While the glue dries!

I've struggled with keeping the wisteria vine attached to the bookstore and I have taken Betsy's advice  at About My Doll House and added eye hooks to the front of the store and wired and glued the vine to the shop.  Here below you can see some of the small eye hooks I used for the task.  (You can also see the blob of glue on the corbel bracket that failed to hold the vine first).  Betsy thanks so much, I think this will finally work.

While everything is now wired and glued into place I couldn't work on the front of the shops anymore, so I moved on to the inside of "Doreen's Fine Things".  Each time I showed the inside staged I used the burgundy upholstered chair shown below.  This chair actually belongs to the castle room, so I have started with a new unstained and unupholstered chair shown below in three stages.

These chairs are actually Bespaq chairs I purchased at Ron's Miniatures in Orlando over five years ago.  I like the natural upholstery for the store window, but I had to remove it to stain the chair.  Some of these pictures are a year old because I actually removed and stained the wood that long ago, but then got tied up with finishing the shop and real life.

Once removed I stained the chair as shown below.

I used Varathane Wood Stain which I really like and have tubes of it in every shade.  My local Canadian Tire actually had them on clearance this week from $5.00 to $8.00 a tube (depending on colour), they were normally $14.00 tube.  As long as the stain doesn't dry up, I think I have enough stain now to last the rest of my mini making life!  I like the stain because it's a gel like mixture that you can pour a little out and what you don't use you can scoop back into the tube, the opening is large enough.  Also because it's gel based, it doesn't run and spread too fast into other surfaces like the liquid stains do and sometimes even the marker pens.

Once the stain was dry, I started back at the reupholstering.  I use cardboard between the padded pieces and the clamps so that the clamps don't make indentation marks into the upholstery.

Now I just have to wait until the glue dries.  See that's the reason I am working at so many projects at the same time, because it takes so long for glue to dry! 

I've been busy trying out different accessories to show in the window as well.  More about that in the next post.

This project is finally getting close to completion, it's so exciting to see the finished product come together.  Plus I am working fast so I can move on to the Whitledge Burgess projects!  Can't wait, think once I'm ready I will start the Exquistrian Suite first. Or maybe the kitchen, oh my, too many choices.

I'm going back to Camp Mini Ha Ha this year as well.  This means I have to prepare 32 small gifts (we call them tidbits) for all the other attendees plus five larger gifts for the evening draws.  It's great you bring 32 + 5 gifts, and you return with 32 + 5 individual gifts from all the other campers.  What a great way to grow your accessory and furniture stash for future projects.

Well off I go to work on my "so mini projects", see the name is so appropriate!

Until the next time....

Wanda