One Year Later...

Hello My Friends! Long time no see! Speaking of long, you might want a beverage and some snacks for this post! 

It may seem as though I dropped off the face of the Earth, but in truth, real life's demands forced minis, and by association the blog, out of the picture. I have a lot of explaining to do, but let me assure everyone that I am super duper, still alive and certainly not sitting around on my thumbs.

First, Tasha and Brent finally had their wedding last fall. Covid, a college degree, a new job and a new house/farm really postponed their nuptials. But the delayed ceremony and celebration were totally worth the wait! It was all the things a wedding should be, absolutely beautiful and many dreams came true that day! While I missed all my goals on the trailer project, and all of you so much, getting to be part of the planning for Tasha's special day was well worth it!

Don't be alarmed!!! It was a costume wedding and
Tasha and Brent went as Mr. & Mrs. Frankenstein!

We also had several folks coming into town for the wedding, so we needed to improve our guest quarters. What was once a catch-all room for "stuff" is now a nice place to host loved ones who come to visit. We have two swanky guest rooms available now! You may also remember that we updated our master bed and bathrooms last summer (2024).

For a miniature enthusiast and dreamer, even upgrading a guest room is kind of dangerous. When we refreshed and improved the 2nd guest room, the rest of the house began to seem dated and shabby. What started out as a small project to reconfigure my kitchen pantry closet turned into a full kitchen and family room remodel. We took down walls, painted walls and cabinets, added a wall of pantry cabinets, reconfigured the island, completely changed the lighting, made faux beams for the ceiling, got new countertops and backsplash tile and even replaced our 17 year old appliances (only the new range is installed so far). And that was just the kitchen!

Kitchen Before

Kitchen After (so far)

Pantry Before. It stuck into the room about 33 inches.

Pantry wall/doorway gone and replaced with cabinets. 
Square footage of storage increased 4 times.

Stove before with microwave above. Very dangerous!

Slide in counter height range with hood. Much better!

New lighting fixtures and added can lights
 makes seeing much easier!

In the family room we removed the corner fireplace (it took up so much room and made furniture arranging very limited) and surrounding walls. We eliminated an odd, long, high up and skinny window that only looked North onto our neighbor's garage wall. We made built in custom shelving and a new fireplace across the entire North wall. We continued the ceiling beams, are installing tongue and groove (whitewashed by me) cedar ceiling planks and replacing the flooring. Eventually we'll get new furniture but it already looks like a completely new house!

Family room when we bought the house in 2008

New configuration

Shelf wall at night

Looking at the length of the rooms. Still so far to go!

And while we had that part of the house in shambles, it seemed smart to give the laundry, utility hall and powder rooms on the first floor an upgrade, too. We used one of the base cabinets that we removed from the island to create a much more functional sink and counter area in the laundry room. There used to be a freestanding laundry room sink in the back corner where the drywall is gone. It was cramped and hardly functional.

The cabinet was rescued from the island. The old color theme from 2008.
This linoleum will be replaced with LVP

Cabinets installed and painted, waiting for backsplash tile.

New shelf for the laundry products.

Backsplash tile finished. Recycled old kitchen sink is an upgrade!

In the powder room, we clad the walls in barn wood and the ceiling in tin to replicate an outhouse. I know - sounds crazy, but it's really rather adorable! The garage and powder room doors, if opened at the same time, hit one another. It was a poor design and has been so frustrating all the years we've lived here. To fix the issue, we'll be installing a sliding barn door on the powder room. That's a ways down the list - there is still so much to do on the kitchen and family rooms!

Walls clad in barn wood. Niches in wall for décor.

I made the sign to look like Old West signs.

I added x's to many of the cabinet doors with dollhouse basswood

Tin "outhouse" ceiling.

We always thought the entry staircase could look much better, so we made plans and bought materials for a remodel there, too. As we took on various tasks for each space, ideas grew and so did the work load. When we start tearing out the old stair elements, we might as well paint the entry, which is a two story room. Yikes! Russ and I are really enjoying doing every stitch ourselves (and still have jobs), so we're at 10 months and counting. Ah well... It will be really lovely someday when we finish!

