Sea House Warming Hut: Now We Are Six

2015/08/012015/08/0118 Comments

Here are the unpainted stools, having a drink at the bar. Seeing them a light color lets me know I want them darker. But not black or aluminum. And because I want to spray them, I am somewhat limited in my color choices. Current thinking is a basilly sage green, and repainting the woodstove to match. Because different greens can clash horribly. But would that be too matchy-matchy, the stove and the stools?

I see several cans of spray paint in my near future.

You know what the hardest part of making this whole set of stools was? Gluing the 1/8-inch round feet on the bottom of the legs. They each needed a good size dot of glue — but not too much — and then they would repeatedly stick to the applicator, the knife blade, the tweezers and/or my fingernail, in succession. At least two out of four instances for each of the six stools.

Sea House Warming Hut: The Living Roof grows

2015/06/042015/06/0414 Comments

Preserved moss, painted cut silk succulents, a paper poppy, real thyme sprigs. Oh, and maybe a few tufts of dried grass. A lot of glue. Moss is sproingy.

My palette of watercolors.

Wee dotted faux succulent-type plant form. Still fooling around.

I seem to have used up most of my “good” moss clumps foliating the trees and bushes of the Sea House Pavilion, leaving mostly weird stems and sad tendrils. Not ideal for this roof.

Yay for 40% discount coupons at Michael’s.

Bins

2015/04/292015/04/304 Comments

Wanted some bins for under the shelves to hold stuff, and opted for a slatted crate style. I used 1 x 1/16-inch basswood for the ends and base, 3/16-inch for the slats, and 1/8-inch square for the feet. Here you can see my paper- and wood-dedicated pair of curved embroidery scissors. Very handy for trimming any whiskers from the cut ends before sanding.

I glue the ends to the base, and then use the upper and lower slats to square it up.

The rest of the slats are spaced in between.

I check to make sure they fit the space, with room to pull them out easily. Tiny casters would be preferable, but hey, budget. On the upper shelves are some metal canisters with lids I got from HBS/miniatures.com. It’s nice to find simple, well-proportioned things not all gobbed up with flowers and out-of-scale bad lettering.

And here they are with two coats of paint — the same California poppy color as the outdoor furniture — and waiting to dry before finish sanding, a light coat of satin varnish and soft buffing.

Poppies for the Warming Hut Roof

2015/03/242015/04/306 Comments

1:12 California poppies kit from The Miniature Garden Center

Contents of a 1:12 scale California poppies kit

I went micro today, and made up one of the flower kits from The Miniature Garden Center. Those dots you see are 3/16-inch (4.7 mm) in diameter.

Inspiration: volunteer poppies near the herb garden

California poppies might be my favorite flowering plant. If it wasn’t for freesias. Or peonies. Or coneflowers.

The kit assembled, with some variations.

Because these will be growing on a windswept roof, I cut the two-inch long stem wires in half. California poppies are rarely leggy.

Waiting to be planted on the living roof

Even though California poppies are too delicate and wild to be a good cut flower, they’ll be a nice spot of color in building tableaux. I made more eucalyptus branches, too. Come sit and have a glass of orange juice, and enjoy the morning light.

Oh also, this is the whole of the background picture I used in the deck extension shot. It was taken at sundown on the aforementioned cliffs at Mussel Rock. There was a brisk wind that lifted Lula’s ears as she leaned into it.

Lula reading the smell stories on the wind, December 2014

Your scale reference here is that she was a 130-pound (59 kilo) Mastiff mix (Dogue de Bordeaux and Bullmastiff), and she died two weeks after this walk. We miss her.

in no particular order

2014/12/022014/12/042 Comments

Peacock rug getting there! Just the remaining green background left to stitch. Then blocking and binding.

(Finished size will be 4.625 x 3.125 inches (11.75 x 7.9 cm), 227 x 153 stitches, Gütermann silk on 49-count silk gauze, from a design by Roger Fry, as charted by Melinda Coss in Bloomsbury Needlepoint From the Tapestries at Charleston Farmhouse.)

Then I’ve been playing around with Kris Compas’s current tutorial for an upholstered parsons chair, using this great cotton stripe from a thrift store shirt. Other than (endless) work on the Peacock rug, I think this is the first miniature building I’ve done since I packed everything up to move in the summer. (The cording is made from three strands of DMC floss, and is more true to scale than using all six strands. In case you noticed.)

Penultimately, here is my first repeating pattern!

