The beach hut is finished!

It's been a fun couple of weeks!!  I was very eager to see this finished, and I am so happy how it came out.  Here are some pics of the finished work, and then I will post pics of little details:

I finally decided that I did not like the painted roof and opted to wallpaper it with grey shingles

I really like the house number!

Peaking through the windows..

View from the top, without the roof

A nice lunch table for two. The towel rack has designs from Véronique

A little side shelf to store stuff and to use as auxiliary table. 

A sink with cupboards to store utensils and food

Plates, glasses, food pantry and cleaning supplies

View from the entrace, with the doors open.  The carpet is the work of Ana Circea.

These director chairs are also from Seaside Miniatures.  A super easy kit made with wood and fabric paper.

Here is a view of the blind curtains that I talked about in the tutorial some days ago.

Do you see the white plates?  Those won't be like that for long...

My husband and I have gifted ourselves new dinner plates for our anniversary.  They are Sargadelos plates, which we absolutely adore.  A coworker of his gave us a beatiful coffee set from Sargadelos for our wedding , which we have been using since then.  She also gifted us a couple of mugs.  So this year we decided to buy some plates as well.  The design of our coffee set is no longer in production, so we chose the Espiroide design.  And naturally, I wanted some Sargadelos plates in the beach hut!

I simply printed the design to fit the plates, cut them, glue them and glazed them with Mod Podge.

Before

Process

After

That is mostly everything, for now.  I am going to buy some wood to make a base for the hut, so I can add some extra floor and set up some more decorations.  More on that soon, I hope!

More work on the beach hut

I was away last weekend, much to my chagrin.  But I have spent a couple of afternoons finishing the roof of the hut.

I started by painting everything that needed to be painted and let it dry.  

While that was happening, I wanted to make better the sink cabinet.  It was originally like this:

As you can see, it only has two spaces for storage, but they are very big, and I wanted the option to fill them up with stuff.  After all, there is not many room for storage in the hut.  So I decided to add a shelf to the door space, and a divider in the undersink.  I made templates to make sure I had the right size; I cut a couple of pieces of balsa wood using them as guide, sanded them to measure and installed them in the cabinet.

Love it!

After that, I started working with the roof pieces.  First, I took a sheet of shiplap wallpaper - this time from Jessica Cloe - and covered the inside part.

Cut to measure

Before glueing the wallpaper, I had to mark the place in which the supporting triangles for the roof would be.  Then I could wallpaper with an easy mind.

 After that, glueing the supporting pieces:

While the glue was setting, I painted white the trim and the accents diamonds.  When they were dry, I simply glued them to the edges of the roof:   And finally, the beach hut construction is finished!

Yay!  I love it!

Tutorial: Easy blind curtains

I love to accessorize!  I think every miniaturist enjoys the decorating part of any new scene - I certainly enjoy it more than the building process, even though I do enjoy putting up wallpapers!

Since I have tiny windows in the beach hut, I wanted to craft some miniature curtains - blind curtains, in fact, that don't require any complex work with fabrics, for which I am totally useless.

This was my first time crafting blind curtains, so here is what I came up with.  I think it is a very easy process, even for newbies to the hobby.

Materials required:

1. Your choice of fabric - I used a printable nautical fabric from Véronique
2. Scissors / cutter
   
3. Pencil
4. Double sided tape
5. Ruler 
6. Fine sand paper
   
7. Toothpics, or skewers - depending on how wide are your windows

1- Measure the width of your windows to determine the size of the rod you will be using.

2- Take your toothpick or skewer and mark this measure.

 

3- Cut to measure your toothpick/skewer using the cutter or an old pair of scissors

4- Sand the edges of the toothpick/skewer

5- Cut a strip of your fabric the width of your rod.  If you used printable fabric like I did, remove the paper backing.

6- Cover part of the strip with double sided tape.

7- Remove the coverings and place the rod at the beginning of the strip.  Make sure it is properly centered and straight.

8- Start rolling the fabric carefully, to make sure there are no wrinkles and that you keep the rod as straight as possible.  When you reach the end of the double sided tape, you are finished!  Trim any excess of fabric if necessary.

Congratulations!  You made your curtain!  

I have 4 windows, but for now I made just two curtains to try the technique.  Now that I have seen it works, more will follow!

Now get creative with decorations for the fabric: lace, trims, ribbons... Anything that you like!  Since this are for a nautical beach hut, I am leaving them as they are.  Have fun!

New project in the making: Beach hut

Since dear husband is away , I have more time to take on projects, and this one is a futile attempt to make the Summer last longer; also, because I had seen this kit a long time ago, and wanted to make it:

It started by purchasing a beach hut kit from Seaside Miniatutes.  The have a lot of sea-related projects in several scales for you to make.  I stuck to 1:12, because it's my favorite, and the one easier to find accessories for.  So I chose this model, and was super excited when I received it in my home just 5 days later, this Monday!  I also bought a director's chairs kit, with the intention of using them in the hut.

