Minis are like a box of chocolates.......

You really just never know what you're going to get. LOL Now that I've done my movie quote for the day, I'll get make my actual point. Minis *are* like a box of chocolates because we can get so many sweet varieties into a small container. It's never boring! There's always something new and different that we can do or see. I spent a few days last week working on my website and created a virtual box of chocolates. I started by going thru my files looking for pictures to present a nice assortment of my minis. (turns out I have over 7000 files on my domain server!! That's a lot of minis!!) I narrowed it down to about 270 pictures, dumped them on a webpage and converted them to thumbnails. Thumbnails are cool because when you click on them, they open a new page with a big picture. It's simple techno magic, but I like it. It's amazing what entertains me. LOL!!

(I'm going to apologize to y'all about the watermark on some of the pictures. That's coz thumbnails show up in image searches and, well, you know what happens if you don't brand your work and establish a copyright.) Anyway, the end result is a fun page on my website with random and assorted minis.............everything from dollhouses to really weird things to go in them. My main galleries are still on the website but sometimes it's fun to get a quick fix instead of sitting down to do some serious surfing. As long as I'm in chocolate box mode, I'll share a few here. The first one is Aunt Harriet. She tends to enjoy her wine just a little bit too much but she doesn't want the family to know about it so she drinks in the closet. Aunt Harriet was one of my tutorials for the Greenleaf Gazette. I think I ran that one last year around Halloween. Anyway, wave hello to Aunt Harriet and then we'll move on.

This is the plant room in my Beacon Hill. The top floor of the BH also has a meditation room with a temple size prayer wheel. It's very serene and one of my favorite mini rooms. I put the plant room with the statue of Shiva next to the meditation room because they go together so well.

I was messing around with the Greenleaf die cut furniture kits one day and decided to do an art deco bathroom. The sides of the tub are mother-of-pearl inlay pieces scavanged from old jewelry kits.

I never thought much about floating staircases till I wanted to put one in the Magnolia. I googled some images and then decided that I don't have to understand the mechanics behind a cantilevered staircase, I just have to make it look like one! So I did. Nope, there's no handrail and it would scare the hell out of me to try to go up or down this thing in real life. However, the Magnolia is home to my bachelor (who has a bar, a pool table and a juke box instead of a kitchen) so I figured that he'd be drunk enough to handle the staircase with no trouble.

Wise Ways Emporium needed lots of books before the grand opening. A LOT of books. I think I made around 350 of these to stock the shelves. As long as I was at it, I did a tutorial for them and ran it in the Greenleaf Gazette.

I decided that my bachelor needed a pet because all my houses have some kind of pet living in them. But he's a playboy and you can't count on him to take care of a dog or cat so I gave him goldfish. I knew there was a reason I never throw away those Ruetters boxes!

I love landscaping! This is part of the formal garden around the Samurai Summer House. I made a "planter" for the tree with real stones and put the mudmen under it. I love the way they're in such intense conversation. There's a tut for the planter in an issue of the Gazette somewhere.

This is Herbie!!! I loooooooooooooooove him so much! Isn't he adorable? Herbie tends to turn up in gardens and lawns around all my dollhouses. As a mole, he tunnels easily and really gets around. In this picture, he had popped up in the Willowcrest yard for some lemonade.

Speaking of all the books I made for Wise Ways Emporium, here's what part of the store looks like. The shoppers are Percutio (the wizard) and Maharet (the witch). That's my great-grandmother Sarah Anne behind the counter. Seriously. I had a custom doll made of my great-grandmother.

Meet Phil O'Dendron! He's a delightful creation of Blue Kitty Miniatures. (look her up on Etsy.........she's a fabulous artisan) As soon as I saw Phil, I knew he was destined to live with me. He's kinda like Herbie and gets shared around between Maharet, Percutio and Sarah Anne. He gets a little nervous around their familiars tho. Mahret and Sarah Anne have cats and Percutio has a dragon named Phideau. I'm not sure if the mouse is an ingredient for a spell or the result of one but Phill seems a bit nervous about him too. I'm going to have to find a mini pot of valerian to keep next to Phil to calm his nerves.

This is one view of the interior of my Samurai's Summer House. The shoji doors (rice paper) actually work. When they slide closed, the living space and the tea room become two separate spaces and you can see the bamboo front door behind them. I had a lot of fun with this house. I made the futon and the pillows in these rooms and upstairs are kimono chests, tatami mats and a kimono on a stand that I made as well.

This is another part of Wise Ways. I keep stones of all kinds and sometimes they get used in minis. This scene includes tiger's eye, lapis, flourite, amythest, quartz, jasper, onyx, peridot and emeralds.

I really like this zen moment. In fact, this mini sits on my desk beside me as a reminder to relax more. I took an online class with Tracy Topps for creating a mini vignette in a picture frame. The results were really awesome since Tracy asked each person to choose their own theme. Very cool!!

That's just a little sampler box of mini eye candy. If you want to get the full candy store, click here. All this talk about candy has given me a craving for chocolate. Time to go raid the cupboard and find that bag of M&M's!