Time Flies!

Doesn’t time pass by quickly? Looks like my last post was way back in June when I was still busy making flowers to sell (yeah right!) at a Dollhouse show in July.

I went to that show but was not overwhelmed with sales. The show was nice and the people all very friendly. The nail polish and wire flowers were greatly admired but I only sold 7. I’d laboured to fill 48 vases and I sold 7!

Anyway since my return I have not done much in the way of miniatures as I got addicted to playing CityVille on Facebook. This is what I spend my time on, for now. Hence my lack of posts here. No miniatures so nothing to write.

Take care and be happy.

Still Making Nail Polish Flowers

Nothing new to report as I’m still crafting nail polish and wire flowers and leaves. I hope to complete enough to fill 48 vases which will be going with me to a miniatures show late July. Hopefully (or maybe) someone will like them enough to purchase a vase (or two).

The pictured vases above only have five flowers in each but I will be putting seven flowers and three branches of leaves into the rest of the vases. So doing the maths for this I need to make 322 flowers and 138 branches of leaves to fill the 46 vases. Phew!

Flowers

I have the nail polish and wire flowers bug. These are my latest creations. If you can’t recognize the flowers the vase on the left contains roses and the other vase has irises in it.

I tried making flowers using glue instead of nail polish but so far have had no luck. I don’t have Sobo glue so tried Aleenes Tacky Glue and another brand of Craft Tacky Glue. Both had the same result. On applying the second coat of glue/paint the first coat puckered. Botheration!

Current Projects

Here I am again back at WordPress.com. I had moved this blog back over to my hosted website a few months ago as you have more control of the layout there but I really don’t want to pay anymore to host a website so today I imported everything back. This means that somes images may not be working as they should. I’ll have to check things manually. Bare with me on this.

Anyway you may want to know what I’ve been doing of late. Or maybe not. It is entirely up to you.

I’ve committed myself to attending a club show in Nelson next month. I’ll be flying there and staying two nights in a hotel. I’ve also agreed to run several roundtable workshops during the show. This is what is filling my time currently. Preparing the kits. The first kit finished is for a boxed Tangrams game.

This week I’ll be preparing kits for a 1/4″ scale chair made from Aida cloth.

On top of this I have an obsession with making nail polish and wire flowers at present. I can make roses, irises, hydrangeas, anemones, tulips, poinsettia, white peace lily,  and a pink lily. I’m currently waiting on a delivery of vases before I can put together some flower arrangements.

So now you know. Till my next post, take care and minis on!

I Have a New Laptop

It  has been awhile since I last wrote as I haven’t been making anything miniature.  But now there is some news. This week on Tuesday I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop to replace my aging desktop PC. I was struggling to find space on the PC hard drive (160GB) and the PC was slowing down. Plus I’d seen several blue screens (bsod) which are not a good sign.

Now I have a 640GB hard drive and 4GB of Ram. Plus I’m not tied to the desk anymore. I’m also up-to-date with the Windows 7 operating system.

There were a lot of budget laptop models to choose from at the store but I narrowed my search down in two ways. First off all the 2GB Ram /500GB hard drive models were not an option. The second thing I noticed was many models had glossy black surrounds. This may not worry many people but I prefer the black textured casing, and a “non-reflective” screen for my laptop. So the Toshiba brand was selected.

It is now Friday and I am making myself at home on my new computer – programs to install and files to copy over.

Attended an Online Auction

I am a member of the active Yahoo Group “Quarter Connection” which is dedicated to making and collecting dollhouse miniatures in quarterscale (1/48th scale) . This group organizes an online auction occasionally of items kindly donated by members of the group.

If you wanted to attend the auction you registered beforehand and received a bidder’s ID. An hour before the auction those with an ID signed into the chat room to absorb the rules and participate in several practice auctions. This was great for a novice like me. Seems it is all in the timing and having a quick computer certainly helps.

Then at the designated time the official auction began. No talking was allowed this was the serious stuff. There were 72 lots up for grabs. The auction took 2-1/2 hours but the time just flew by. All items began with an opening bid of $1 working there way up $1 by $1. In the first category all items had a maximum bid of $10. If the bidding went up to $10 the first person to bid $10 got the item. If the item was popular you had to be really lucky to win. The second category was ten grab bags (contents unknown) with a maximum bid of $5. The last category was the unlimited price items.

To prepare for the auction I’d made a list of items that I wanted. Seven in total.  Four were in the first category but as they proved to be popular items I lucked out completely. I did however win four other items in this category. The bidding for the grab bags was fast and furious. So no luck with these at all. One person won two and another three. So I guess they had the timing perfect. In the last category I was surprised to win one of my wanted items.

So here they are:

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UK Atlas

[print_link]

The instructions for this atlas are written in PDF format. You can view the instructions with Adobe Reader.  If you don’t have this already installed on your computer you can download a free copy from Adobe’s website.

Please click on the files listed below and they will open up in new windows. Then you can save them to your hard drive.

UK Atlas Instructions

These files are for printing:

UK atlas pages inside

UK atlas pages outside

UK atlas cover