Two Down . . .

The reason why I ought to remember to add a new post to the blog every week is that when I'm lazy and miss a few weeks as I just done, I end up choking your bandwidth the dozens of photos of two finished projects.  If this post is taking a long time to load for you, it may have something to do with the thirty photos on the page.  My apologies for this and I promise I will try to be a better blogger in future and not let so much time pass between posts.

The house made from the 'Old Rectory' kit is now finished.

All the fireplaces have fires of red and black seed beads (for coals) in grates of varied jewellery findings.  In 48th scale I need to find smaller beads if this trick is really going to look right.

The bedroom in left of the top floor has a scratch made bed covered in fabric with a woven floral pattern.

Books and an unwound scroll for the library.

The x frame chairs flank a storage chest in the gallery.

The table in the great hall

The gold an silver platters are made from foil from the top of a container of butter.  It's gold on one side and silver on the other.  I used a hole punch to create round plates.

The printed doors have been accented with faux leadlighting outliner for handles and hinges.  And a note for those with as little sense as me, it would be so much easier to do this before glueing the doors into the building.

I don't seem to have a good photo of the right hand bedroom, but this one does show the fireplace off quite well.

And finally the kitchen.  It could use some pots, pans and utensils (etc)  but the only way I can think to make them is with polymer clay but not only did it not seem worth the effort of pulling the clay out for so few things, I have doubts I could make pots that small; all I'm likely to get are squashed blobs of clay.

With the Old Rectory building done, I started another 48th scale project . . . .

You'll have to forgive the very bad photographs of this one as it's built inside a glass fish tank, a highly reflective glass fish tank.  It's a Japanese garden complete with a small tea house.  A badly painted mountain forms the backdrop and the slope of the ground is made from Oasis foam.

The tea house is made from mount board accented with thin brown cardboard.  The roof is printed from a seamless tile pattern from the internet.  The tiles are more Chinese than Japanese but that's as close as I could come.

The side of the house has a small extension.  Traditionally this is where guests would enter, crawling through the small internal opening into the main room of the tea house to show humility to their hosts.

Inside the floor is papered with a woven reed texture printed from the internet and outlined in strips of brown cardboard to resemble traditional tatami mats.  The doors are made from rice paper and more cardboard.

Once the Oasis foam was carved into a pleasing slope it was 'painted' with some PVA glue and had some fine model railway grass sprinkled over it.  Model rail gravel went into the hollow that would form the pond.

Pebbles were pushed into the Oasis foam to create the rocky pile down which the waterfall flows.  If you look very, very hard you might even be able to see the waterfall, but the 'water' is really hard to spot through the reflective glass.

You can see it a little better in this shot, taken holding the camera inside the tank.

And a little closer . . .

The garden was then filled with plants.

The flowering cherry trees are made by twisting wire into tree shapes, painting it brown and glueing pink flower soft to the branches.

Most of the bushes are lichen while others are model railway . . . urm, "bush making stuff"; a sort of crumbly foam substance.  Some of the lichen bushes have been sprinkled with purple flowersoft to resemble flowers.

Stone pebble steps lead up to a pergola up which some wisteria has been trained.  The pergola is balsa wood while the wisteria is brown cotton twine and more flowersoft.

 A path of white sand leads from one side of the garden, over the bridge and along to the tea house.

Even in 48th scale I found there wasn't quite enough room for everything I wanted to include but on the plus side the lid will now fit on my box of miniature garden supplies!