A really, really long blog post

It's been a while since a posted (again) but only for good reasons.....too much socialising has kept me away from the computer. So I have a bit of a backlog of things to tell you, and little treasures to show you. A real mixture! I was really lucky to receive some lovely gifts, I made a couple of things that I'll show you, AND I did some shopping!

I know that posting about Easter gifts in mid June is awfully late, but these are photos that I took just days before our computer died. Just before the Easter weekend, a little package arrived from Mercedes (Liberty Biberty). It was so beautifully wrapped - there is definitely something awfully exciting about a "do not open until...." sign!It was so lovely to have a little gift arrive out of the blue, and when I opened it there were the most beautiful little Easter miniatures that Mercedes had made! They are so sweet! Aren't I lucky!
The rusty rabbits are now in the garden of the Shabby Cottage, and the little boys room has some very sweet bunny accessories! The little cushion and Country Bunny book are delightful and I love the little blackboard (it even has chalk) and the rusty "tin" items! Thank you Mercedes - they are lovely
I think my favourite item (is it ok to have favourites??) is this little table and potplant. Here they are in a corner of the bedroom. I had always meant to make a little stool or table for this corner, and this just fits beautifully. Such pretty colours. You can see one of Paris Minatures Laduree cupcakes there as well, on one of my vintage plates. And in the corner, on a tray made by Frederica, is another recent arrival at the shabby cottage....the little patchwork doll. I must admit I was blatently copying Flora when I bought this little doll. I saw it on her blog and just fell in love with her - thank you Flora for the link to Pamela's Etsy store.

Another gorgeous gift arrived in the mail a few days ago, this time from Norma, who recently came to visit! When I opened it, I was amazed to find that she had made a little beanbag for the little boy's room ....the fabric is gorgeous - covered in tiny stars. It looks so comfortable and now the cushions I made don't have to lie on the floor any more. Here is the beanbag in its new home.
And that wasn't all!! Norma had also gone to the trouble to make a selection of Biggles books - she had seen one of my posts mentioning that Biggles books were on my wishlist and had made some! I love the vintage covers and my little boy, Matthew, is most impressed. My daughter Ella says that her favourite thing in the Shabby Cottage is the beanbag. So thank you, Norma - you gift was a real hit! You are so kind.

I thought I would post a picture of the little presents I made for Norma when she came to visit. I made her a breakfast try in pink and green, and a little toiletry tray in similar colours. Norma chose a really lovely selection of plates to take home and I slipped in some New Zealand miniatures as well.

As far as other additions to the cottage go, I was really pleased to find these gorgeous vintage picnic boxes on Etsy. They are so lovely and have found a new home in the kitchen.
I was happy to have finally found an image of one of my favourite plates - it is by Royal Winton and has a picture of a caravan on it - I made a miniature version for the cottage!

Finally, I was reading through some of the blogs I follow a while ago and I found a wonderful blog post by Suzanna. What gorgeous things! Like her, I would like everything from this shop. Since they can't be had here (and I probably can't afford them either), then the next best thing is to make them in miniature. I really like these new sets - they are happy-looking.Goodness, you deserve a medal for reading all the way through this blog post. I've nearly finished now and I promise not to do such a long one again. The last thing I wanted to show you was this gorgeous plate set - my new favourite - aren't these just the picture of shabby chic!!

And the winner is....

The winner of my giveaway for the breakfast tray is Lara from Lara's Miniature World. Congratulations, Lara....I really hope you like it - let me know your mailing address and I will send it to you with lots of love.


Thank you very much to everyone who took the time to enter this giveaway....it was nice to hear from you and read your comments. Thanks especially to Susan who saved us all a whole lot of headaches by knowing the reason why people couldn't comment and suggesting how I could change the settings to have it work better. Thanks Susan!

I have also had people send me links and images to replace the ones I lost...thanks so much for that - I appreciated it a lot. I have got over my dismay about the computer (I'm no longer crying over spilt milk) and am all excited about the new plates I am about to make!
I wondered if anyone felt like visiting Amy. She is new to miniatures and blogging and has taken on a big project and is going at it great guns. It's so great getting good advice and support from people who have been doing it a bit longer, so if you feel like stopping by her blog, I'm sure she would appreciate it! (Hope you don't mind the mention, Amy!)

