The hardware I chose for the carpet shop doors is one of the rather-standard knob-and-plate sets and sort-of-matching two-sided letter slot available from most miniatures sources, under various brand names but clearly the same. They weren't really ideal, looking late-Victorian where I was hoping for something more Georgian, or at least early-Victorian, but there it is, needs must -- it was more efficient to order all from one place, and I was certainly happier with the rounder knobs, which are more in keeping with the period of the shop than the far more common modern-looking ones with sharp angles. I did manage to find a shop bell that I liked!
They were, however, all very clean and shiny straight out of the box, so then I had to go about aging them. It will probably be clear to experts that I don't have much idea of what I'm doing here, but after reading their blogs, I knew in theory what needed to be done! I am lucky enough to have a real vintage bell to use as a model --
so I painted all of my hardware black, then dabbed on a bit of green and a bit of brown, until it looked about right.
(Like traitors' heads on spikes!)
I've also finished the permanent signage. I had the dickens of a time with the shop name, not trusting my skills at this scale to free-hand letters -- though in my more desperate moments I did consider it. I find it difficult to believe that there aren't 5/8 inch stencils to be had, but there aren't, unless you want to pay for custom stencils, which are far beyond my budget. I couldn't even find stick-on letters. I tried cutting some out of paper, which sort of worked but usually ended up with my snipping off a serif here and there, etc. Print-your-own waterslide decals were, alas, a dismal failure, with only the number on the door being worth keeping and I'm not even delighted with that. The "FINE CARPETS" one actually stretched as it was coming out from underneath the backing -- too much water? not enough water? I don't know. These decals are repositionable for a few moments after you lay them, which is very helpful, believe me, but I discovered to my dismay that if you touch the image while you are doing this (despite the sealer applied after printing), some of it will most likely come off on your finger. As the decal dries, the ink sets, but the door number decal especially was so small that I couldn't reposition it without touching the ink. And even if they had worked, I wanted the shop name sign to be gold, and I would have had to paint over them.
While I was dithering and experimenting with the carpet-shop sign, I had the idea to do this on the upper façade --
-- in the manner of old shops that have permanent signage painted over when a new business moves in -- which was actually pretty successful.
I was hoping to superscript the S in "Thos." the 18th-century way, but I couldn't find the same font in two different sizes, nor even, to my astonishment, upper-case and lower, so this was what I ended up with. These are stickers from the scrapbook aisle at Michaels. The letters are textured, which wasn't ideal -- painted, they remind me of the no-slip texture on ladder steps and shower floors -- but they are a good size, and they add a certain whatsit to that rather boring façade. I just made up the name, but it sounds charmingly old-fashioned! (You can see that I got the idea to do this after I'd aged the piece a bit, which I had to do over again after painting over the letters! More practice, I guess.)
The shop name has had a long journey, full of wrong turns and potholes, but like many such journeys, arrived at its destination happily.
This is the Folkart 59796 alphabet stencil, painted with Martha Stewart Craft Paint in Metallic Gold -- a handsome alphabet, to be sure, if smaller than I wanted. (I noticed after this photo that the F was clearly below the line, so I painted it out and re-did it.) I scanned the stencil then cropped the letters I needed and spaced them out in a rectangle the same size as the shop-front inset, so that I wouldn't have to do it on the fly -- a bit of a bother, but worth it to save the stress! I was not successful in merely dabbing paint over the stencil, so I painted through the stencil, as it were, onto the surface. I had to do one letter at a time, then let it dry, then do the next one, since I didn't want to cut the letters completely separate. The result wasn't what I'd pictured in my imagination -- which was certainly bigger letters, as well as neater -- but the sign was "up," at least. It's possible that some of the clumsiness of execution was due to the brush I used. It's a poor workman who blames his tools, of course, but this was my brush --
and no amount of wetting and coaxing would get the tip any finer, so I vowed that if I ever did this again (wh. at the moment was doubtful, but I said the same thing about childbirth the first time) I would buy a better brush from an artists' supply store.
This was just not what I had in my mind's eye, though, and so after a few days of thinking about it, I painted it over and tried something different -- first, pricking around the edges of a printed letter, through the paper and slightly into the painted wood, and then filling in the outline with a very-fine-tipped gold pen, which I tried out on a piece of scrap wood I'd been using to practice weathering techniques. This worked fairly well -- the pinpricks are still visible from close-up, but not so much at a distance -- but then I remembered the old elementary-school trick of homemade "carbon paper" -- I printed out the letters I wanted, rubbed a no.2 pencil thoroughly over the back, then traced around the letters with a fine-tip ballpoint pen, which left a faint imprint of the graphite on the wood.
