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Fairfield landscaping behind-the-scenes exposé

The other day I posted a bunch of pictures of the finished Fairfield garden looking all nice and pretty. Now I’ll show you how it got that way.

Most of the supplies my mom and I used to landscape the Fairfield were fake flowers that came from Michael’s, with a few previous Dollar Tree purchases thrown in. The flower selection at Michael’s changes regularly—in fact, all but one of the ones I bought there were on clearance—so it’s unlikely that anyone who makes a trip over there looking for landscaping supplies will find exactly the same flowers I got. The trick is to look for flowers and leaves that will work on a small scale.

Our selection included pink and purple Queen Anne clusters, grass shoots with little white balls on them, a “coral” flower with vine-like leaves, and caspia basil. (I later learned from a Google search that caspia basil is also used in model railroad landscaping. It’s quite leafy and realistic, but it’s also the most fragile since it’s a dried plant, not plastic.) Shopping at Michael’s saved us a lot of money—dollhouse garden supplies are pricey! The most expensive plant was the caspia basil at $4.99; everything else was between $1.50 and $3.50 (albeit on clearance for 50% off). I also bought a two pound bag of “decor stones” for $3.99, to use for the path and flowerbed borders, and I have a ton left over for future projects…

We warmed up with window boxes. These were made using skinny sticks. We used some of the same flowers as in the landscaping, and some different ones, to make them complementary but also unique. This one was a prototype that we made just to make sure the size would be right. The rest of them were painted before assembly. (My mom ended up taking the prototype home to use in her half scale conservatory.)

To make the plants, we stuck pieces of the fake flowers into lumps of air drying clay then coated the surface of the clay with glue, followed by coffee grounds. We made a bunch of different plants, playing around with the layout as we went along.

The bushes are made out of foliage fiber clusters intended for model train layouts, and these little spiky balls that have been falling out of a tree in front of my house and littering the driveway all winter. I never imagined they’d turn out to be useful!

A few of the plants were created by taking apart a snow-covered tree from the Dollar Tree—it was part of their Cobblestone Corners village. I didn’t take a picture of the tree before it was destroyed, but you can see it here—it’s the only non-pine of the bunch. The white bush is made from a few branches of that tree. The green bush with the white flowers is from the same tree—the snow was removed by soaking it in warm water. The white flowers, which came off a Dollar Tree plant, were then attached with hot glue.

Once we had plenty of plants to go around, we decided how to arrange them, glued them down, and filled in the flower beds.

Step 1: After deciding how to arrange the plants, glue them down using Quick Grip.

Step 2: Apply a line of Tacky Glue around the border of the flower bed and glue in rocks. Use glue that dries clear so it won’t show through the border.

Step 3: Brush the area between the rocks and the plants with glue and sprinkle in coffee grounds. I used Mod Podge because it comes in a tub, making it easy to dip a brush into. (On the downside, my Mod Podge is now full of coffee grounds.) Touch up the soil on the plant bases if necessary.

Step 4: Voila! A freshly-planted flowerbed that smells less and less like coffee with each passing day.

I tried to be neat with the coffee, but by the end of the project there were grounds clumped around the rock borders and spread out all over the grass. I cleaned these up the best I could by brushing them off the base with a toothbrush. There are still a few grounds stuck in the grass but I think it adds realism. I’m also thinking of adding a few dandelions from SDK Miniatures to the yard, because even the most beautiful garden sometimes has to play host to a dandelion or two.

Photos of the finished garden can be viewed here.

The Fairfield’s garden, in full bloom

My Fairfield has been in progress for six and a half years, and it’s *this* close to being complete. I have some details to finish (a few baseboards, the upper porch railings), plus I’m still working on furniture for some of the rooms. But even though it’s not quite done, the house has been placed on a base and fully landscaped—with a lot of help from my mom and dad during their visit last week.

