My Hiatus is over!

After a very busy St. Patrick's week I took a break from everything except taking a break. But now I'm back and ready to "mini" again!

First I want to say hi to Mable - I see she's joined us here. Welcome! Mable has her own Etsy shop (Mable's Minis)for the best Christmas trees, ornaments, gift bags and other accessories you'll ever see. Beautiful stuff!

I spent some time thinking about the greenhouse decorative framework - I don't like what I did so I'm going to redo it with the mat board I had originally planned. In the meantime, while I was thinking, spring arrived. Yes, it snuck up on me - and in disguise as well!! It's disguised as a continuation of winter! Gee, who saw that coming?

Anyway - since spring is in the air, and I'm building a greenhouse, my thoughts naturally turned to plants and flowers. I found some great examples by searching through the net. I especially love a site I found: We Love Miniatures.(Note: Since this was first posted, the website for this miniaturist appears to no longer be available. If anyone knows if she has moved to a different site address, please let me know. Thanks!) They have some great tutorials there on several different plants as well as flower pots, lanterns, and other cool stuff. I'm going to start by making the hostas. The leaves look fabulous. In order to get them as realistic looking as possible she actually took a picture of hosta leaves from her own garden, shrunk the pictures and repeated them on a single sheet for printing. What a great idea! I can hardly wait for summer to arrive - I'm going to try out that technique myself. Hosta leaves are probably one of the easiest to do this with since they're large and have simple, defined edges - no frills or little in-cuts.

I spent the evening watching a movie with DH and cutting out lots and lots of hosta leaves. I've bagged them up and have them sitting on top of another sheet of leaves. I think it will take 16 or 17 leaves of varying sizes to make a good-sized plant. That means I have enough to make - well - maybe a gazillion! Okay - maybe math is not my strong suit. That's not a good thing for a former accountant to say, is it? And, it's actually a little white lie. Well, actually a whopper since, if I have a strong suit it would definitely be numbers! It's everything else that's a little iffy. *smile*

I also bought another set (or three) of picture frames from Michaels. These ones were orange-coloured but the biggest one is a slightly different pattern than the others I showed you the other day. I'll use them all up eventually. On Sunday we went to a flea market. We didn't know the hours they were open so arrived at 12:40. They close at 1:00 so I just made a really quick tour around the tables to see what types of things they had. I did pick up six pieces of sliced, polished rock. Because of their shapes, I thought they might make nice table tops for little entry tables or sofa tables (you know - the ones you place behind a sofa that's placed in the middle of the room instead of against a wall). If anyone has any other ideas for their use please share them with me and I will include them in a following post.

So - my leaves are cut out - I will start making my hostas tomorrow and let you know how I make out. TTFN!