My first experiment with paper mache clay, Fairy House Jar Tea Light, was so successful, I made another one. This time I used a small glass bouillon jar with a plastic lid, cardboard, and CelluClay.Continue reading
Category Archives: Miniature Garden Accessories
scaled miniature accessories for garden and doll houses
YES, I made it myself: Constructing Molds
At my last selling event, once again, someone asked: “Did you really make that yourself, by hand? Well, how did you do that?” Sometimes folks don’t believe that I DO actually create the papercrete items I sell, from the design, the molds, to the painting and finishing of each piece. This post will be a step-by-step breakdown of a custom miniature house to show the amount of work involved in just creating the molds.Continue reading
The Mother Tree-Part III: Fairy House Door
Fairy doors come in all shapes, sizes, and designs. The Mother Tree’s fairy house entrance was made from scraps of wood, twigs, and jewelry findings. It has an operable latch and decorative hinge made from a recycled Spam can.Continue reading
The Mother Tree-Part II: Stone Landscaping
I approach most miniature garden landscaping projects using the same methods, tools, and materials as real life projects, just at a smaller scale. This post concerns only the stonework created for the Mother Tree.Continue reading
Crafting With Recycled Aluminum Cans
This is a continuation of an earlier post: Repurposing aluminum drink can to the max! I want to explain in more detail a few of the crafts I’ve made along with some tips for repurposing aluminum drink cans. Some crafts need specific equipment, others may be created with everyday household items. There are many YouTube videos, Instructables, and Internet crafting tutorials about how to deconstruct an aluminum drink can, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here. However, I do have a few suggestions that might make the chore a little easier.Continue reading
Experimenting With Cement Soaked Cloth
I’m having way too much fun with cement-soaked towels to work on anything else at the moment. I’ve made draped vases, miniature fairy houses, funky steampunk looking flowers, and have a few more ideas I want to try before I work this obsession out of my system. So, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned while experimenting.Continue reading
Busy, Busy! – forming hardware cloth miniatures
I’ve been extremely busy the last couple months (good for me), so I’m just getting back to blogging! I promised in my last blog post to create a couple of tutorials. There was one to be on forming hardware cloth and another on using recycled asphalt shingles for miniature garden accessories.Continue reading
Catching Up . . .
I’ve had the flu and been out of commission the last few weeks, so I’m taking a day to catch up the Blog with the papercrete fairy house projects. Some of the fairy houses were pretty cut-n-dry to develop. They were hand formed over disposable food containers, un-molded after set, dried, painted, and embellished.Continue reading
Waiting Game
As I suspected, the Hobbit houses didn’t do very well. It took two days before I could remove them from the molds, and they might collapse anyway. They’re still wet, fragile, and spongy. I’m afraid this batch failed! I’m letting them set out to see if they will harden up any, or just flop. Either way, I can’t use them. I learned a lesson (or two), so it wasn’t a complete waste of time and materials . . . disappointing though!Continue reading
Fairy Houses Formed
The R2D2-like mold was made from disposable plastic containers, Easter egg half, foam packing material, shopping bag, tape, and a straw. It yielded an “Angry House” once formed with papercrete. The pattern of the roofline made it appear a bit ticked-off, but I liked it, so I left it. The papercrete felt really good and I have high hopes for this one!Continue reading