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

New Life...

After finishing the Beachside Bungalow, I looked around at my work room and thought about how it had evolved over the last ten years. You see, in 2012, it was still very much a dining room.

It was in July of that year that, after an excruciating nine year absence from minis, I began a mini project again. It made sense to work on the dining room table, as we rarely ate in this room. I could leave my "in progress" work there for months without inconveniencing anyone. After deciding to tone down the yellow, this was the first blue paint I tried. It created a soothing atmosphere while I worked on my gas station kit.

My first storage system for minis in this space consisted of boxes on the floor
and filling the hutch and buffet to overflowing.

Over the years we eventually edited out the carpet in favor of very inexpensive laminate flooring. With the carpet, I always had to worry about keeping it nice, and regularly cleaned it with the Bissell steam cleaner. What a lot of work and worry! In 2016 when we replaced the carpet with the laminate, it freed me up to craft in the room with no concern about the flooring. 

At that time I also exchanged grandma's buffet with many drawered storage units. This really revolutionized my ability to organize, find things and put them away with ease. I painted the room too, for the third time, though it was not a charm for me. I really dislike the "new" blue, too. Someday, when I feel really ambitious, I'll try painting it again. But maybe not blue this time.

Upgraded storage system in 2016.

With the bungalow finished and ready to display, it was time for another upgrade to the work room. Since this mini obsession doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, I needed lots more storage. Luckily, I have Russ. He is the sort of husband that is ready, willing and able to help me construct what I need as my needs grow. 

And when it comes to supporting my many mini dreams, he's the wind beneath my wings! 💗

On the room's left wall, we added another 97" shelf, along with two 40" shelves on the short, far wall. This allowed me to gather my houses from around the house and display them in one convenient "neighborhood". I am working on getting them all plugged into the surge protectors and will be able to turn the lights on with the press of a button. If I need to work on one, I can just pull it down to the work table.

Speaking of table, I pivoted the table the long way into the room. There is still plenty of space to move my wheeled office chair around, and my body won't cause so much shadow from the light fixture onto my work. I can also have three "stations" on the go and just move my chair around to them as I am waiting for glue and paint to dry.

The far right corner of the room got wrap around shelving, too. Now my kits have a place of their own. The Cricut Maker and the sewing machine share the lower shelf on the other side of the window. I'll just pull them down whenever I need to use them. See how the top shelf is empty? This will allow for future yeses! 

I have wheeled carts filled with categories of tools and supplies for various tasks. When I am working on a specific task for that specific dollhouse, I just pull it close. Then my table space is freed up to work on things. Rusty appreciates the open space under the table, too, because he can lie on his comfy bed at my feet while I work. He's a great helper!

When the time comes to sell our house and downsize in our golden years, we will replace the laminate floor with nice new carpet for the new owners. And I can craft worry free in the meantime. 

My goal was to get this room upgraded, deep cleaned and ready for the next project. The one I picked has been left unfinished for nine years!!! Upon first inspection, it needed a lot more "finishing" than I had anticipated! But with the New Life given to my work room, I should be able to accomplish almost anything!

This was all made possible because of Russ and his endless support of my ideas. A very heartfelt ~Thank You~ to my amazing husband, without whom, I could never achieve the things I dream. He is truly my greatest and longest lasting dream come true!

xo xo,

Jodi

Feedburner Bummer

Hello Dear Feedburner Email Subscribers!

I am publishing this post especially for you because at one time you signed up to receive an email notification of new blog posts. This was via a sideline form on the blog located here: 

Feedburner is an RSS feed service managed by Google/Blogger but will no longer be supported after July 1st.

You can read more about this change here.

Because of this, until I find a better way, I will now manually send out an email with a link to each new blog post to those of you who signed up. If you would like to opt out, just reply to the email and let me know. I will remove you from the distribution list.

If you would like to use the Blogspot notification service to receive an email of new blog posts, you may do that by signing up as a blog follower here:

I will begin the manual process with the next blog post. I also want to assure each of you that I will never give or sell your email address to any other entity. Your privacy is important to me!

Thanks so much for your interest in my mini passion, and thanks so much for being a part of the mini adventures! Back soon with an update on the Beachside Bungalow!

xo xo,

Jodi

P.S. Fellow blog publishers... If you are looking for alternatives and are going to send post emails manually until you get it all figured out, here is a good article about the different FREE email services:

https://www.jenryland.com/best-free-services-for-email-blog-subscriptions/

Even after splitting my subscriber list into 5 groups, Gmail still said I exceeded my quota and that was for only one post! I am going to try MailChimp next. I'll update this post or make a new one as developments occur.

Getting Back Up Again

Hello Everyone! Though I have only been away for six weeks, it feels like I have missed out on so many amazing mini things in the community! I apologize for not leaving comments on blog posts, and for not posting my own. It might take me a few weeks to catch up, but I am looking forward to the effort...

