In case you haven’t noticed, Peter has been modeling most of my recent 1:6 scale accessories and set pieces. That’s because he’s the only finished Zombieville denizen of average height that I can stand. Both of these qualifiers are important, because Béatrice is finished, but she has dwarfism, so she’s not as easy a reference as a Zombieville denizen of average height. Theophany is finished, but her personality annoys me too much to let her in pictures frequently.

Other Zombieville denizens exist, but they are not ready for modeling:

• Anna needs her hair finished. I’m having an epic fight with it, to be detailed later.
• Carter needs a headback, a custom body constructed [fat doll!], faceup, eyes, hair and clothes.
• Chaz needs faceup and hair.
• Isabel needs a custom body constructed [fat doll!], faceup, eyes, hair and clothes.
• Novella needs faceup, eyes and hair.

Okay…anyway…here’s Peter showing off the blender that I got from stupid.com. It started off as an Xmas ornament, hence the little metal loop at the top. It’s a solid piece of painted resin, 2 inches high, which scales out to 1 foot in 1:6 scale. There are no removable parts, but it’s well sculpted. I also may be biased toward it because its design reminds me of the blender in my kitchen growing up.

And here’s Peter making good on the proclamation on his shirt by showing off last night’s craft: lazy cacti. If you search on steps for making small-scale cacti, you’ll come up with tutorials that require you to punch out individual leaves with a miniature cookie cutter or even add minuscule spines with single toothbrush bristles. If you want to go that way, I applaud you, but I have neither the patience, nor the tools, nor the inclination. I believe in saving my details for the stars of the show, viz., my dolls. Therefore, I sought a simple, inexpensive method of making passable cacti.

I made these first by procuring a package of 4 terra cotta pots with a 0.75 inch diameter. I used some polymer clay to fill each pot with a unit of soil.

After that, I prepared my cacti. To fix them securely in each pot, I mounted them on wooden coffee stirrers cut to size. For the small round cacti, I just glued one or two 10mm pompoms on top of the stirrers with hot glue. For the taller tubular cactus, I glued one end of a pipe cleaner near the point where the cactus would join the soil unit, then wrapped it all around the stirrer, making sure to add more bulk to the top for a more accurate, bulbous shape.

I then planted each cactus in the soil unit, then removed it, so that each stirrer would have a slot to go into after the soil unit was finished. I cured the polymer clay, then painted the visible parts of the soil unit [top, upper sides and inside of slot] with a few layers of raw umber acrylic paint, a color that looks like shit.

When the paint was dry, I glued the soil unit into the pot, then the cactus into the soil unit. I used white glue in these cases for a closer fit.

Voila!

 

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