Saving Your Hard Work From the Ravages of Dust

Inspiration hits.

Tea By The Sea - by Kimi B.

Now, the enemy of all Miniaturists raises its ugly allergen-promoting, mini-destroying  head - DUST!

DUST!

Okay, that might be a little overkill. But still, we don't like dust.

Our first meeting of the season dealt with how to protect the little teacup scenes we had made, in the form of a display case. Certainly, these are expensive ventures when you can find them, and often the more available ones from the craft stores are geared for that teary-eyed sports enthusiast who managed to snatch that foul ball out of the air at the "big game"  (or out of some poor sad little 7-year-old kid's hands, as the case may be), got it signed by the players who were nice enough to do so, and will eventually sell the ball on an on-line auction site for beer money. What was I saying? Oh yes. Display cases.

The solution that was presented to us was - using cheap (inexpensive) wooden picture frames from the dollar store, 4 in total,  hardware removed, glass removed (carefully put to the side), glued together to make the box. Lengths of strip wood was cut and painted, and used to secure the glass (which, as you recall, we saved to the side)  back into the frame. This will leave you with one short piece of glass, but no worries - art stores often have precut glass that isn't "that" pricey, or a glass repair shop might - if you ask them nicely and bring them cookies - cut you a custom piece from otherwise unusable scraps.

Raw Materials For Display box

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is the frame box jigged up.

5 x 7 frames fitted together to make a box

Neat, right? My caveat to you in this venture is to make sure you have frames that are not warped. Warped wood tends to like to stay warped, and it will be a pain to glue. Also, determine how you will secure the top of the display box to the base. Clever chickens might make it a top loadable display case, secure at the bottom, so no one grabs the top portion and sweeps everything on the base to the floor in a heart-sickening "crash". You could make the whole thing permanent by gluing everything down good and tight. Or you could leave it as a bottom loader, and maybe work out some way to secure it semi-permanently. One might even try to hinge instead of glue one side, so access can be had then. The benefit of course of access is that you can transport things separately, and double your chances of transporting a piece safely when required.

You will also need a base on this - just a simple square of wood will do, or you can get one of the fancier plaques from the craft supply stores if you like. If you go the square piece of wood route, you can doxie it up with trim, paint, whatever. The world is your mollusc of your choice. If what you need to display needs to be protected from scratches, a piece of felt glued in would work remarkably well.  However, you could take this in all sorts of directions - make the base part of the scene, for instance.

Sorry about the "after" picture (well, "lack of"), I haven't really finished it completely, and it seems my camera card has had a small meltdown.  The above gives you a good idea where we went with it, however.

Until next time, gentle readers,  a picture of early fall instead....

A Local Creek