I then carefully painted inside the lines -- with a new 10/0 spotter brush, the smallest I could find -- and voilà! a very pleasing shop sign.
Even with an unstaged and badly-lit photo, this was miles better!
As for the interior walls, my use of Paperclay to make faux plaster interior walls was, unfortunately, a pretty dismal failure. I don't think it's the Paperclay's fault, as lots of miniaturists use it, and some very expert ones too -- perhaps it was the age, flexibility, and/or utter dryness of the MDF walls, as they either absorbed the moisture from the drying clay or, as the clay shrank -- which I knew it was going to do -- it pulled the MDF along with it. Regardless of the reasons, the effect was obvious --
At the top is the Plexiglas "ceiling" which is still straight -- the next one down is the thicker back wall, then the two side walls at the bottom. Even the thicker rear wall wasn't sturdy enough to resist the warping. No end of resting under weights had any permanent effect -- after I saw how the first one bowed, I even clamped the freshly-Paperclayed ones to a very firm surface to keep them from warping in the first place, but the warping was actually very gradual, and was clearly worse after a week. (They have also warped even more since I took this photo.) Very dismayed, I left the whole thing alone for quite a long time -- David busily coming up with ideas such as bracing the walls outside with brass rods -- but eventually we both came to the inescapable conclusion that, since the rear and side walls were plain as plain could be bar the glued-on corner brackets on the back wall, the most logical thing to do was to simply cut some new walls out of plywood and start again. It was actually ridiculously easy to pry off the brackets, and I simply re-glued them to the new rear wall.
I really wanted the plaster effect, so I used spackling compound on the new ones, partly because I was now wary of the Paperclay and partly because David had a nearly-new tub of the stuff so I didn't have to buy anything.
Despite all of these grandmother's-footsteps accomplishments and setbacks, what made me most nervous was the painted "aging". The members of the Greenleaf miniatures forum were gently encouraging and helpful, though, so I did some practicing on a piece of scrap wood, then just dove in. ("You can always paint it over and start again," said a number of people, which, though the prospect was daunting, was certainly true in my case, as I had used only a fraction of the lovely green Behr Marquee sample pot -- "Chelsea Green" -- I got from Home Depot!)
The technique I ended up using was basically dry-brushing, starting with a "faded" bit of the base color (mixed with white craft paint), then some black and some brown, just sort of "dusted" on where it seemed there would be the most aged and/or dirty places on a real wall. I did rub it off in some places and do it over. There are also some spots that I sanded lightly with an emery board to look chipped or flaked off -- there are some wonderful tutorials, especially from model railroaders, for simulating flaking paint, but the sanding worked well enough for a "slightly run-down but not dilapidated shop".
What Not to Do: If you change the orientation of a door, don't forget to age the door jamb on the new opening side, not the old one! Duh!
The "Private" sign is a faux-enameled one from a selection of Victorian sign images that I found online, printed on watercolor paper and loaded with artists' medium, in the same way that I made tiles for the No.16 kitchen. I made it slightly bigger than the real sign, as it just looked better that way on my door.
I will try next time to get the lower parts of the walls a bit more uniformly grungy -- now, how often do you get to say that, really?! -- as it looks a bit spotty to me, but I'm satisfied enough with this to move on to the next step!
The windows aren't glued in yet, as I've found that they fit in the frames very snugly just by friction and I suspect that I might want to have the access for a while longer! but I have since this photo glued in the Plexiglas.
And, after all of this, it was time for ...
This was surprisingly nerve-wracking, and I put it off for ages, but the Time Has Come. The base that came with the kit is here held in the right-angle of the big gluing jig by the two large clamps, the four walls of the box are wrapped around the (now also glued in place) floor at the bottom and the removable "ceiling" at the top and held snugly with extra-large rubber bands (which I had bought for a catapult experiment at day camp a few weeks ago, and worked perfectly for this as well!) and the whole box is also pushed into the right-angle of the jig, there is a piece of wax paper between the base and the underside of the shop box in case of glue overflow, and the five handy craft clamps aren't actually clamping anything (because they are too short to go around the box) but are pushed up snugly against the slightly-warped front piece in hopes that the glue will grab hold firmly enough to counteract the bowing.