The house sits on an 18″ x 20″ base with a turntable. We would have made it 20″ x 20″, but the Lemax grass I had in my stash—which I got for 70% off from Michael’s in January—was only 18″ wide. Oh well.

The base is made out of plain old plywood, with trim covering the edges. My dad mitered and attached the trim, which I then stained with Minwax Golden Pecan to match the shingles. The bottom part of the base is covered in felt so it won’t scratch the surface it sits on.

The wire for the lights pokes in through a hole drilled in the base and connects under the kitchen. The house itself is not secured to the base, but I’m not planning to move it unless I really have to, for fear of messing up the plants. (I did remove it mid-project, to take the turntable outside and stain it, and managed to get it back into place without any major catastrophes. But I don’t want to tempt fate!)

The flagstones in the path and the sundial are among the only items we bought at an actual dollhouse store. Almost everything else in the garden was made using fake flowers from Michael’s and the Dollar Tree. I’ll post another blog this weekend that goes into more detail on how we created the garden, but for now, here’s some eye candy… (Update: the blog with how-to details is here.)

The plants we made include pink and purple azaleas, white rose bushes, globe arborvitae bushes, white hydrangeas, a yellow foxglove, and a bridal veil bush. We also found spots for a couple of pine trees that I got at the dollar store last Christmas.

The little rocks bordering the flower beds are from the gardening section at Michael’s. The “soil” is finely ground coffee.

To make the path, I first glued down the flagstones, then covered the areas around them with Mod Podge and dropped in the pebbles. Next I diluted Mod Podge with water and dribbled it all over the pebbles to form a seal.

The window boxes are made out of skinny sticks and clippings from the same fake flowers we used for the rest of the garden. The tree (my mom thinks it looks like an elm) is dried caspia basil wrapped with masking tape, which I then painted brown to form the trunk.

The flowering tree was originally a bare winter tree from Lemax that I got on clearance at Michael’s years ago. The blossoms and leaves are precariously attached with hot glue. My mom did most of them… I tried a few myself and seemed to be knocking off two leaves for every one I glued on, so I gave up. Some trees in my neighborhood are just starting to get their leaves while other trees and plants are in full bloom, so at art is imitating life…

Here’s the finished Fairfield in its new location—right in the entryway, so it’s the first thing that anyone will see when they come in. (After so many years under construction, it’s about time!)

My review of Again: Eye of Providence

I’m a big fan of Japanese developer Cing. Trace Memory was the first adventure game I played on the Nintendo DS and it filled me with all sorts of hope that the genre was on the verge of a resurgence. I liked Hotel Dusk a little less, mainly because some aspects of the storyline and the setting felt clumsy and unrealistic, but it was still an entertaining game and I was optimistic about Cing’s future.

When I first heard about Again: Eye of Providence, I was really intrigued by the premise—a serial murderer has started killing again after twenty years, and only by delving into the mysteries of the past can the crimes of the present be resolved. I’ve always thought Cold Case would make a great adventure game, giving players a chance to investigate the past as well as the present, and Again: Eye of Providence promised exactly that.

Then came some bad news: in March, Cing declared bankruptcy, Again still made it out in English (albeit in an extremely low-key, blink-and-you’ll-miss it release from Tecmo), but it’s very possible this is the last game we’ll see from Cing in English. (It’s not clear if their recent Hotel Dusk sequel will be released outside of Japan.) So I went into this game with high hopes for the experience, but also sad to know that it was Cing’s last chance to really wow me.

Well, it almost really wowed me. Some aspects of Again are really, really good. Some—in particular, the believability of the story—fall flat. But it’s still worth playing, especially if you’re a fan of their previous work. Check out my review on Adventure Gamers to see why I think so.

Oh, and if you want to buy the game, Amazon’s got it… for now, anyway. With the lax promotion it’s received so far and Cing’s shaky financial situation, I don’t have a lot of faith that this game will be available at retail for very long.

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