Busy Doing Nothing.......

The summer has definitely arrived for most of us and like many mums I have been busy doing nothing because it is the school holidays.....But the thing is my babies are 21, 19 and 17! Why then do they manage to completely disrupt the pattern of my life?

I have not done a huge amount of mini-ing lately so I thought I would introduce my Design Emporium which was my third project and the one where I became a little more ambitious and tried to be more creative.

The idea for this shop stemmed from my finding a set of modern classic chairs on Ebay which were from Hong Kong. I absolutely fell in love with them as I have an inner yearning to live in a white, minimalist house with scattered pieces of iconic furniture. At the same time this DHE kit appeared on Ebay too, I think it was an old design called the Marshall & Snellgrove kit. You can see two of the chairs I bought in the windows.

These photographs show the inside of the front and are an example of how I started thinking a little more independently. I know this is a long way from the truly talented of Blogland but thinking of a design, finding the card and putting it all together was a big step for me! I also new that I wanted a very definite colour scheme to go with the classical furniture designs and began collecting all the black, red and white pieces I could find.

Here are my first steps into mini plant making. No doubt when all my projects are finished I will come back to these and start again but I do still like them for all their faults. I couldn't find polystyrene balls so I used cotton balls from HobbyCraft not the best for fixing sticks into but they held the glue very well.

The slate roof has been laid with Peter Clarke's fabulous hand painted cards which come marked ready to be cut out. As you can see I still have the lead flashing to affix, which I have bought but haven't got round to yet. Actually I have bought the flashing twice because I lost the first somehow!

And on discovering the scatter stuff you can buy for railways I added moss for texture and realism. That stuff is great. Which reminds me my local Hobbyland/HobbyCraft have quite a few types of this scatter for sale at the moment for about 80p I think plus quite a few other bargains too if you have one near you.

One or rather two of the reasons I have also been 'busy' the last couple of weeks are the football and the tennis, great passions of mine. So when not watching some obscure team play badly against another obscure team I can be found cheering on Rafa Nadal! Sad old lady that I am!