blades and left them as wedge shaped blocks rather than cut away the outside edges.  It's a little . . . eccentric . . . but once a nice flowering vine grows up one of the posts and along the railings you'll never notice it.

Between adding the verandah/balcony and adding the balcony railings I glazed the windows, added doors and framed around both the windows and doors.  The doors are both balsa wood and like most of the doors I make open by pivoting on a pin pushed through the top and bottom of the frame into the door.  The window and door frames are the biggest failing so far in this house.  I think it's the colour I don't like, but if not white, then what colour should they be?

Inside, not much has changed this week.  I did replace the ground floor wallpaper.  I decided that the existing wallpaper was too heavy for the space and it would be too hard to find paint and fabric colours that worked with it.  I've replaced it with a lavender paper with a check pattern.  It's still a bit overpowering in such a small space, but once it's been broken up with curtains, pictures and cupboards it should (hopefully) work.