{"id":10901,"date":"2016-11-22T23:30:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T07:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=10901"},"modified":"2018-01-26T11:12:41","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T19:12:41","slug":"four-seasons-bushes-and-mailboxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=10901","title":{"rendered":"Four seasons bushes and mailboxes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My goal with the four seasons roombox is to show the same scene as if it&#8217;s progressing through the year. There isn&#8217;t a ton of space for landscaping, but the front door has space next to it for a bush. I&#8217;ve <a href=\"\/blog\/?p=7414\" target=\"new\">made bushes before<\/a> by covering round prickly things out of a jar of potpourri (or off the sidewalk) with clump foliage for model train layouts. <\/p>\n<p>I dug through the potpourri jar and these are the four biggest ones I have left. I decided to use the largest for winter, since it won&#8217;t have any foliage to bulk it up.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons67.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>To make spring, summer, and autumn different from each other, I used different colors of foliage. This spring mix is finer than what I&#8217;ve used for bushes in the past, more like grass. I chose it because the light green seemed spring-like, and the yellow mixed in could be flowers. To stick this stuff on, just cover the prickly thing in glue and roll it around.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons68.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>The summer bush is dark green. This stuff is clumpier and was a bit easier to glue on.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons70.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>For autumn, I&#8217;d bought what I thought was orange\/yellow clump foliage, but it&#8217;s actually <a href=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons80.jpg\" target=\"new\">a sheet<\/a>. (I&#8217;m not sure what this is supposed to be used for?) I cut off a piece and wrapped it around the prickly thing. When that didn&#8217;t look bushy enough, I added a second layer.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons72.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>Here are the four bushes. Unintentionally, it looks like the bush gets fuller with each season. (Someone needs to do some pruning!) These prickly things came out of a harvest potpourri so they&#8217;re orange. I painted the winter one brown, and it will also have some snow on it eventually.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons74.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The other thing I did this week is add house numbers and mailboxes. I have not been able to find many mailbox options in half scale. I started looking at charms and somehow stumbled across <a href=\"https:\/\/www.etsy.com\/search?q=envelope%20locket%20charms\" target=\"new\">envelope locket charms<\/a> on Etsy. Unlike most mini mailboxes, these open! The ones I got are about 3\/4&#8243; wide (approximately 18&#8243; in half scale). I bought antique brass for the four seasons vignettes, and also a couple of silver ones for future houses.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons75.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>I used wire cutters to snip off the rings at the top, then used one of Geoff&#8217;s metal files to shave down the nubs. There are catches on each side of the lid that hold the lid in place and make it hard to open. I used needlenose pliers to fold these under  <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons76.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>I positioned the mailbox on the siding so that the lid opens. It has to be set down slightly from the bottom of a siding strip, otherwise the back edge of the lid will run into the bottom edge of the siding. I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ll actually put mail in any of these, but it&#8217;s nice to have the option! <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons77.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>The house numbers are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.miniatures.com\/Sheets-of-Small-Brass-Numbers-P25262.aspx\" target=\"new\">from Miniatures.com<\/a> and come with four of each number &#8212; exactly what I needed. These are not marked as being half scale but they seem to be (in fact they&#8217;re almost too small), with each number about 1\/8&#8243; tall. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons78.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>I like house numbers on dollhouses to mean something. I tend to create a number out of the month and year the house was finished, but I didn&#8217;t have enough 1s to do 1116. I decided instead to do 2016&#8230; but now I&#8217;m not sure I like it. All I see when I look at it is a year, not a house number. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/dollhouse\/seasons\/seasons79.jpg\" style=\"margin-top:15px; margin-bottom:15px\"><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m tempted to change them all to 16 (and possibly to move the numbers above the door). Now that I&#8217;m thinking about it, the sheet numbers sheet includes an extra set of 1s, so I *could* do 1216. (The project won&#8217;t be finished before December!) Decisions, decisions&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My goal with the four seasons roombox is to show the same scene as if it&#8217;s progressing through the year. There isn&#8217;t a ton of space for landscaping, but the front door has space next to it for a bush. I&#8217;ve made bushes before by covering round prickly things out of a jar of potpourri [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[80,19,42,26],"class_list":["post-10901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dollhouses","tag-four-seasons-roombox","tag-half-scale","tag-landscaping","tag-roomboxes","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10901"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10914,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901\/revisions\/10914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}