In mid August, Russ, at the pleading of one of his bosses, took on a side job to "help" his boss put up a metal building. At the same time, my dad came up from Arizona for a visit. For the last three weeks, all reno activities stopped. That meant between sharing my dad with my brother, I had an unexpected opportunity to work on a mini activity - making flowers and plants. I also converted an old Carlson's lantern kit into a mini greenhouse. It's not direct progress on the travel trailer project, but since the trailer project will eventually have a greenhouse, its progress adjacent. I've also gotten to work on making a potting table, plant stands and trellis prototypes with the Maker. Happy, happy, happy!!!

I did manage to sneak in a couple more "small" mini projects while at various standstills with the renos. I decided not to finish the Willowcrest so that in the future I can concentrate on smaller, more manageable projects. But I did want to keep the kitchen since I spent so much time on every detail. I carefully dismantled every aspect and recreated it in a set of hollowed out books. It will live on my cookbook shelf in the new kitchen.

Looking Inside

The story on the back pays homage to the original project.
Don't worry - the kit shell and components are being
rehomed along with all the custom door/window/arch frames
I designed and 3D printed.

Other "arty" things have kept my creativity satisfied this year, too. For Mother's Day I made plant stand "scales" for all of the special ladies in my life. They are made up of various pot and saucer components from the dollar store, hot glued then spray painted. I used outdoor thermometers rather than fake scale faces so they'd be useful and cute. In the background you may notice that I painted grandma's hutch... again, and gave a facelift to all of my old décor pieces so that I could recycle them into the new aesthetic.

For the family room I wanted to create a gallery wall, so embarked on a journey to create various nature themed art pieces using a wide variety of media. So far, I've made 56 different art pieces. It has been one of the most rewarding goals I've ever accomplished! Now when it comes time to hang everything, I may lament at the number of items to hang, but at least I'll know where every one of them is going thanks to the diagram I created as I went. All pieces are in scale with the background, which represents 18 ft x 8 ft of the family room wall. 

Well friends, as you can see I have plenty of excuses for my absence. I hope you will forgive me and come back again next time I share not only our beloved minis, but (hopefully) progress on life's other engrossing (and fun) projects. I pray it's much sooner than a year!

Hope all has been well with all of you!

xo xo,

Jodi

An Unexpected Detour

Hi Guys! I hope you won't be disappointed that there's no update (other than the two photos below) on the Fairytale Treehouse's great room fireplace. I had fully expected it to be my sole focus this week. Until...

Cricut cut parts assembled, herringbone "brick" affixed to firebox.

Test fit in the great room. Goldie can't wait to roast marshmallows!

As I'm sure you've all experienced, life has a way of landing us into unexpected adventures. That's exactly what happened to Russ and me last weekend. What follows is not a post about miniatures, but is quite an exciting development for us in any case. So if you're up for something other than minis, read on...

Russ and I have both had trouble sleeping for a few years now. Sometimes the aches and pains of our aging bodies is the culprit. Sometimes it feels like we can't find the right pillow. Still other times it feels like our mattress is seeking revenge for all our tossing and turning. Whatever the plethora of causes, it's annoying! We finally came to the point where enough was enough!

Our solution and plan was to install our new, firmer mattress. After all, it's been in its box for a little over a year now!!! Then we would assemble a new frame (also a year old now) for the old mattress (which I love but Russ does not) and put it in the second guest bedroom (we seem to be finding more and more occasions for needing a second guest bedroom lately). So our plan to get a new mattress for our bedroom had additional motivating factors. 

To give more context, in 2018 we replaced the carpet with wood flooring in two of our four bedrooms. We set one up as a guest bedroom at the time. The other has been sitting empty since we finished. The last bedroom (other than ours) I'm ashamed to say is a catchall for all the stuff we don't know what to do with but can't yet decide to part with. It will stay as is until we find inspiring motivation.

As we began to tackle the mattress swap last weekend, our plans drastically expanded. At first we decided it wouldn't be that hard to empty the room so that we could install new flooring. It is long overdue. And, we thought, while we were already in DIY mode, it might be smart to go ahead and repaint, as well. One thing lead to another and soon, thanks in part to our income tax refund, we had a pretty great makeover in the works. 

Here are a few of the elements that will go into making up our new environment. It seems serene and lovely on paper, but if we still can't sleep in here after all this then there is no hope for either of us, lol! But we do hope. We hope by the end of March we'll be sleeping in our newly redecorated room. And we hope to have two guest bedrooms ready in time for Easter company. And we hope our aging bodies are up to the task!

The background color, Cream Puff, is the same color we painted in the other bedrooms.
The more I've lived with it, the more I really love it!

