Merry winter holiday of your choice

December is a bad time for hobbies of any kind -- there's never enough time or money. One of my resolutions for 2011 is to get as many presents as I can way in advance. Of course, I've been promising to do that for about twenty years now...

Nevertheless, there are some mini offerings:

The jug and bowls, and most amazingly, the little matryoshka (for reference, the inner doll is just under 5mm tall, as small as a rice corn!) were made by my best friend Amanda. They're all made from quilling paper, as per Kris' tutorial here. All the more amazing since Amanda had never made miniatures before I ambushed her with the idea of it this summer.

And one of my own works-in-progress:

This is a quarter scale shadowbox (or half a roombox, really). The wallpaper is Carta Varese that I originally bought for various 1:12 tidbits, the floorboards are small craft popsicle sticks, stained and varnished, with the baseboards being co-opted varnished mahogany veneer leftovers. The fireplace was glued from 2x5mm pine and veneer, and covered in acrylic primer to save time. Brick was painted in acrylic and pastel chalk and the fire screen is half a flattened jewelry finding. There's also embers I'm very proud of, made from decorative sand and covered in paint and grated chalk to simulate ashes, but unfortunately they're not really visible. ;)

Meanwhile, my mother has grand plans for Gisela. As soon as she's got some time I'll force her to sit down and to draw me the basic plans (she's the one with a MSc in engineering, after all), so I'll be able to start working on the implementation -- and to calculate how much materials I'll need for just the basics. The original house is built from 10mm thick wood, dry and light after these 60 years, but I'm going to make the new walls from 10mm or 8mm thick MDF, I think, and the roof from even thinner MDF.