Village

This was my second official commission but the first one completed and delivered. Our good friend from Fredericton, Diane Carson, has a few pieces to a glass miniature village that she displays at Christmas time. The buildings are very small (the smallest being 7cm x 4cm). She wanted to expand her village so came to me with the idea and brought her existing pieces to show me. Challenge accepted!

I decided to build a school, bakery, toy store and another house (cottage style). I searched the internet for ideas and soon had my own adaptation-designs drawn to scale.

Construction was an exciting challenge especially to engineer the roof lines on some of the buildings where two opposing peaks join. I also left a 1 cm space at the bottom of the back walls so Diane can put mini lights under each building.

The details on the windows and doors were created by cutting thin strips of copper foil and laying them down to represent window grids. Other details were hand painted on using Monica’s acrylic tole paints.

In addition to the four buildings, I also created three fir trees of different sizes to accent the village houses. Very cute.

Over all, this was a fantastic 30 hour project and I learned a great deal about 3-d construction.

Later on (after Christmas) I continued adding more pieces of my own pattern creation until I had a complete village. All pieces including the first four were re-designed so the windows and doors are built in flush with the walls as opposed to glued on as in the first attempt.

What a fun project. I learned more about 3-d construction each time I made a new one. Once completed, it looked real cute on the mantle with tea lights set under each house.