Under the guise of saving money, I'll be making new wall art for the room. That means I'll get to carve out some creative time. It's the next best thing to mini time! I hope you're up for expanded adventures and will enjoy the transformation with us, too!

xo xo,

Jodi

Snack Size Update...

Hello fellow creatives! There's not much to share in terms of mini progress this week, but Goldie and Roz asked to pop onto the blog today to share the photo of their apron fitting. They are both so excited to have so many aprons to choose from and can't wait to get cooking!

Our backyard project went great last weekend! Though we still have much more to do, we made amazing progress! We moved and compacted 20 cubic feet of gravel, mixed and poured 46 bags of concrete, got metal posts anchored and had a great time with the kids! By next spring we hope to have a level yard, nice new grass, a gravel easement all the way around the fence (for weed and blackberry bush control) and will never again worry about the fence panels blowing away in the winter wind storms. Thanks so much Tasha, Brent, Ande and Lex! We could not have done this without your hard work!

Now that the schedule is returning to "normal", big progress is also being made for Roz's kitchen! I hope to be able to share it all next week!

Stay cool my Northern Hemisphere friends! We've almost survived the hottest summer in recorded history and will soon feel the relief of fall! 

xo xo,

Jodi 

Attention MailChimp Email Subscribers

This post is for readers that subscribe by email and receive my MailChimp emails. Let me explain what that means and why it is necessary to address this function in a stand alone post...

Back before June of 2021, you could subscribe to Blogger blogs via a service called Feedburner. Essentially, by signing up, each time a new blog post posted to blogs you were signed up for, you would receive an email containing the post. A lot of readers found this convenient and blog authors loved that their readers would automatically be notified of a new post.

Blogger is a free platform hosted by the generous folks at Google. They host our interests and photos for free. A lot of us have been doing this for a long time, so the amount of things they store for us is HUGE! Pretty amazing, right? Well, there has to be a limit to the amount of resources that Google can allocate to Blogger, since it produces no revenue. That is why we see features disappearing slowly over time. In June of 2021, Blogger could no longer support email subscriptions through Feedburner, and so they provided bloggers the ability to export and save their list of email subscribers. This made it possible to employ other email services to notify subscribers, though it would be a manual process for the blog owners. I chose MailChimp because it was free for up to 2000 subscribers. That has now changed.

Sample Email Posts Sent

Beginning on March 10th, MailChimp will now only be free for email lists of up to 500 subscribers per mailing and 1000 emails per month. If your numbers are higher than that, the price goes up. Because my email list hovers around 1400 subscribers, and I generally send about four emails per month, my monthly fee to continue as I have will be $27/mo minimum. That is hard to swallow, since I make virtually no profit from my hobby.

I have spent a lot of time researching alternatives over the past month, and there just really aren't any. Not for free, at any rate. My best option, and the one that will serve my subscribers the best is to reduce the number of emails I send out. You see, 1400 emails per week go out, but only about 100 or so of the emails actually get opened and read. That's right - I have about a 7% read rate. To pay for 1400 subscribers when only 100 are reading is just not practical. So, what to do?

I have kept the actual readers. the ones who open the emails, from the last 90 days. It equates to about 200 or so. Beginning with this post, I will only be sending email posts to those subscribers. And, the emails will come from my personal gmail email. Gmail seems to be able to accommodate the number of subscribers and emails I send out each month and it is free. I am still keeping the option open for you to sign up for email subscriptions, you will just have to request that by sending me an email. And if you wish to stop receiving email posts, you'll have to let me know that, too: jodihippler@gmail.com

As ever, I am so delighted to connect with all of you through this amazing passion we share! You keep me inspired and motivated to reach my mini dreams, and I truly hope I do the same for you!

xo xo,

Jodi

Barbie Dreams Across The Generations

Hello Friends!

Just quickly popping in to say that Russ and I are okay - we just got hit with the nasty RSV bug and have been isolating at home for the entire month trying to get better. We are on the mend now, but this virus really takes its time exiting! We are hoping to attend family festivities to celebrate Christmas together, masked just in case, this weekend. I hope all of you have managed to escape the "Tripledemic" this year!

