Despite an uncanny physical resemblance, Thomas Edison I am not.
But, I was determined to do some miniature work this weekend, so I put aside my electrical difficulties and got a couple mini-projects done. The first of which I was determined to get done today (5/5, my one year wedding anniversary), to commemorate the special occasion in miniature. Because that is how I live my life - it doesn't happen until it's been replicated in 1/12 scale.
One of the many excellent gifts my wedding photographer, Melissa Arlena, gave to me were these wonderful business cards with pictures from my wedding on them.
It's like a series of trading cards that no one would want to collect but me.
So, I cruised around on the online miniatures store (as I'm oft to do in my free time), and found a frame that I thought would fit my chosen business card portrait well.
It came with a mat, which was a nice touch. I didn't use it, but it was still nice!
I then used all of my artistic composition knowledge to figure out my alignment of the image inside the frame.
You can't handle my "Rule of Thirds" skills!
Then I simply cut to fit and glued a back piece onto the reverse side of the frame.
Ta-da!
Fun fact: Shortly after taking this picture, I dropped the frame and chipped it on the side. I filled in the gap with superglue and used some gold paint I had laying around to fix it. I'm so clumsy it hurts. But, in the end I still ended up with a nice little wedding memento to hang in my little living room!
I also worked on creating an outside address plaque for the front porch with these neat little cast metal numbers I picked up on a whim during my last order.
My first step was to cut the metal that was holding the numbers I wanted. I then veeeery carefully sanded the protruding metal flashing from the tops and bottoms of the numbers because they were very pointy from being cut and would look incredibly sloppy if left on.
I only got one set, so I had to choose a house number that didn't use the same digit twice. I settled on my first (and current) house number: 8759.
After that, I got to work building the plaque. This was a spur of the moment thing, so I just used whatever I had lying around. I have a huge box full of supplies left over from when Papa was building the house (thanks, Papa!), so I rooted around in there and found some pre-painted balsa wood strips and cedar roofing shingles and made it work like I was Tim Gunn on "Project Runway."
I trimmed down the shingle to make it more rectangular and less "boxy"
I split the balsa strips in half lengthwise to make a narrow frame to go around the border of the plaque
Checking the first number for fit before gluing it down.
The finished plaque. It's sideways because this is how I was working on it.
And here it is mounted in place on the front porch! Now the mailman won't get confused when delivering to all the other houses in my living room.
The last project I'm posting I actually finished a few weeks back, but I'm posting it today because I was so frustrated with all my electricity issues that the idea of typing about a lamp made me want to punch a dolphin square in the face, so I didn't.
Anyway, I installed that "Tiffany" lamp I customized a few posts back and actually have it hooked up properly. It looks very fetching when there's power in the house for it to run on. I drilled the hole in the ceiling for the lamp wire to run through, but the area where the lamp met the ceiling looked very plain, so I decided to add on a ceiling plate to fancy it up a little bit. With that goal in mind, I rooted around in my craft room for every yellow/gold colored button/doodad I could find and came up with the following selection:
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| Little Mermaid ain't got nothing on my collection of thing-a-ma-bobs. |
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| Here it is with the ceiling plate installed. I think it adds to the overall look of the chandelier quite nicely! |