Upon recieving it, the first thing I did was lay out the pieces, and do a dry fit to see what would be the final result; also to measure the actual size of the hut for the decorations.

Soooo cute!

It's more square than I thought it would be

Love the little windows!

So, first step: before any glueing, painting the outside!  I had been perusing the internet for pictures of beach huts, and most of them are very brightly colored.  That's why I have chosen a bright blue - I love blue too.

Starting the painting process

It takes a while to paint everything.

This was the end of Monday evening.  On Tuesday I kept adding coats of paint to the model.  It took 3 coats for the paint to look uniform.  But the blue shade is lovely!

While everything was getting dry, I went to Veronique's shop to choose a floor and a wallpaper for the inside of the hut.  She made things easy for me with a coastal design for the wallpaper, and another for the floor.  First step: the floor:

Perfect!

Then, the back wall.  To make the pattern, I simply laid out the wall on top of the paper and traced the contour.  Then I cut to shape with a sharp blade.

I even had time to make the side walls.  Then, the light was fading and it was time to stop until next day.

It's starting to look good...

On Wednesday, I started by putting some pullers on the doors.  I had purchased these a long time ago, I don't even remember for what, but I liked the industrial look:

Very nice!

While the pullers were getting dry, I started with the front wall.  Since it has windows, it obviously needed a "glass" on them.  So I cut some pieces of acetate to cover them:

Once covered, it was the wallpaper's turn.  This one was more difficult because of the windows, but I did exactly as the same as with the back wall: lay it on top of the paper, trace whatever was redundant and cut the pieces - I did the tracing before I put on the acetate on the windows, to be able to use the window cuts.

It was a good thing that I kept the paper cut from the doors frame.  It would come in handy later...

Seeing how it is looking...

Love the earthy tones!

I spent some time playing around with furniture for the hut, to see what could go well and where.  The light faded again, and I stopped the work until the next day.

Today I started by painting the outside of the roof.  It is a soft black, to create constrast with the hut:

While they were gettting dry, I decided that I really did not like the blue doors as would be seen from the inside of the hut, and decided to wallpaper them with the remnants from the front wall - the piece I was wise enough to save the day before.  So I cut the acetate pieces for the windows glass, and wallpapered them:

Cutting the wallpaper to size

Covering the windows

All done!

 To make the exterior look cute, I added a house number on top of the door frame:

I love seahorses!

Now, a difficult part: the doors.  The kit says you have to glue them, open or closed at your discretion, but I wanted the option of being able to open and close them at will.  So I decided to try something risky: I stuck a pin in the edge of the doors, and made a hole for them in the door frame.  Ideally, doors would be able to swing, but since I do not have a base to hold them (the front wall is glued to the edge of the base), maybe they'll fall.  It's worth a try - there is always the possibility of glue them later...

The wait is over: now to glue the hut together!  Instructions said to glue the back wall to the edge of the base.  Then the sides - but I did not know if they were on top of the base or to the edge too.  It turns out that they were glued on top of the base, so now the wallpaper does not match in the corners.  Oh well.  That won't be very visible when the furniture is put in place:

Now the front wall.  It goes on the edge as well.  Apparently, the doors hold well in place.  One has to be very careful when moving them, but I am happy I don't have to glue them down.  On retrospective, for once it would have been better to glue the pieces together and then put the wallpaper, but what's done is done.  The mistakes are not very visible unless you know they are there.

I will let everything dry in peace for a few hours.  In the meantime, I will play with accessories to put on the hut when it's finished.

I still have the roof to work on, but I think I will tackle that next week - I will have some free days, so I hope the work can keep going steadly.

So, as I said, I started playing with a little cabinet with sink that I got for the hut.  It looked like this:

I fell in love with it the momen I saw it.  Mostly because many sinks I have seen were vintage/Victorian, and this one has a design that can be very modern - with the right accessories!

So what I did (something that I had been wanting to do for a long time!) was give the counter a marble look.  To do that, I followed carefully this very precise tutorial from Jessica Cloe.  Here are some pics of the process, and a pic of the finished counter:

I choose carefully the more ornate part of the marble decoration

Some dry fit

All finished!

I am not too sure about the faucet.  I will try to find a prettier one, but if I cannot find it I will probably just paint it black.

I was going to paint to whole piece white, but after I saw this picture, I decided to leave it unfinished.  Now off to fill it up with goodies!  I may add a shelf inside the left door cabinet to store stoneware... We'll see how that goes!