I'm back

And yes, I am properly ashamed of myself.

I know that there are a great many people who swear by Greenleaf dollhouses but I am absolutely not one of them.  Give me a Houseworks or Real Good Toys house any day of the week but please, please keep the Greenleaf stuff away.

And then I bought the Sugarplum Cottage.

It was on sale on my club's sales table for only 5 dollars, and it was already mostly-constructed.  I figured that my friend's kids would like it, so I bought it (I later discovered that it was for sale because the previous owner hated it even more than I do.  In fact, she offered to refund my $5 if I agreed to come over and watch her set fire to it).

But I soldiered on… kind of.  I told myself that I would not be permitted to work on anything else until this thing was finished and shipped off.  This backfired severely.  See, I did stick to my resolve and quit working on my other projects, but it turns out that not working on anything else did not, in fact, motivate me to work on the cottage.  Ultimately, the only thing that worked was telling myself that I wasn't allowed to go to N.A.M.E. Day unless I finished the cottage.

I finished the cottage the night before N.A.M.E. Day.  Here it is:

Yeah, plastic roof.  I would probably feel bad about that if the adorable Tudor trim wasn't made out of cardboard.  I made up for it by making cushions for the settles, a mattress and linens for the bed, and interior window trim.  The butterflies are scrapbook embellishments and the wallpaper on both floors are scrapbook paper (I don't know why the 2nd-floor paper photographed so peach-y; I assure you, it's pink).

So onto stuff I actually want to work on!  As it turns out, though, I will not be returning to the MiniTown Loft just yet.  That is because Miniatures.com had an insane sale ($20!) on these little cuties:

A few of my mini-obsessed friends and I are having a kit-building party this weekend.

The loft will not die, but I intend to build the vast majority of what's going in it by hand... and, well, my procrastinating over the Sugarplum has put me severely behind schedule.  I will not have time to execute my plans for the loft before the next show, but I will have plenty of time to do what I want to do with the little charmer above.

And none of it involves tab-and-slot furniture punched out of a sheet of wafer-thin plywood. ;)