I was so lucky the other day, because I had a visit from Norma! Those of you who follow her blog will know that she was visiting her brother in New Zealand and he lives not far from me, so they both came out for a visit and we had the most wonderful afternoon, chatting about both miniatures and blogging, and eating slices of his significant-birthday cake (yum!). Norma is just lovely and it was so nice to see her.
Well, that's all from me today. I'm sorry that I couldn't send everyone a gift! Thanks again for entering my draw - I'll be back soon with more photos to show you.

Giveaway - Breakfast Tray

I had a lovely morning yesterday working on this little breakfast tray for my giveaway and here it is, all finished. I really hope you like it!
The tray itself was made by Al Chandronnait - I have painted it white. There is a little Greengate placemat and some of my dollshouse "vintage" plates decorated with purple flowers. The plain purple bowl, cup and saucer are made by Sam Dunlap - such a pretty colour. I have filled the breakfast bowl with yoghurt with a swirl of fruit flavourings and I made tiny berries to add to the yoghurt. Of course there is a lovely steaming cup of black coffee, a coffee pot for refills and a little scone with jam and cream. When my husband saw this he asked if this was my idea breakfast and I had to admit that it was! I think it is really pretty, and I made it with lots of love for this giveaway to celebrate having more than 400 followers. Thank you so much for all your support - it means a lot to me and I really appreciate you all!

If you would like to enter this giveaway, all you need to do (you know the drill!) is be a follower and leave a comment on this blog. I'll draw it in about a week.

Have a lovely week with your miniatures!!

Back in Cyberspace

The last time I posted was 6th April!!! That is such a long time ago....you were probably wondering if I had dropped off the face of the earth after 7 weeks with no blog entries!!!

We have had such a disasterous time here. Not really, because actually everyone is well and happy and my beautiful children are just great and we haven't had any great tragedies to deal with, but it feels like I have had a tragedy anyway.

A bit of background....I run (actually maybe it should say ran) a dollshouse business here in New Zealand...., not my Etsy shop. I didn't really mention it much because I wanted to keep it separate from my blog, however like many dollshouse folk, I poured a huge amount of time and energy into setting it up - I ran it from home via a website. So....this is what has been happening with that: First the recession hit and that didn't do it much good, then my show displays were all at my mother-in-law's house when it burnt down so I lost those. (She is having a new house built and is ok but the displays are history.) Then someone hacked my website and destroyed it - one day the whole website was just gone! I have had a new one semi-built but I don't like the way it looks and also haven't had time to enter the about one thousand products back in. Which brings me to my recent misadventure...

...our computer fried itself about six weeks ago. It took with it all my business accounts, family and business photographs, basically everything, and I do A LOT on the computer! There's a lesson in backing things up for you. Please learn from our mistake!! We had to send the hard drive off to the men in the white coats and the computer had to be rebuilt.....got it back empty....no photo editing software, no email programme, NOTHING. We eventually recovered some things off the fried hard-drive.....our family photos of when the kiddies were little are all there, so that is good. My accounts are recovered up to Jan this year so that is a relief....I'll have to re-enter everything since then all over again.

Anyway, sorry to have to tell you all this - it's a bit boring to read!

But there are some things we haven't recovered, the absolute worst from my point of view is all the images I have collected over the last 18 months or so for my shabby chic miniatures.....everything is totally gone! All my images of plates, all my book covers I made, all my pictures that I used to make miniature framed pictures... just everything! I have to start all over again! So that sucks! Big time!

What amazes me, is how much it has completely thrown me! Even once we got the computer back, I just didn't know where to start trying to get started again. That's why I haven't been blogging - we've had the computer back for the last few weeks but I was so upset about it all that I didn't even want to have to tell you what had happened. And of course now that I have, I feel better.

