The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop: Handmade Accessories for Your Tiny Living World

by Janit Calvo

Overview

A not-so-mini trend
 
The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop is the next big thing for the crafters and gardeners already captivated by gardening small. Organized by playful themes—including gardens around the world, holidays, and fantasy gardens—it’s a fun-filled guide to creating one-of-a-kind gardens and the accessories that make them shine. Thirty-seven projects are included with fully illustrated, step-by-step instructions. For a Japanese garden, you will learn how to create a miniature sand garden. For a Halloween garden, you'll learn how to make a flying ghost and zombie. And for a space garden, you'll learn how to make a tiny space ship and alien. The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop is for anyone enchanted by the whimsy of creating a tiny world.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604697018
Publisher:	Timber Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/14/2017
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Janit Calvo is an artist, miniaturist, gardener, and entrepreneur whose creativity makes diminutive scenes come to life. Her first living miniature garden was a tiny stage backdrop that grew and wove itself together for years. Inspired by the little garden's long life and easy maintenance, Janit started Two Green Thumbs Miniature Garden Center in 2001. Janit has won many garden and miniature show awards, and her gardens have appeared in the Seattle Times, Dig Magazine, and Dollhouse Miniature Magazine. Her website is TwoGreenThumbs.com. She resides with her husband in a full-size house and garden in Seattle, Washington.

 

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
There is no other pastime as diverse, adaptable, and accessible as gardening in miniature. It is a collection of a number of other hobbies merged into a single incredibly creative one. And it appears that we’ve taken the best and easiest aspects of these leisure pursuits and left the hardest parts of them behind.

We don’t break our backs gardening and landscaping: we use spoons for shovels, forks for rakes, and we find ways to grow slow and small. We play with plants and with the garden. We casually build small hills and dales in our gardens; we eortlessly carve riverbeds and move property boundaries on a whim. We dream of different ways to plant and repurpose tiny plots morning, noon, and night. We begin a fresh garden design from scratch with every new pot we pick up, or every garden bed we till, something full-size gardeners simply cannot do.

We can appreciate all kinds of miniature and dwarf plants and include leggy shrubs and broken trees in our work because we will use them as authentic additions to our miniature garden scenes. We adore tiny conifers with their little buds and needles not as collectors, but because they are genuine landscape trees in miniature. We don’t practice the art of bonsai, but we will gladly use its ancient techniques for pruning and looking at plants in a new way. We use the same bonsai-tree starts but instead of cropping off the roots to fit them into shallow trays, we lovingly place them, uncut root ball and all, into our miniature gardens as delicious anchor trees and hang tiny swings or birdhouses from them.

Instead of spending hours indoors renovating a dollhouse, we take our miniatures outside and put them in the soil. We can complete a garden from start to nish in a couple of hours; that’s a feat seldom heard of in the dollhouse world. We don’t craft just anything and everything either; our projects have to rev up our imaginations, fill our hearts, fit into our tiny gardens, and be special enough to warrant giving up such valuable real estate.

We are versatile crafters as long as it has something to do with the miniature garden. We dabble in masonry, mosaics, woodworking, painting, and all kinds of applied arts. We love to use our hands and minds to build and make rather than just buy an idea to plunk down in a pot of soil. We relish the realistic details, knowing that that is where the magic and enchantment is made.

We can’t join an established club because we would be guilty of being so selective. If a miniature gardener were looking for a club to join, which would it be? A dollhouse- miniature club would quickly scale down any idea made with living plants, real soil, and water. A rock garden club would toss us out for aggregating with trees and miniatures. A conifer or a regular garden club would consider us weeds because we would only attend when the topic resonates in miniature. A bonsai group would prune us away for sneaking in miniature patios and furniture under their specimens. Railroad garden groups would put us on the next train out because we would only want to talk about the plants and the garden.

So, here is another book for you, my fellow miniature gardener: you are welcome in this club anytime. This book is a follow-up to my first book, Gardening in Miniature: Create Your Own Tiny Living World. Grow, play, experiment, plant, create, invent, dig in deeper, or garden smaller anytime. But do think big and dream bigger.

