Good fun and good company - can't beat it!

The only thing I like better than a day working on minis is a day working on minis with my friends.

Louise, Marijke and Susan all came over today and we worked on minis together. It was a great day. Though we all worked on separate things, we put our heads together to come up with a solution for this, a suggestion for that, caught up with what's going on in each of our lives and our families, had munchies and, in general, just enjoyed the opportunity to share the time with each other.

I have made some progress on the Remembrance Day room box, although it's not necessarily fast.

The last time I worked on it, several days ago, I left you with pictures of a basic brown box. Today, I heavily sanded all the walls. It certainly added to the rough character of the wood in general. Then I dry brushed over with white, further highlighting the roughness. I installed the shelves then I made up a mixture to cover the "dirt" floor.

The instructions from the magazine say to use equal parts of powdered drywall compound, garden soil and PVA glue, mixed up with enough water to make it spreadable. I wasn't keen on that idea so I started by mixing dry coffee grounds with dry tea from used tea bags. I actually really liked the way the blended colours looked like dirt. I think from now on, when making plants and flowers I will use this mixture as soil instead of one or the other. It looks more realistic in my mind. Then I mixed this dry coffee/tea with pre-mixed drywall compound and spread this mixture over the floor. It will dry quite light but I will be able to dry brush over it to bring out more of the dirt floor look.

You might notice a strange little square space on the floor that has no "dirt" compound on it. That is where the post for the roof support will go when it is time to put the roof on.

I installed 6 sandbags over the door lintel and installed the faux rusted corrugated metal panel to the right of the door. Marijke made the sand bags. Louise had painted the corrugated cardboard a silver metal colour first, then Marijke took over and aged it to look like rusted metal. I think it looks great.

I'm now ready to move on to the space outside the door opening where there will be a whole lot of sand bags and a pile of rocks, dirt and general rubble. I'm looking forward to that.

Not much else to report tonight so sorry for the short post. I'll be back with more on this project in a few days. TTFN! - Marilyn