So, let's look on the bright side....some of the plate images I had I have been able to re-find, and I can start collecting new images. I have now got a replacement photo editing programme that I can get to know how to use hopefully. I tried downloading a free one and look what it did!!! The photo at the top of this blog post is the result, but I saved it anyway because I kind of like the freaky 1960s hippy look....however that is NOT what I want all my photos to look like!

While all this was going on, I reached 400 followers. I don't deserve them, because I haven't been blogging for so long, but to those of you who are still reading, I have plans for a giveaway coming up to celebrate 400 followers and surviving my computer crash, so keep watching this space. Also, I received a lovely little gift from Mercedes for Easter, which brightened up my glumness...I'll show you photos next time.

Thanks for still reading my blog!

A few additions to the shabby cottage

My thought for the week (this is aimed entirely at myself!) is that if you need to take time off from miniatures so that you can relax, then you must be doing it wrong!!

There have been a couple of additions to the shabby cottage recently.

This week I made a carpet for the bedroom....I printed the image onto my very last sheet of fuzzy paper. Sure enough, the paper folded over part way through the printer, but luckily it wasn't on the part with the large carpet on it.

Fuzzy paper makes a lovely, thin carpet but it can be a bit prone to lifting at the edges after a little while, so I have very lightly glued it down to the floor. I can lift it up easily enough if I want to because when I made the floor, I rubbed a candle all over the painted surface and then polished it to make a 'waxed' surface, so the carpet isn't really permanently stuck down.

This is such a pretty carpet. I thought I would also add the original image here as well so that anyone who would like it can copy it. You can see it below.

I am interested in trying out suede paper for carpet making to see whether that would stay flatter. Maybe I'll try that next time.

Here is the image I used to print the carpet. Hopefully you can right-click this and use it yourself if you like it.Another addition to the shabby cottage is a beautiful little teapot and cup/saucer which have come all the way from Brazil, made by Betinha out of cold porcelain.

They are just gorgeous, and I have put them on the kitchen bench, all ready for a very glamourous cup of tea! This week I have been absolutely plagued with headaches/migraines and haven't had much joie-de-vivre, but in between headaches I did manage to finally go out and get some plate hangers and make a real-life-sized plate display for my living room wall.

Here they are, hanging above my rather excessive collection of cookbooks! I haven't been, and won't be brave enough to try and "shabby-chic' my collection of dark wood furniture in my real house....that is why I love the little shabby cottage so much - my husband once looked inside it and commented that he could now see what I would really like the house to be like.

Shabby Chic Bunting

For ages, I have been meaning to make some shabby chic bunting for my little cottage. It's not hard to DO it, just hard to find time, unfortunately.

I printed out some pretty Cath Kidston patterns on printable cotton fabric (which I managed to find in NEW ZEALAND!!) and spent a happy little while cutting out little triangles and messing around with glue. I am really happy with my bunting - it looks so pretty hanging over the living room mirror. Now I have to figure out how to make some tiny fairy lights

I want to make some fairy lights to drape over the ladder in the living room - they have to actually light up of course.

I found this photo of some beautiful fairy lights shaped like roses - these are full sized ones but I would love something like this in miniature for the shabby cottage.

I have had one try at this already but only succeeded in detaching a very important and very thin wire from the string of tiny lights I had bought. I couldn't fix them so that was the end of that attempt. Maybe it's time I tried again!

Too many plates

I am so grateful to my Etsy customers for buying my little plates, because then I get to make more, which I really enjoy. I love finding new images to use and learning more about vintage china. That's why miniatures are so great - you get a chance to learn a lot about the full-sized thing you are trying to miniaturise. So now I know more about china than I used to. Unfortunately it has meant that I have spent too much of my very small amount of free time wandering round antique shops and I now I have fallen in love with some vintage patterns I didn't know existed before! The two above are so pretty - both Royal Doulton patterns. The one on the left is Wild Pansy and the other is Violets.



I don't have very much vintage china but here is one of my pretty plates, with the passionfruit biscuits I made this week. I'll show you some of my other china some time when I can get a nice photograph of it. I would quite like to put a plate display on the wall, like I have in the dollshouse. Not sure what hubby would think of that, though.