In the past five years or so, especially since I began to share my mini adventures on a blog, there hasn't been too many weeks when I haven't been excited about or looking forward to some kind of mini challenge. A couple vacations or helping my folks move to Arizona aside, I have been all minis all the time. It felt weird not going in to my craft room (a.k.a. dining room), and in fact, I actually found myself pretty much avoiding it. More on that later. I don't have a whole lot of progress to share this time, but in the interest of giving everyone a little something to distract from the craziness in the world (particularly here in the US), I will share what I have managed to do.

First I need to share a little bright spot. I made a fabulous (and rare since Covid) purchase from Gergana Trichkova, the artisan behind CrochetCanto on Etsy. I had been searching for a tiny clown doll for Vera. The real life Vera was a collector of clown figures of all kinds from every place she visited around the world. Each time I would visit she would show me a new one on display and tell me the story behind it. She was in her 70's in the 70's so she had thousands!  It made her so happy to share her passion, so I knew that my Vera would need to have at least one clown in her cottage to honor those memories. In my searching, I saw a leprechaun doll in Gergana's shop. It was created with micro crochet and was so unique and adorable! I wrote to Gergana asking if she would accept a commission for a clown doll with similar style and size, but with a blue and yellow theme. She happily and enthusiastically agreed and a week later sent me photos for approval!

I could not be more thrilled with the workmanship and detailing, and by golly she even gave him a wee balloon! I also ordered a handbag and a delicate pot of daisies - they, too, are a wonder!

It is such a blessing to be able to collect these precious, handmade things from artisans around the world! This time from the talented hands of Gergana in Bulgaria! The shipping process was worry free, too - she provided tracking so that I could follow the package all the way to my door! Gergana even made opening everything feel like a thoughtful gift! Excellent packaging!

I can't wait to display all of them in Vera's cottage!

Now on to my meager progress for Vera and Virgil's cottages... I decided to use up of some of my stash of furniture kits. I really love using the Maker to make furniture, but also feel guilty for having all these kits and not using them. I reasoned that if I use the kits that I have stashed, then I'll have space for more furniture making supplies in the future.
And... I really just enjoy a good mini kit, too!

I started with the hutch and tables/dining chairs for each cottage. For Virgil, I used HOM kits, except for the table which was an old Magic_N_Miniature kit I picked up on impulse on eBay. What amazing wood this kit had! I had to stain the top!

For Vera, I used a Chrysnbon table and chair kit and a barewood hutch that I had left over from the Sweet Christmas Cottage kitchen. I softened it in the micro so that I could pull it apart for sanding and finishing. There was a lot of excess glue, and being able to sand each piece individually makes for a much funner and better job! I also found a nice piece of artwork that I could resize and cut with the Maker to decoupage onto the sides. That project was super fun!

I still have to paint the table and chairs but I can't decide on the color yet. Maybe, once I make Vera's sofa with it's aqua blue polka dot material, I'll have an easier time choosing...

I used HOM wing chair kits for Virgil's living room and, unlike when I made them for the Sweet Christmas Cottage, didn't make any changes to the original design. The only challenge I gave myself was using striped material. I had to go very slowly and make sure I had the right pieces matching at every point. Phew!

When it came time to add the bottom assemblies to the wing chairs, they seemed to be a little too tall for the scale of the cottage. Even compared to the dining chairs (which are HOM kits, too), they seemed imposing. A little off scale is okay because it only adds to the whimsical feel of the cottage. But it seemed if I could reduce their height they might look better.

I combined three shapes in Tinkercad to make new, lower legs for the chairs and for the sofa. Then I made a recess in them to hold a toothpick which would then be used to anchor them into the chairs. This idea came from making the Kris Compass sofa kit for the New Orleans dollhouse. It worked well and it only took an hour and fifteen minutes to print twelve of them on the 3D printer.

Some finishing required.

These will make quite a difference in height and I'll share how they came out in my next post.

I can't really explain what kept me away, and in truth, writing this post was a monumental effort in self discipline. I knew it would be good for me to get back on the horse. All I can point to is that after a rapid battle with lymphoma, my beloved beagle Georgie passed in July. That was the start to a time when I just felt really, really sad. The only joy I could find during this time was to spend loads of time with my beloved min pin boy puppies, Rusty and Woodson. We have had a few adventures in the forest and at the beach, and I am so grateful for the healing power of their love. 💗 We all miss Georgie every day.

Here's Georgie the day we brought her home...

 and snuggling her big sister Gracie, who passed in 2013, on the sofa.

It seems as though this year has brought so much loss for everyone around the world. We are all learning to cope with a whole new way of life. And for many of us, that means moving forward without some of the ones we love. Here in the US, we are learning to cope with new levels of shock and horror at human behavior every day. We are learning to live in instability and violence, something many of our friends in other countries have managed through for years. I guess it's no wonder that sometimes all of it makes us sad, and finding joy in spite of it is a battle we must fight each day. To all of you struggling out there with any and every thing, I offer my hugs and prayers.

xo xo,
Jodi