I detailed previously the creation of the Shoppe Front, and all the shelves etc, but there are a couple of things which I did not show. The first is the stove and log basket. I ended up with a big space in the left hand side of the shop so I thought I would add a wood stove to keep Esmun warm when the weather is inclement.
If any of you are feeling chilly and have run out of propane - here’s how to build your own wood stove. All you need are these simple parts and a bit of imagination.
Disclaimer: stove will be very small and might not actually work… ;)
I had a devil of a job getting the label off the vitamin bottle, and I should really have primed it, but I was impatient. Sigh. Here I am gluing the various bottle tops together to make the stove body. I cut out two pieces of white card for the stove door, painted them black, and glued them together pinning the “hinge” in place.
For the hinge and door handle I used these bracelet findings which are perfect. I’ll never make a bracelet using these so it’s good to find other uses for them. I also used the round parts as Zahrah’s magnifying lens.
I painted the body of the stove with black acrylic paint and ultra matte medium. It took a couple of coats to stick (because I hadn’t primed the plastic!)
When I looked at olde stoves online they often had some fancy decoration so I found some beading supplies and made my own by squashing the bell shaped bead caps flat and gluing them on to the bottle.
After I glued on the trim, I used a silver pen to do some stripes and highlighting, then I glued on the door. The grill below is a piece of wood left over from a wooden 3D model I did years ago. After doing all this I decided I did not like the Matte look and went over it with gloss medium.
Trying the stove in situ. I made a stove pipe using the cardboard roll from my kitchen foil (which conveniently had just run out!) Now of course I needed a log basket.
I got out the jute string that came with all my little apothecary jars and started coiling it up. I used tacky glue to make it stay in place. Once it was a good size I started to build the sides up, just coiling and sticking. It was kinda messy, but worked really well.
Finally I plaited a little strip for the top edge and made some handles out of the remainder.
Completed Stove and Log Basket. Esmun is now ready for any cool weather.
Creating a sidewalk outside the Apothecary Shoppe.
Only someone as crazy as me could get excited about making a sidewalk! Fortunately I’m not the only person being crazy these days, so I found some inspiration online (where else) and used some dollar tree foam board. I stripped off the top layer of paper revealing the foam. I experimented with making marks in it and painting it to see if it worked. These are my tools for scoring. I used the foil for making indentations in the foam, which I did when I made my wall for the final scene of my book. The foil creates a stone like texture in the foam.
Having figured out what to do I made a whole street length of pavement markings, then started putting paint on it.
Here’s how it looked in front of the shoppe. For later photos I added some bits of moss and dirtied the stone up a bit.
Well, now the Shoppe is completed - on to other things…