A small world's big buzz!: February 2012

I absolutely LOVE getting all the mail we do. It's fun to hear from readers, and though I don't have time to respond to every contest entry or short note scribbled after a sub renewal, I hope you all realize that I read everything and enjoy it to no end.

I especially enjoy mail when we get little surprises! Here are my two latest favorites. First up is another card from Emma. For those of you who don't remember, Emma is the granddaughter of our warehouse guru, Fran. She sometimes joins Fran in the office, and she is always smitten with our little guy, Arthur. Apparently Kelly recently ordered some Girl Scout cookies from Emma, and here is Emma's thank-you note:

(If that doesn't make your heart melt, I just don't know what will.)

And now my other fun piece of mail, courtesy of the wonderful Martha Puff, who recently finished her end of the monumental task of two--yes, two!--galleries for our April issue of American Miniaturist. The first features some beautiful spring pieces by very talented artists, and the second gallery has been making my tummy rumble for days on end as I cutout photos of cakes and pastries. Yes, it's a food gallery, and trust me, you will want to eat something before you look through the article, or you will end up making brownies for yourself at night. Anyway, Martha sent me some beautiful pieces from Sue Ayers of Sue's Little Things! This photo is courtesy of my new iPad (yay!), and I haven't played with the settings, so the photo is a bit low-quality. But if you look below, you will see a print-quality photo of some of the same pieces, upcoming in our April issue. Enjoy!

Traci

This past weekend, Bailey and I drove a couple hours north to Minneapolis to attend the winter meeting of the Midwest Miniatures Guild. The meeting itself was wonderful--we were able to speak with many contributors to our magazines and presenters for Dollshouse.TV (Mary Wallace, Barbie Cohn Andreason, Joan Purcell, and more) and there were lots of minis on display as well as some sales tables. One of my favorite parts was the numerous entries in the Shoe Challenge that they had done: at the last meeting, they'd given out unpainted metal shoes to attendees, and those who had completed scenes with the shoes brought them for display to this meeting and we voted on winners. (Congrats to our lovely Barbie for winning with her shoe store!)

There was a lovely lunch and meeting, where we heard all the latest news for our area as well as elected new executive leaders. But what I was really excited about was the workshop! There were around six workshops we could have chosen from, and Bailey and I opted for the same one: lovely masquerade masks, taught by Irma Escue.

I didn't take a photo of the materials, but essentially they included feathers, ribbons, jewels, beads, and a pin. The masks themselves were provided by Irma; she has a special face mold of her own that she used to make the face masks, and she cut out the eye masks as well. Irma had done some wonderful preparation and had put all the materials for each mask into little ziplock bags, packaged by color. I chose one with the word "sunset" in the name--I am such a sucker for that word!--and it was a lovely mixture of oranges and yellows.

The mask handles were created by adding beads onto the pins. Easy and fun! There was also a little decorated foil piece (I forget what they are called, but you can see them on the face masks). I cut mine so it was on the back of the mask as well as across the forehead; Bailey cut hers into a lovely heart shape. These create a really polished look to the whole mask.

From there on, we used glue and our imaginations, adding feathers here, beads there, maybe a bit of ribbon. Irma actually had some tinsel that we used by curling it with a scissors and attaching it.

At one point, as I glued pieces and experimented with the different feathers and beads and cutouts, I noticed something I hadn't seen at first: a beautiful little orange heart. Perfect! As I picked it up with my precision tweezers, though, it fell, and disappeared on either the floor, my lap, or somewhere in my (long and unfortunately not pulled back) hair. Sigh. So I replaced it with a purple heart and a red dot, which you can see in the photo below. I like the small touches of red included in mine; they really add to the idea of a sunset. That's also why my favorite photo of this is on a blue background! Perfect!

I also really like the red dot in the middle of the forehead with the little feathers sticking out. That took me a surprisingly long amount of time!