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Do your dioramas and dollhouses need a little life?
Plants are a great accent and usually
very economical if you make them yourself.
Choosing greenery for plants for 1:6 scale. I scour 'sale' aisles after seasons for bargain plants in stems and ushes, even garlands and wreaths, always keeping in mind scale. WallyWorld, $$ stores, and Michaels' are my favorites for new---and of course there always thrift store plants, arrangements or even greenery wreaths available, really cheap.
Flowers and Twig stems:I shop when I see anything reasonable and buy cheap whether I have a plan or not. Think texture---mixing up textures can be very interesting.
Finding Florals isn't as easy as plants, as blossoms need to be 1/2" or smaller to work for Playscale of 1:6. I do not make flowers or leaves from scratch---but I have cut down or trimmed commercial products to a more workable size.
Containers: Mini's from thrift stores, mini wood, plastic, or ceramic floral pots, beads, candle cups, mini-dishes, bottles, bottle caps, baskets, napkin rings, shot glasses make great containers also.
Basic Tools: Glue gun or glue, scissors, wire clippers, pencil, dowels, toothpicks. (when working with hot glues, something to push down on your mini saves fingers.)
Basic Supplies: Dry floral foam, rocks, modeling clay, skinny duct tape, wire, florist tape, scotch tape, glue, moss ( I use lichen type mosses for mini's)
EASY Project: Making a Kitchen herb garden. The remodeled Victorian house has such great windows---really screaming for plants.
I started with some mini 5/8" clay pots I had, and painted them red with paint pens.
Since the pots are so small---I used some fine moss to fill them. A touch of glue in the bottom will secure the moss. Take a small 1/16" rod/wood/toothpick and stir a hole in the center of one pot for the taped-plant below.
I took a stem or two from a grass plant and slit some blades in half length-wise. Then I sharpened the ends by clipping. I used a variety of lengths. Trick for really tiny pieces is to make a taped bouquet. Place each blade starting with shortest on each end and the longest spread out in the middle on the double stick tape. (keeps you from dropping the pieces, everywhere )
Then tightly wind the tape and blades up....trim off excess at the bottom. Glue the bottom (hot glue or some sort of glue that work with plastic). Insert the plant in the hole in the mossed pot. Great for Chives!
The pot on the left was made from bits of Christmas Cedar greenery and makes a great Rosemary plant, a mini Eucalyptus plant (just the tips) makes Basil. These are just hot glued/ or glue on each stem and inserted into the secured moss. Since the stems are soft---you will need to use a good dab of glue. Three to five pieces/stems is plenty for this size of pots.
This corner sink gives a perfect place for an herb garden.
Potted Trees or Bushes
Generally trees or bushes are evergreens backdrops in dioramas, so I choose small versions of pines, cedar, or palm/plants. Here Trish models with the plants to show the scale of outdoor plantings.
Containers: The most important thing for potted trees/bushes is to have heavy or weighted containers. Rocks, or a clump of clay in the bottom of a lightweight container will support a large planting, bush or tree. It is a balancing act, the taller the tree/plant the more weight you will need. Plaster is also an option--though messy but, great if you are doing a lot of containers.
Cut a piece of dry floral foam to size and secure to the container with hot glue or secure with a duck tape weight skinny tape. For smaller pots, I use low-melt glue glue gun which usually is totally removable, yet will hold foam and small plants/branches.
Mosses: I use the lichen type mosses for small projects, just bits and pieces and glue them around the rim of the containers
Here I covered a white plastic pot(left) with contact paper to match the one on the right.
These were made from a Christmas bush, the pot on the right has small twigs added to the greens. Both pots are weighted and filled with multiple sized cuttings inserted/glued into the foam.
Trish is shown for scale, I tend to make 'matching' pieces in different sizes.
From the top---you can see it isn't perfectly even---plants aren't, but balanced all the way around.
Filling in the outside edge with small pieces gives a 'natural' shape to your bush.
This is a large lit planter with many different types of greens and twigs. Think of all those commercial planters you see in shopping centers...and this is a great way to use up odds and ends. This is roughly a 4" square pot, with rocks in the bottom, then the glued in foam and finally moss.
Start with your largest stem branch in the middle towards the back(the twig branch here), Then add a medium pine stem and pull all the pine pieces evenly across the back. Add a few smaller pieces to each side and then something interesting in the front. I used some white mini berries from a wildflower bouquet.
For winter, I added a birdhouse and a few cardinals for color and interest. Snow is just laid on the branches. Other bits were glued in, or wired if I wished to remove them later. I will update this for the summer season by changing out the twig/snowy branches and adding maybe a flower/berry stem?
From the back: This was made for a corner display so is flat in the back on two sides. Square planters are perfect for corners. Diorama space is always tight!
This was a thrift store tree stuck in a disk of wood which kept tipping over.
I used clay in the bottom of this pot. It was shallow so I made the foam taller than the edge of the pot, trimmed the edges off round and covered it tightly with different pieces of moss.
I made a hole in the center with a pencil, filled it with hot glue and stuck the tree in.
It works and is an easily moveable prop tree.
This small potted tree/bush is cedar from a Christmas greenery bush, The pot is a weighted one from a commercial plant. I used it's plant somewhere else.
View from above, I made this piece somewhat flat on the back to be put against the garbage cans. One tall stem, 2 medium pieces and a few bits for the bottom.
This little plant and pot (peat moss pot) was weighted, and sparsley filled when I bought it, I just added the pine stems into the holes to fill it out.
I use this piece in lots of out door shots and it gets moved around a lot!
Potted Houseplants
Actually the tropical in the middle of this pot--was from the white pot shown before. I needed an indoor pot to fill an awkward space in the Victorian by the beam support. The container is a black ceramic candle cup from a thrift store, and heavy enough to support these light weight plants.
I used three types of greenery here to support the tropical house plant. In the industry we call these 'gardens' when smaller plants support one larger plant.
Glass Pots for Greenery and an ARRANGEMENT
I had to show you one of the ways to treat a glass pot. This 'dish garden' was used in a bedroom and has three different 'elements' or types of greens/flowers in it. Two pieces of flowering twigs, 3 bits of mini-eucalyptus, and 3 trailing plant fronds. The fronds were glued to some wire stem pieces which were bent to drape the fronds over the side and down. You can also bend plastic greenery with a hair dryer, heat it up and coax the shape you want, as it cools it should stay that shape.
Here you can see I filled the pot with moss. The stems are glued in one at a time, starting from the middle and working outward. Other glass pot fillers for mini's: tiny shells, rocks, gravel, sand, even fruit or beads.
Close up here shows the 'wire' on the left frond, it's green which just blends in.
This glass pot was found in a bag of several at a thrift store. Perfect for 1:6 scale.
I confess I was a floral designer for three major big box stores as well as a few florists, I always enhanced my pottery displays at shows with seasonal greens and sold them. I taught tons of classes, but you really don't have to be a designer to make miniature greenery arrangements.
Just, keep it very simple and have FUN!
Next Post: Scale and Arrangement styles with lots of GREEN!
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Thank you for your cooperation, Sandi
Oh, WOW! How tiny they are. Love them!! Thanks so much for linking up at A Themed Linkup 98 for Crafts and DIY. Pinned.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dee
DeleteCONGRATS, Sandi! Your post is FEATURED at A Themed Linkup 99 for Trays from the previous linkup for Crafts and DIY.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dee!!!
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