I have been very busy filling orders lately, and have been wondering why it has been getting more and more difficult. Anyway, the other day after we had done a time-and-motion study at work, I decided it was about time I was more organised at home....I waste so much time looking for things. So I FINALLY sorted out all my little plate decals and NO WONDER I was feeling disorganised....I have more than 200 different patterns for plates at the moment! It took me quite a few hours to sort them all out, label them, record them on the computer and file them away tidily. Now it all runs like clockwork and I don't know why I didn't do it ages ago! I'm not naturally a very organised person.

The strangest thing that has happened lately is that I now get to blog at work!!! The seed company where I work has started a gardening blog and they have given the job to me. It feels like a big responsiblity....a bit different from just doing a personal one and writing whatever comes to mind. I'm enjoying it though.

Thank you so much for your kind emails and comments after my last post. Here in New Zealand we are all having to come to terms with the Christchurch earthquake and just try to help our people as much as we can. This is becoming an iconic photo in New Zealand - the moment the earthquake struck - captured in time.

Thank you for continuing to stop buy and visit my blog. I haven't commented much on anyone else's blog for absolutely ages, and feel quite guilty about that, but time is so short....I can squeeze the reading in though, and it is wonderful to be inspired by all the wonderful miniaturists out there in blogland.

For Christchurch

For the city where I was born..... I am so sad. This has been such a dreadful time.

To those of you who have contacted me, thanks for your kind thoughts. We live many hours away from Christchurch and are safe, but like most New Zealanders we have close family and friends in Christchurch and all our thoughts are with them. The whole of New Zealand is sad for our beautiful Christchurch.

First Dollshouse - Bedroom

The final room in my little tour of my first dollshouse is the bedroom on the top floor. I must say that I definitely learnt my lesson by building this particular room. It is such a crazy shaped room that it is difficult to furnish and very difficult to photograph!

It is built in the triangle roof and even though I made it a couple of centimetres taller than the plan said, it is still very annoying having the two sloping roofs on each side - there is no room for the furniture (let alone a door - so there is no way into this room!) and there are not enough walls on which to put pictures. Oh well, we live and learn!

I really like the bed I have in this room. It is a Phoenix white metal kit - quite soft metal, but really finely detailed....I've seen the same bed painted really nicely in gold and white (that's probably what I would do now, and then add rust!!), but I like this old-fashioned look. Since I can't really sew, making the bedding was a huge challenge for me! I was really proud of my pillow case, which is made from an old linen handkerchief.....I love the cut work edge. The pillow was embroidered by a lady called Judy and it goes really nicely with the old broach that I found to use as a picture on the wall.

I like the dressing table, and had great fun making pefume bottles out of old beads. The dressing table set is a Chrysnbon set, which my friend Trish has beautifully handpainted. I made the hydrangea that you can't quite see behind the chair.

This beautiful doll was my "special" purchase at our national Convention about two years ago. I think she is gorgeous!Another favourite thing in this room is this sweet Alice in Wonderland doll. She was knitted by Helen Palenski, who is a New Zealand IGMA artisan.

She sits on the chest at the end of the bed. This was already a very nice plain wooden chest, but I have messed around with decals again here to make it resemble the Norwegian Rosemaling folk art painting. The pretty green shoes on the floor are by Sylvia Rowntree, the Dolls Cobbler.

Actually, silly as it might sound, I am really proud of the floors in this house. I found some pieces of paper that looked like wood, and before putting the house together I painted the floors black, then cut strips of the wood paper and glued them to the floor, leaving tiny gaps between so that the black showing through looked like the "gaps" between the floorboards. Then I painted the floor randomly with watercolours so that it wouldn't look so uniform, and finally it got two coats of varnish. I like this floor that I made so much better than any of the readymade floor papers I have seen.

This is the window in the bedroom. Yes, blinds again....you know I can't make curtains. This blind is also made from an old handkerchief. The cranberry glass vase is so pretty and here is one of my absolute favourite miniatures....the little "Butterfly Girl" bronze by Neil Carter. It is just so beautiful!

So that is the tour of my first dollshouse...I hope you enjoyed it.

The cider turned out very very nice! I'm making my second batch now.