Quarter Scale Coaching Inn

I'm making more progress -- slowly -- and am thisclose to having the front ready to glue on to the first Butterwick House. But the last few panels needed some adjustment, so more on that in a future post. Instead I thought I'd give a first look at the coffee room, as I'm making pretty good progress on it. I got the Petworth Miniatures gaming table "dressed," finally, including a sandwich from Medieval Miniatures and a whiskey set from Stewart Dollhouse. The sandwich was invented when the Earl of Sandwich was hungry but didn't want to leave the gaming table and asked that meat between two pieces of bread be brought to him, so it was fun to slip that little anecdote into my scene. The secretary is from Victoria Miniland and it's stocked with books from kenna_gal on eBay. There are more of them in the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace (another from Herdwick Landscapes). Would a coaching inn have had that many books? Possibly not, bu...

I haven't posted in a while because I haven't really completed anything lately. I am still working away on both Butterwick Houses, but I thought I would at least post some pictures of work in progress. One of the tricky things with these houses has been figuring out my plan to build them. The reason for this is that they will eventually be joined in some fashion -- their balconies will connect to form the gallery. The bottom part of them needs to be in a stone finish, and I couldn't put the lower windows in until the stone finish was done around them. But the stone finish couldn't be completed until the upstairs was more complete and I attached the balconies. Add to this a whole lot of wallpaper and details which means I really need to work on the rooms from the bottom up without the upper floor in place for each room, and it became a real conundrum. Ultimately what I decided to do was to do part of the front stone, particularly around the windows. I'll then ha...

The good thing about getting my two Butterwick houses together and getting their floors done is that I could begin to test the furniture a little bit better. I'd made sizers out of cardstock based on the measurements of the buildings, but it turns out those were a bit too large. I didn't account for the width of the walls! What this means is that my lovely pub bar that I'd gotten for the taproom was a smidge too wide for the building, and the even lovelier settle (both from Petworth Miniatures ) was a bit too wide for where I wanted to put it. I ordered a new settle that should be narrower, and this one might still find life elsewhere in the project. Although as I also realized that splitting the floor above the pub into a formal dining room and a billiard room was not going to work, and this Petworth billiard table was also a casualty... ...I think I might just save them all and do a nice (somewhat more modern) country pub after this project! This meant I st...

One of the things I've been doing for all of the buildings in the project is using real stones for flagstone floors, which I think really gives it a more authentic feel. I get them from Stacey's Miniature Masonry , and I thought I'd post a tutorial here on how they're done. The stones and mortar (which Stacey's also sells) come with instructions, but I think it'll be handy to see photos of the process. I like to lay down a coat of paint before starting, to give the stones something better to stick to, although there won't be any gaps once it's done. Then the first step of laying the floor is to glue all of the stones down with PVA adhesive (tacky glue). The recommended way to do it is to plan them all out in advance, but I don't have patience for that so I usually just wing it! That's probably how they did them back then anyway, right? At some point you'll probably need to cut a stone or two in half to get ones that fit your last remainin...