The color palette is a combination of hues drawn from photos of the ocean and from the persimmon tree in Soquel. The simplicity is perhaps underwhelming, but this represents hours and hours of work. Onward!

And finally, I did go back to the indie dollar store and buy up all the boxes of Prang KantRolls.

Mostly because this:

The gift of vocabulary (and leather)

2014/03/072014/03/073 Comments

Superfun surprise letter!

Squeeeee! Some days the mail is extra-fun.

Last week I came across a post on Pat Sweet’s Bo Press Miniature Books about shagreen. I sort of thought I knew what shagreen was until I came to the observation “Stingray is such a strange leather.”

Wait, what?

Some time later, after reading up on both (and related) items, and with new-found appreciation, I thanked Pat for enriching my world. I had not known that they make leather from fish. Then she told me they make leather from all kinds of things, “If you can skin it, you can tan it.”

And then she sent me this!

The first black piece is polished ray skin; the yellow is unpolished; the celadon-colored bit is more traditional ray (which used to be called shark skin); the green triangle: also ray.

The lower black piece is chicken foot leather.

O_O

Here’s a closer look, because it is so fabulous and horrible:

Pat says this is chicken skin leather. I think it might be dragon.

Anyway, I have to go continue celebrating my birthday. We will be seeing more of these extraordinary materials. Each will become a part of something fabulous. Thank you, Pat Sweet, for sharing this treasure with me! And do check out her work. You will be glad you did.

ps: The shagreen dots are calcified papillae.

so of course

2013/06/192013/06/204 Comments

messing around with modern rug design

So now that I’m all obsessed with miniature needlework, I’ve been searching for some modern design charts. I haven’t found any yet, so I started sketching up one of my own. I also want an easier project to work on, so I got some 28-count evenweave canvas and picked out some silk thread from the minimal selection of colors available at the local fabric store. This will be a 5 x 7 inch (12.7 x 17.78 cm) rug, so on 28-count that will be… 140 x 196 stitches. Ha! Compared to the 49-count silk gauze, should be relatively fast and easy.

I think I can kraft again

2011/10/022014/02/24Leave a comment

drunken krafting creatures emerge

new horizons

2011/07/052013/03/04Leave a comment

overcast day on the Gulf of Mexico, Gasparilla Island

green

2011/05/262011/05/28Leave a comment

Wheat! That lived under the snow in the winter, that Lula ate for sour stomach, that is now making grain!

Dear Rhode Island Summer,

I hate you.

Never mind that when you decide it’s time to grow things you do so with a greenhouse vengeance, all unrelenting heat and humidity that plants crave and I wilt in. You try to appease me with ridiculously dramatic thunderstorms that thrill my soul, but the price of admission is too high. Yes, I can see the tomatoes growing, but it’s too horrible to go out and defend their honor, picking the hideous bugs and grubs and caterpillars that appear like harpies, to devour or torment that which I would harvest.

I long for tolerance, to acclimate, but each summer is a fresh new hell.

Sure, I can remember swimming, body surfing, blissfully playing in the waves of a warm ocean, in the evening, with the sun setting in the wrong direction, but that comes later on, after I am broken by the months of high temperatures and air so devoid of available oxygen that I live totally indoors, air conditioned loudly to a freakishly unnatural cold.

The ratio of good to awful is way, way off.

I am aware that I am tainted, having known that climate can be another way. But I cannot un-know it. And I am really, really hard-pressed to rise to the occasion of fully functional productivity when you are summer. Because you suck.

Your winters I love. Will even miss, when I am no longer subjected to that spectrum of tantrums you call weather. Your Fall? Over-rated. A blessed relief that summer is over, and a month or two before the winter heating bills kick in. Tree leaves turning brilliant colors? Very pretty, but not worth living through summer. Spring? A marathon for those of us foolish and forgetful enough to garden, to get ready for the unbearable gauntlet of summer.

I am the stranger in a strange land. So much beauty, but bugs will bite you, hard, to within a millimeter of your itch tolerance if you think you can go outside and enjoy it.

I like fireflies, magic incarnate. They are worth being eaten alive by mosquitoes to observe, on a blanket on the lawn with your one true love. Also tequila or fine champagne helps.

I think about the people who have lived in these woods before me, before central air conditioning and tequila and fine champagne. I admire them! But also, they didn’t know there was any other way to live. I assume they had a larger perspective — one that, after four years here, still eludes me.

I want out.

But still, it is green, and greening. May’s color.