Village Accessories

With the price of eggs these days, we may all need to own our own chickens! I suggested to my husband that we should buy some chicks, but he doesn’t like the thought of the work, nor having to protect them from the coyote family that lives nearby. Luckily we actually have some lovely neighbors that trade eggs for our homegrown fruit and vegetables.

This year I hope to add more village accessories to my library of free patterns. Making houses are fun, but it is always the little details of the accessories that can go with each house, or between them, that ties a village together. I have had occasion recently to repeatedly pass a house with a wishing well in the front yard. I thought one would look cute in my village

While researching dimensions of wishing wells, I found they vary greatly. You may want to make your wishing well larger or smaller.

I have a constantly fluctuation list of items I want to design. My list shifts with the season, requests, and sometimes my mood. Frequently, when I am researching one design I will see other designs I add to my list. This happened last month when I was looking at pictures of arbors for inspiration for my Rose Arbor, and saw several swing arbors. About the same time I received a request for a porch swing. It made sense to design the two together.

I found dimensions for both the swing arbor and the porch swing online, and made both to scale. However, I quickly found that none of the porches on the buildings I have designed, with the exception of the Gabled Octagon House, are deep enough to fit my porch swing. So I am already having to look ahead to designing a building with a deeper porch.

When I designed my Rose Cottage pattern several months ago, I knew I wanted to decorate it with climbing roses. At the time, I only had a few rose bushes, but I found a package of rose vines on Amazon. Even though they say HO Scale, I actually think they are perfect for the S Scale I use to make my village.

The package comes with 6 rose vines, 3 red and 3 pink. I used one of them to climb up the side of the building on the trellis from my Greenhouse Accessories. I got the idea from Donna Camacho’s version of Rose Cottage. I hadn’t even remembered that I had made a trellis!

I decided to make a Rose Arbor and fence to use two more of the rose vines. Of course I have already decided that I would like to make another house with a wisteria covered arbor. So far I haven’t found anything in the right scale. I will probably need to learn how to make my own.

I have been wanting to make more accessory items for my village, but this month’s pattern was actually driven by my other hobby, beading. I love to bead ornaments, and have designed my own in the past, but prefer how relaxing it is to use other designer’s patterns. About a year ago I discover the designer Julie Glasser (JulRiDesign on Etsy) and have been making my way through her patterns. She has designed a series of miniature beaded plants in pots and urns, and I decided they would look better in a scene than as ornaments for my tree. I bought myself a little domed terrarium, then decided I needed a flower cart for my smaller potted plants.

I finally made a few 3D beach accessories to go with the Beach House pattern I published last August. I began by thinking about what items I would take with me if I was to go hang out at the beach. A towel, sunscreen, and my phone loaded with an audiobook is probably all I would need, though I would search out a palm tree to sit under as I burn easily. The audiobook isn’t really necessary as the sound of the waves at the beach always lull me to sleep within minutes. Ack, that wasn’t enough, so I threw in a beach chair for my husband, a beach umbrella in case there weren’t any palm trees to sit under, and then a couple of surf boards just because I knew they would look good leaning against the Beach House platform, not because I have ever surfed. I am sure if I had ever tried I would have needed the life preserver.

When I published the second of Cheryl’s patterns for her two greenhouses, I promised a post with some accessories for the greenhouses.