Further Improvements

I wasn't lost :) just spent my days with pretty hard work during the last 3 weeks and now I can show you the latest improvements of my salon de thé. Until this I worked only on the flat walls, as the front facade will be joined to the "body" later with hinges. Working on the back wall was totally different experience and now I realized how big house this will be....
During the last weeks I worked on the back and side walls. As I mentioned earlier the back wall will get the same design as the front facade. I built it from cardboard and balsa and I have my 2 cents again: if you worked with balsa, I'm sure you realized how hard to glue the balsa to any other material, as it starts to curve at the moment the glue meets its surface. This time I didn't want to go through on this nightmare again and decided to varnish the balsa first with waterbased varnish originally used on wooden furniture. And IT DID THE TRICK!!! The balsa became sturdier and I could cut it and glued very easy. My last tasks on the outside before I will start the painting is making the decorative railings and the stuccos on the back wall. I hope I can start the painting procedure before Christmas. Fingers crossed. Probably I will do it between baking cookies or preparing some Christmas stuff.

Back wall - cardboard and balsa cut and glued



Covered with liquid wood and painted with gesso

See you soon,
have a great week,
Orsi

M A Facade

I wish I could post earlier.... but I didn't have any time to deal with miniatures, I did some pre-Christmas clean-up in my flat and put together a lifesize chest of drawers which came from the blue-yellow Swedish shop (aka Ikea). As its total weight is 75 kgs (12 stones) it was a real challenge :)

But finally on this week I finished the stuccos on the salon de thé's facade and happy to post some photos about them. It was annoying to make the tiny grapes, I did not even count how many small balls needed to create them..... 1 stucco has 13 fruits, with 25-30 balls each, so we can count 300 balls per stucco, which is altogether 1200 small balls.... no wonder it took 6 hours to make one...

In the upcoming weeks I will spend my time with building up the back, left and right side and leave the stuccos for a while. And can I tell you something? I won't miss them. Though I'm happy with them it was PIA to make them. Now I'm eagerly waiting to finish the outer walls and paint them to a rich, aged limestone colour.

See you soon,

Orsi