My goal for this book is to oer unique projects that are doable by anyone, independent of their skill level, are practical in application, and will delight the novice and experienced miniature gardener alike. In other words, you don’t need that specic chair in the project to do the project; interpret the projects for your own ideas. Have fun, make mistakes, and create.

This book begins with advice for setting up the ideal workshop for a miniature gardener and an overview of the basic materials and tools needed for most projects. Then we move on to the projects, which range from nationally themed projects capturing the spirit of Great Britain, Spain, Japan, and India to projects inspired by special occasions, from the Fourth of July and Halloween to birthdays and weddings. Storybook ideas follow: a fairy house, an intriguing door to the world of gnomes, a shack on a deserted island, aliens from outer space, and a world beneath the sea. And last, we look at Wardian cases and broken-pot gardening, and sneak attacks (okay, with permission) in the form of guerrilla gardening.

With all the projects in this book, let your imagination fly. Reinvent or adapt the ideas to use with other themes. Take the techniques gathered here and use them with abandon. Each project is photographed in a miniature garden to show you how the nished piece looks in a garden and to give you an idea of how you might apply it to your own gardens. I hope you’ll enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed getting my ideas out of my head and onto these pages.

Table of Contents

Introduction 8

Getting Started 11

Creating a Miniature Garden Workshop 13

Tools, Materials, and Techniques 17

World Tour 29

America 31

Aging Adirondacks

Snail Shell Planter

Great Britain 45

Ancient Brick Patio

A Folly in the Park

Spain 55

Aging a Fountain

Pretty Mosaic Patio

India 67

Meditation Altar

An Indian Parasol

Japan 75

Zen Sand Garden

Easy Bonsai Pruning

Make It Special 81

A Little Birthday Wish 83

A Good Sign

Let Them Plant Cake

An Enchanting Garden Wedding 89

Making Arches

Let There Be Light

Wedding Bouquet

Mother's Day 103

Country Garden Posy

Hanging Flower Vase

Independently Yours 117

A Patriotic Perch

Light Up Your Life

A Haunted Halloween 125

A Spooky Ghost

Reduce, Reuse, Revive from the Dead

Have a Merry Little Christmas 135

A Christmas Tree Dress

A Holiday Snowman

Miniature Imaginings 145

Fairy Haven 147

Fairy House Redux

Customize a Fairy Bench

Gnome Garden 161

Door to a Gnome's Home

Log Border

Deserted Island Survival 173

Tree House

Make a Cave

Colonizing Outer Space 181

Make an Alien

The Mothership

Under the Sea 193

Glass Float

Sea Throne

$$$ $

Wardian Case: A Miniature Atrium 205

Your Own Miniature Atrium

Broken-Pot Gardening 215

Break Your Own Broken Pot

Cachepots and Vases: Fast and Fun Miniature Gardening 223

Make a Scene

Guerrilla Gardening 233

Sharing Miniature Garden Fun

Miniature Scales 238

Metric Conversions 238

Recommended Reading 239

Shopping Resources 240

Acknowledgments 241

Photography Credits 241

Index 242

Editorial Reviews

Digs deeper, instructing readers in how to build their own accessories for themed potted worlds. . . . tending to a tiny garden offers a satisfying kind of challenge: the cultivation of a light and the ability to slow down in order to focus on something so small.” —Publishers Weekly

“This fun, strongly recommended book gives miniature enthusiasts the opportunity to customize their minigardens with unique scenes and pieces.” —Library Journal starred review

“Do you know someone who loves fairy gardens (and who doesn’t really)? This book takes the trend to the next level showing crafty gardeners how to accessorize their mini creations.” —HGTV

“The next big thing for crafters and gardeners captivated by gardening small. . . . Become enchanted by the whimsy of creating a tiny world.” —Gambit

“Sets out 37 projects for crafters and gardeners who are enchanted by the whimsy of creating a tiny world.” —The Irish Garden​

From the Publisher