Mini Marvels

Hello all!  Time to set out on the next leg of A Vintage Journey.  The wonderful Anne is our host this month and she wants to see your Mini Marvels.  You can read all the challenge details over at A Vintage Journey, but basically she'd like you to apply your creativity to anything four inches or smaller in size.  My fellow Creative Guides have, as usual, provided a wealth of inspiration but before you hop off and take a look, here's my offering for you.

If anyone mentions miniatures to me, my mind goes immediately to dollshouses (unsurprisingly) - so I headed for tiny houses and this is what I ended up with.  You might want to grab a cup of tea if you're planning to see all the details!







My little houses range from four inches in height (the peak of the tall, thin house's roof) to a tiny two inches high (the smallest of the houses), so they fit right in to Anne's Mini Marvels rules.













They're made with some Calico Craft Parts house kits - they have a lovely range of dwellings in different shapes and sizes.













Depending on how you're decorating the houses, it may be easiest to do some work before gluing the houses together...  (Here's proof, in case you need it, that they're all smaller than four inches!)













... but since I wanted to work with paint and mediums, I glued them first and then started with gesso and then white acrylic for my first layers.














Next up some book page fragments and tissue tape scraps.














I have these great Inkylicious Greyboard Wildflower Silhouettes, which work with the matching stamp set, so I thought they'd make a nice focal point on the front of each house.














Then I used the complementary stamps on all the other sides.














It's only rough stamping since there are more layers to come, and a perfect image won't be necessary.














I inked some Broken China through the That's Crafty Distress Harlequin Dinky Stencil.  These tiny stencils are perfect for small scale work - the diamonds are sized perfectly for a Mini Marvel!















I clear-embossed the inky Harlequins, so that they'd stand a chance of making it through the layers still to come.
















Next I started playing with DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylics - washes of Prussian Blue coming down from the top, and washes of Raw Umber coming up from the bottom.










Some more stamping - a Tim Holtz stamp in white acrylic paint this time...

... as well as one of my all-time favourite TH script stamps in Jet Black Archival.  (It comes from his Apothecary set).








I sealed all those layers in with a coat of DecoArt Satin Varnish.














At this point, I stuck on my Wildflower pieces and gave them a couple of coats of white paint.














I then used a paintbrush and my fingers to add DecoArt One-Step Crackle around and about the place, and then coated the whole lot with Antiquing Cream in Titanium White.

That's always a bit of a heart-in-mouth moment as you see all your hard work disappearing, but the Antiquing Cream will always wipe away with moisture...














... other than in the crackles, which is the whole point really.















I love my spidery white lines breaking up the darker areas of paint.













And you can still see all the way through to those earlier layers underneath.













Now for the roofs... Since we're working in a small scale, I dug out some very finely corrugated cardboard - the usual size folds would look a bit out of place on such tiny houses.














I cut and trimmed my roof panels to fit each house, and used Distress Crayons to add some darker shading to them.












I also added some Distress Crayon to the edges of the houses, as well as to the edges of the flowers.













When you spritz the applied crayon colour with water and then rub with your finger, you get a great distressed look.

The flowers then had a coat of Triple Thick Gloss Glaze by DecoArt, and over that glazed layer I stamped Wendy Vecchi's Spatter Background stamp - again stamping in white paint.













I sought out some suitable phrases from the Idea-ology Clippings stickers and glued them on.














And then the penultimate step was to outline the words and the flowers with some pen work and shading.

















And finally - of course - plenty of white spatter.













I'm so delighted with the outcome.













My little houses make me very happy.

I'm going to go through a quick view of each house, side by side (mostly so I've got a record of them here!).  As always, you can click on the photos if there's anything you want to see in close-up.









Everywhere you look there are different details taking centre stage...

... sometimes the Harlequins, sometimes the crackle...

... sometimes the stamping, sometimes the words...

... sometimes the flowers, and so on!

They also look great with a tealight standing in front of them.  The flickering flame allows the glossier areas to reflect the light and brings them to life in a different way.





I'm afraid I utterly failed to capture the effect on camera, but you can get an idea of it from how they catch the light.









I'm sorry it's been another mammoth post (even longer than my Love This Life journal a couple of days ago), but I hope you enjoyed visiting my tiny dwellings, and if you're looking for more inspiration do check out the wonderful projects my fellow Creative Guides have come up with for their own Mini Marvels.

Our sponsors this month are the Southern Ridge Trading Company.  Our randomly drawn winner will get a generous $50 selection of their fantastic chipboard and wood veneer laser cuts.




Or you might get chosen by the Creative Guides to be one of our Pinworthy projects and join us somewhere down the road as a Guest Guide, so get your miniature thinking caps on, and do come and join us on A Vintage Journey this month.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  I'm on another travelling spate at the moment, but I'll be doing my best to catch up with you all here and there and now and then.  In the meantime, happy crafting all!

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.
Napoleon Hill

I'd like to share this at the That's Crafty Challenge Blog where the theme is Forever Floral
At Stamps and Stencils this month they are playing with Pastels - I hope these will fit in