This is the tea-room-to-be, almost ready to glue together. I painted it with milk paints in a previous life, which I had tested on a little bedside table I made and really liked (the paint I mean, the table was an object lesson in using a right-angle jig for gluing!) —
but I painted a first coat on the shop and wasn't happy, then painted a second coat and was even less happy — the blue is pretty but far too dark, but the yellow while lovely on my sample (and in the upstairs room in Hardy House) was dismayingly blotchy on the shop front — so I put it away in despair and felt sad about it for I'm afraid almost a full year. I had bought some more paint samples from Home Depot around Christmas, I think, but only put a coat of primer on, which looked awful, to be honest, and I didn't touch it again until … well, until I had some extra time on my hands. You know. Anyway, I gave myself a mental smack and took all four walls out to the garage and went at them with the palm sander and other bits of sand paper in various grades until I felt better.
The new paints are "English Hollyhock" (the blue) and "Candlewick" (the pale yellow), both from Behr. The yellow isn't as Farrow-&-Ball as I had pictured in my mind, but there it is — it is quite pretty in itself.
In the boxes of stuff that my benefactress gave me (how nice, to think of having a benefactress!) was this Houseworks "French door" which I thought would be perfect for a tea shop, as the most convenient route to the kitchen would surely be a swinging door! The frame was glued together rather crookedly, so after a previous successful experiment with a hair dryer, warming the glue and gently prying the joins apart with the thin blade of a craft knife, I took it apart and sanded it a bit and glued it more straightly. When I dry-fitted it, though, I thought the door looked a bit stingy somehow, with no room for a push plate, so David helped me to trim off the innermost section of the jamb. I will play around with cutting a push plate from a model-maker's brass strip that I've got.
After looking at innumerable shop fronts, both English and American colonial-esque, for design ideas, I thought I'd like to try tiling the bottom part of this bay window. I had such fun with my previous faux tiles that that method was high on my list, and I had accumulated quite a lot of paint chips in various colors by that time, so I tested it out and decided to go for it. These are cut in 1cm squares, slightly smaller than the more-obvious half-inch because I felt that an odd number of rows would look better. At first, I simply marked the rows on the back of the paint chip with a ruler and pencil, but quickly realized that as good as I thought my measuring eye was, in 1:12 scale being only slightly off makes a huge difference! So I printed out a piece of 1cm graph paper, stuck it on to the back of the paint chips, and got them cut much more accurately.
Alas, this gorgeous blue and black is only the artists medium still in its opaque wet stage, and the faux tiles have since dried quite black — which is what I wanted, after all. This would have been a happy accident, indeed.
The paint-chip base gave somewhat different results from the watercolor paper I've used previously — for some reason, the gloss medium didn't level off as much, but more importantly, either I didn't notice that there were more bubbles in the bottle (or perhaps from the brush I was using) or the black underneath made them much more apparent, but the first batch I did was unusable. I had wild thoughts of dashing in to Home Depot, corona-virus be damned, grabbing some paint chips, and dashing back out again, but of course that wasn't very sensible since I have family at home, and so I resigned myself to the challenge of eking out enough squares from the wonky batch I'd cut by eye from the first chip. I think I have enough, though I may have to use some of the slightly-bubbled ones.
(My shops, by the way, are set in a vaguely contemporary time, which to me means that one could have a chip credit-card reader and another a rotary phone. And even though the possible inspiration for the designs is American, the 1:12 shops look thoroughly English to my Southern-California eye, so it's difficult not to lean pretty far in that direction, though I'm actually trying to be ambiguous. A friend asked me not long ago, "Are they English or American?" so I said, "Yes.")
Even after re-gluing the inner-door frame, the warping was was so much, after who-knows-how-long sitting in its box (it wouldn't surprise me if it was ten or twenty years), that it promptly snapped back into pieces when I set it into the opening, twice, and so the only thing to do was glue it into place in sections, first the top and then the two sides! It was a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to clamp it, but luckily that giant rubber band came in handy again! I did have to spackle a relatively huge bow, but with one of the teeny-tiny tools in the stash I now have, this went surprisingly well. If the warp had been sideways, I probably would have simply chucked the whole assembly, but since it is outwards, you can't see it from most of the angles that will be visible when the room-box is put together. (More "subsidence — from the bombing"!)
I took the time to paint new chimney pots for Hardy House, since every single one is chipped or broken, the old clay (maybe plaster of Paris?) being dry and brittle after forty years. The new ones are of course those little wooden "candle holders" that are in I think every single craft store's "woodworking" aisle. (Candle holders? Well, I can see how they would fit, but who would actually use them for holding candles? They look like they'd fall right over and set your tablecloth on fire.) They barely needed sanding, so after a cursory rub I gave them two undercoats of black, then two top coats of terra cotta paint, dry-brushed a bit of black and gray "soot" around the rims, and finished with a coat of matte varnish.
I had decided to save a bit of money and get only a matte pot of the blue for the inside of the shop, and use the gloss varnish that I already have to put a shine on the trim. This is fairly successful, though it does take a bit of sanding between coats to get both the paint and the gloss looking smooth enough to create the illusion. It occurred to me about halfway through this that there really ought to be a frame around the inside of the bay window, so I dug out some plain pieces and glued them in place. It will rarely be visible, but I'll know it's there.
Finishing this part will now start overlapping with the interior decoration! —
A Bluestocking Knits 