Getting to First Base with My Shabby Shop

(I really do love my miniatures.)

I wanted to add some little pots and display pieces around the shop front at ground level, to break up the bare white panels at the front a bit.  But every time I wanted to move the shop, or turn it round, it was a pain in the bum.  So I decided that I needed to make a base.

I used an old picture frame and cut a piece of heavy duty cardboard to fit the frame, covering the glass exactly.

Mr Gypsy thinks I'm a bit weird for keeping strange bits of rubbish.  Sometimes I do too.  Occasionally, I will pack up my crafting stash for the umpteenth time and put away some piece of packaging and I will wonder if perhaps I'm not just a bit of a crazy hoarder.  Who moves house with an old empty egg carton, anyway?

But look - I used it! Knew it would come in handy one day.  #smug

 

My cobblestones are made of egg carton, which I think I first saw suggested on the amazing Otterine's blog.  The grouting is wall mending that I just had lying around (if you've ever lived with small children, you will understand why this is the kid of thing you happen to have to hand).

At the front is a little strip of turf - actually railway modeller's grass, glued and scattered directly onto the cardboard.

The Inside Back Wall

I used this cute butterfly paper for my back wall but it's just not quite right - a tiny bit too bright.

 I gave it a white wash and tried to tone it down with the gallery wall and some grubby inking but still I wasn't happy with it.  It detracts from the details in the foreground too much.

So eventually, I stripped it all back and changed the paper.  That was a massive ball ache and the second lot of paper wrinkled because I wasn't thorough enough about preparing the surface. Lesson learnt.

Display rack.

Here is a tiny rack that I made to add some height to the shop counter.  I used coffee stirrers (Yeah - I drink quite a lot of coffee!) that I cut to three lengths and glued to a piece of card along the bottom.  Then I flipped it over and glued two strips of 'leather' (actually inked up card) diagonally on the back. Finally, I glued the base card to two more lengths of coffee stirrer and added another along the front, just above half way up, to reinforce the structure.  I wanted to add a little shelf at that level but it would have overbalanced the unit so I left it as you see.

The jewellery is from an old costume necklace of mine that I have butchered for parts over the years. The two little silver bottles are beads and the tiny crown and eiffel tower are jewellery findings from a haberdashery market.

Zinc planters

These are some little planters I made out of card.  They are a five-sided cube net with a strip of card at the top and bottom.  The flower is a little flat-back.  The whole lot is painted with gesso to give a bit of texture, and then two coats of silver acrylic paint.

In my shop, they will hold flowers and little art prints.

Little mirrors

I have been experimenting with different ways to make frames (yeah - again!) and particularly with different finishes.

This first one was a wood laser cut that I heat embossed with embossing powder in Princess Gold.  The idea was that the embossing powder would add a bit more dimension to the flat laser cut, especially rounding off those hard edges a bit.  However, it didn't have as much impact as I was after: although the shape was too fragile to allow for sanding, it was still relatively broad in places.  On shapes with finer details, the embossing can give the appearance of a more rounded surface.  Anyway, I wasn't happy with the overall look so I added some flat-backs and sprayed the whole lot with gold spray paint.

I think it looks better.

The next two frames are cardboard die cuts.  They have very cute and detailed filigree edges so absolutely no chance of sanding these round.  I went over all the curlicues with black dimensional paint, waited for it to dry thoroughly and then coloured the whole lot in with a gold paint marker.

I like the raised effect that the dimensional paint gives to the shape of the frame.  I still haven't made my mind up about the paint though - something about it's not quite right... Too dark? Too shiny?

This last one is my favourite yet.

It's the same shape as the second one - very detailed and fragile.  I did the same thing with the dimensional paint and then I just blobbed on some gold acrylic, really thickly.  After the acrylic had dried, I dry-brushed some brown acrylic into the kinks and cracks to age it up a bit.

I'm pretty happy with this one.

Shabby Chic Railings and Piggy Bookends

My two little boys have all kinds of random plastic crap toys that clutter up my apartment, clog up the hoover and maim me when I tread on them in bare feet provide invaluable learning experiences.

I keep a bag of broken toys, and found or missing toy parts so that I can fix them when I get around to it.  Some of these dismembered bits and bobs find their way into my craft stash.

This grate was too good to pass up. I've no idea what it's from and I didn't even wait to find out.  I just gessoed it up, painted it cream and wound some paper flowers into it.  It was even cuter after I glued on some cinnamon for rust.

These pigs weren't in the broken toy bag.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with them - they were perfect.  So perfect in fact that I became a bit obsessed with them.  I would spend ages eyeing them while helping the boys build their train tracks and farms.  In the end, I stole them.  Yes, reader, that's right: I stole toys from my children.

But look how cute they are....

Little stone pots

I bought these little moulded plastic pots from the art district in Shanghai.

left urn is filed, right is raw.

As you can see, they're pretty rough and not very realistic so I used a file to get rid of the seams and to painted them with gesso to give the surface a texture more like stone or concrete.

They ended up pretty cute...

Rusty tin roof....

The next step was the roof.

I've been collecting these cardboard coffee cup holders for ages because I just love the ridges.  I've done all kinds of projects with them, like punching shapes out of them, printing with them, making frames out of them.  There's just something really satisfying about those neat, parallel lines in such a grungy looking material.  And it looks like tiny corrugated metal!

I gave them one coat of silver acrylic. A single coat allowed the dinginess of the brown cardboard to show through and I liked that.  I used a yellow-brown, a dark brown and an orangey-brown watercolour to wash on some rusty stains.

 

Mr Gypsy said my roof would leak because I didn't overlap the tin.  Mr Gypsy made his own supper that night.  My Gypsy understands now that I don't like it when he critiques my miniatures.

The top right corner panel was part of one of the test ones.  It had a coat of white spray paint under the silver but I thought it looked too 'clean'. However, I ran out of panels and used it anyway.  I like how it looks like one of the panels has been replaced - just like on a real roof.

I used a piece of scrapbooking paper on the outside back wall.  I love that shabby wooden look and I'll have a go at doing it for real one day but for now, it's just paper.

I actually took this last photo after I had done some work on making a base for it.  You can see it in more detail here.

Shabby Chic Shop

So my little gift kiosk, as much as I liked it, lasted about a day before I deconstructed it and started on phase two of my plan.

You see we don't have a lot of room at home to store things, and certainly not to display things, besides which,  miniatures aren't really Mr Gypsy's taste. So my plan is to use the kit my lovely mum bought me for three separate projects, starting with a crisp, contemporary vibe and transitioning through a tastefully-distressed shabby chic stage, to a final, thoroughly filthy and decayed look.  As well as the space issue, because we relocate a lot and we try not to accumulate too much 'stuff' I figure this is a good way to keep my craft shipping to a bare minimum (ha - as if!).

I made a template of the floor plan and tried some different papers to create a floor for the shop.

Cute blue linoleum...

But actually, I preferred the brown floor in the end.  I added some smudges and dirty patches to make it look more worn.