Have My Cake And Eat It Too!

In keeping with my flighty nature (when it comes to miniatures), I grew bored/dissatisfied with the SOS shop kit. After I had made a counter unit and painted the exterior front wall, I moved all of it's parts and pieces to the top of the New Orleans where it will likely sit until it inspires me again. No telling how long that will be. Good thing there won't be any company coming over for a while!

Why switch, you ask? Because once again, ideas solidified and I became excited for the next steps on Brimble's bakery... the roof and exterior.
The roof is really pretty boring, so rather than expanded explanations, I'll just show the progression via photos and captions...

Fill, Sand, Gesso, Sand...

Cut cereal box covering for wires...

Add trims and gesso...

Dowels to bridge the apex gaps in the dormers...

Of course the cereal box fits - it was Lucky Charms!

In Miniatures, you can turn a wooden roof into a
metal one with just a few pieces of trim!
It's magic!

No shingles - yippee!!!

Channel molding to hide and direct wires...

Base color for metal roof...
The metallic paint will come later...

Also notice that body trims are being added to frame exterior elements...

And just in time - The Cake part, because, well, I really love cake!!!
Some of you may remember that I wanted to try to make the exterior of Pound Cake look similar to a layer cake...

So using the Design Space software for my Cricut, I made lattice, stripes and floral stencil. These were cut from paper products, of course, rather than fondant!

Lattice, stripes and stencil created in Design Space.

Here you can see that I laminated three layers of Kraft card to thicken up the lattice.

And here I am adding hundreds of tiny half pearls, one at each intersection. There were 112 of them used for the bottom lattice alone...

And then, along with trims, they were added onto the bakery...

And then the stripes...

And more lattice and trims above that...

Great progress, right? Until I got to the flower fondant layer...
This was proving to be a total trial and error adventure. I had hoped to be able to share the finished exterior in this post, but alas, the work continues...

I had the following ideas about how to achieve a fondant/frosting kind of texture:

1. Cut floral shapes with the Cricut and add embellishments to supplement.
2. Create a stencil with the Cricut and apply spackle like frosting over it.
3. Use a Tim Holtz stencil as above with spackle, then paint and embellish.

My first attempt at cutting an intricate floral stencil was a disaster. For those of you with a Cricut, I used Cricut Kraft paper with the Kraft setting, fine point blade with extra pressure. It did not cut all the way through on the first pass, and the second pass only tore sections. So disappointing. Back to the drawing board...

My next experiment is going to be with larger flower shapes which I plan to apply in a random pattern on the wall, paint and then embellish. If my cuts don't go well again, I'll try the stencil/spackle idea, though I fear that will be majorly messy!

To fill my non mini time during our mandated seclusion, I have also been baking (muffins not cake... yet!), cooking a whole lot more than I'd like (but not as much as Russ likes), finally getting my money's worth out of Audible, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, and learning that at 51 years old, yes 51, you can absolutely love playing video games. It turns out, surprisingly, that I'm a pretty good pirate and warrior! :O)

Finding silver linings is something I'm truly good at. I hope you are too, that you are staying safe and healthy, that you have all you need and are not afraid to ask if you don't. There is so much kindness out there and we all get to take turns giving and receiving it.

God bless all of us!

xo xo,
Jodi