Monday, February 23, 2015

Needle Felting



I have fallen in love with all of these needle felting pins that I have seen lately on Pinterest.  So I thought that I would give it a try.  This little bunny is one of my first projects. The link to the tutorial that I used is below -


 Her bunny was quite a bit bigger.  He looks to be about the size of the little kid's hand who is holding him.  And I of course love everything tiny so I wanted to make mine on a bit of a smaller scale.


Here's his cute little cotton tail!



And a couple of shots of him from both sides.  He's really rough, but I like the way he turned out.  I've not been able to find a good supplier for wool roving in my area so it looks like I'll have to start ordering online from amazon.


I also made this felted tree.  Inside is a foam cone, like the ones you can find in the craft section at Walmart.  (I just realized that you can tell that I'm watching Jericho on Netflix in the background!)
I like the wavy pieces of felt cut out to make the sort of branch levels on the tree.  Next time I've decided that I'm going to get a few different shades of green felt and see how that looks.  I also thought about doing one with all white to make the tree look snow covered.

With more practice I'd like the try some larger animals.  I've seen some adorable poseable felted mice that I'd love to do about five or so inches tall.  That way they would be perfect in mini scenes with all of the stuff that I've already got :)

Monday, February 16, 2015

Mini Pastel Pie Tins!

 

I really want to make a mini bakery!  I have so many great ideas, I just need to improve my polymer clay skills so I can make lots of mini baked goods :)

I've seen lots of pie tins on other blogs and they always just look like bottle caps to me.  And since I have thousands in my collection I decided to try painting some of them.  I seem to have a love all things pastel recently so I went with that as a color scheme.


The colors above are Cameo Pink, Couscous, Cloudless, and Lilac Mist.


And this one is Pale Green :)


Each cap got multiple coats of paint on the inside and outside and then a shiny coat of Mod Podge Super Gloss Brilliant to seal them.

Now I just need to dig out my seed beads and practice making strips of clay so I can make one of those fancy lattice style pie crusts!

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Coupon Minis


I've got some new coupon minis to share!  I've done so many of these lately that I probably need to get back to working on my Country Cottage so I'll actually have a place to put them all :)


These were either from a Colgate coupon that expired, or the photo ad that was right beside it.  They were actually double packs so the picture was of two toothpaste boxes one on top of the other.  Since I had two coupons I cut them all out and folded the pictures in half so I could make one complete four sided box.  You can still see where the boxes say value or twin pack, but I don't mind that.

I recently found a pin on Pinterest from a blog post written in 2013 where a lady make similar minis out of junk mail.  Instead of cutting out boxes for her minis she used foam to make them solid and I thought that was a great time saving idea.  Here is the link to the post -


I don't have enough colored markers to color the sides of my foam like the blog post so I used colored paper and glued them onto the sides.


A cute pic of the mini Colgate with a real box!  The real one is a 6 ounce tube so the box is almost 8 inches long.  My mini boxes are a bit closer to 10 inches on mini scale so we'll just pretend they are bigger tubes lol.


And of course I tried out some mini cleaning products using plastic straws.  I did one Lysol spray bottle, one Scrubbing Bubbles bottle, and one Lysol wipes bottle.  My cans are very close to the height of the real products, but they are a bit skinnier than normal.  This was the only way that I could get the mini labels to fit all the way around.  I think they will still look pretty realistic in a mini scene though.

See ya later blogland!

Sunday, February 1, 2015

1:12 Scale Stockpot DIY


My pharmacy friends will love today's post.  This is probably one of the easiest minis that I've made in a while.  I have hundreds (or possibly a thousand or so!) of these little desiccant pieces.  After all we just throw them away at the pharmacy!  So for this piece I took one of the larger desiccants and used an X-acto knife to just barely run along the seam between the lid and the bottom piece.  Once you've got a tiny gap going you just slide the blade in and the top pops right off.  Throw away the little crystal pieces that are inside so that no one (including pets!) can get to them.  Next I took my wire cutters and snipped the ends off of two paper clips.  I estimated the size I wanted for handles and then put a dot of super glue on each tip.  I used pliers to hold the pieces in place for about 30 seconds on each side.  Afterwards I sprayed a few light passes of silver spray paint to make it look like a stainless steel pot.  Once that was dry I flipped it over and gave it a couple more quick coats.  The area around the rim may need a bit of a touch up, but I can do that later with a paintbrush.

And voila!  A super easy, super cheap, fancy looking mini pot using things that I already had around the house!

Happy Sunday blogland!