Bohemian Townhouse 1974

I wanted to share a fun article by The New York Times called "A Six Decade Tour Of Barbie's Dreamhouses". Most of us who love minis have intersected at some point in our lives with the world of Barbie. The amazing photos of the Dreamhouses in the article bring back such fond memories. They may even trigger a little longing for the ones we never got to play with! I was the proud owner of the Bohemian Townhouse, a hand me down from my neighbor friend across the street when she got the Dream House. That elevator was so cool and fun to play with! And the furniture (I had the blow up sofa and loveseat), were so neat!

Barbie Dream House 1979

To those of you with grandkids who love Barbies and can play with them and their modern structures - I am so jealous!!! Enjoy them! For those, like me, who can only reminisce, enjoy the article!

I want to wish each of you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and joy in all the things you celebrate. We made it through another tough year, and in spite of the hardships, have so much to be grateful for! I'll see you all in the New Year to share and inspire creativity in this miniature passion that we all love so much!

xo xo,

Jodi

She Had A Dream...

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted in a while - November 1st seems like such a long time ago! But once I was finished with all the 3D printed kitchen stuff, I had to take a breather. I got my craft space ready for mini work again, and I began to think about what I'd like to do next. Finishing the Willowcrest kitchen seemed like the obvious choice (it's the project that sparked the 3D kitchen accessories to begin with), but I just couldn't muster any motivation to get going on it. In the meantime, I was contacted with a request to design and create a couple architectural elements for a very special project that had been waiting in someone's basement for a very long time.

You may remember my customer, Diana, from my doing her Breakfast At Tiffany's brownstone windows and door replicas last year. One of the projects she's been dreaming about since the 90's is recreating the historically significant Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama. Back then she purchased the Real Good Toys Country Church Kit at a miniatures show to house it in. Then she had custom stained glass windows made by a miniature stained glass artisan. But, like for many of us mini dreamers, other projects moved ahead in line and there the kit sat, waiting for its turn. The project was never truly forgotten. Diana collected a whole lot of lovely resin sitting folks all decked out in their Sunday best to add to the congregation over the years. When she saw the project on it's basement shelf a few months ago while looking for something else, these patient people reignited her inspiration!

What Diana wanted me to tackle was the elaborate carved doorway behind the pulpit, as well as the lattice panel behind the organ area. It was challenging, as the only details I had to go by were the limited photos found on the web. The proportions and measurements had to be estimated. Additionally, Diana only had 10" of  ceiling height (minus the height of her crown molding), and I estimated the doorway in the original church to be about 18 feet tall! I would need to find a way to pay homage to the original within the height limitations, while still balancing the proportions and ending up with something that was worthy of being a focal point in her project.

Challenge accepted! Diana and I traded ideas back and forth on three slightly different models before we both agreed the version below was perfect! It kept the proportions balanced, included as many of the carved details as space would allow, and finished up at 9-7/16" tall by 6-13/16" wide. 

I got to experiment with creating dental molding and fluted columns for the first time with this doorway, and I had so much fun figuring it out!

I am so fortunate that Tasha and Ande gifted me the bigger 3D printer for my birthday last year! My first printer would not have been able to accommodate this big job, other than in pieces needing to be assembled post production.

I think the doorway is so pretty, and I just love how the dental molding, fluted columns and corbels turned out! 

The lattice piece was pretty challenging, too. In scrutinizing the church photos online, I realized that it was created in three panels. The middle panel is slightly shorter which allows room for the wood molding of the lower organ area. It is installed in a raised position on top of and joining the other two panels. The lattice detail itself is done in four levels, not including the main frame and the stepped picture frame molding on top of that. It was a challenge not only to create, but to figure out how to engineer it for a successful print. I felt that eliminating the half circles in the homage version gives the piece more balance and accommodates better the measurements that Diana had to work with.

Level detail close up.

It was such an honor to be trusted with this piece of the job and to help Diana realize her longtime dream!

In other exciting news, I have been busy rediscovering cooking joy with our new Instant Pot! Even Russ has joined in the culinary delight around here! This is all thanks to our big hearted and generous son, Ande! He uses my Prime membership from time to time, and if I leave stuff in my cart and he sees it, he likes to surprise me with it! 💗 This time, it was the Instant pot and accessories I was considering. What a great kid we made!!! He and Lex and Tasha and Brent love theirs, too!

We have run out of fingers and toes counting our blessings, among them, going to Tasha and Brent's new home for their first Thanksgiving there! I hope each of you has more to be thankful for than digits, too!

Happy Thanksgiving!

xo xo,

Jodi