Little Acorn Nursery

Hi again!

First of all, I would like to wish everyone reading this a very Happy New Year! I hope that yours was wonderful and that everything in 2022 happens in your favor. I personally had a quiet but peaceful New Year with my close family (my parents and sister).

The first Creative Challenge of this year is New Beginnings, and that is actually quite relevant in my real life; for a little while now my family and I have been thinking of moving; we have been living in my grandmother's house since she passed away two years ago trying to settle in and settle down. Two years have gone by and we're ready to let go. The house is a little small and just doesn't feel like ours so moving is in our best interests.

I started working on my New Beginnings project on January second and third, and was finished by the fourth. Unfortunately my talent for procrastination has lead me to near the end of the month and so, having most of the pictures ready, I decided it's now or never and wrote this post.

Thanks for listening to my long-ish intro (haha) and I hope you enjoy the read.

~

It has been a few months that I have been staring at the Li'l Woodzeez Nursery sitting lonely on my shelf with nothing better to do. I must admit, I am not particularly fond of the quality or colors of the Li'l Woodzeez toy franchise, but this Nursery is one of the better ones in my opinion and is actually very cute, given that I don't own another nursery from SF.

For the New Beginnings challenge, I dreamt big and decided to add a second floor to the Nursery, since I thought it was just too small to decorate and use with creativity. I am not an expert at foam board buildings like Mimi from Mimi's Little Sylvanian Town or Sylvanako... but I gave it a try and honestly, I think it turned out pretty swell.

I came up with a detailed plan for the building process, and decided to cut the floor and walls before gluing them together, and it would also involve a lot of painting and glossing. My dad helped me with the cutting part; being pretty much good at everything lol, he managed to cut it straighter and cleaner than I would have hehehe.

Once I had the floor cut, I examined the tiled pattern on the first floor and decided to use a dull blade from my paper-cutting machine to indent the second floor. I admit I went a little overboard with this step, but it certainly paid off later.

Before I glued the floor on top of the roofless building, I realized that I was going to face some problems with the plastic tree that is attached to the nursery. I leveled the walls by measuring, cutting, panting, placing and finally gluing three pieces of thin balsa wood on top so they would be the same height as the tree. This was a pretty quick process, but an important one.

Next, I glued on the floor. Funny story, my dad and I bought the wrong foam board and realized it was too hard to paint over... so white floor it was! Thankfully, we returned to the dollar store for the walls and bought the real foam board--not a dry erase one!

I painted and added some dark brown siding to tie the whole thing together, and I find it really helped for the exterior look of the building.

Once that was done, I moved on to the walls (this was the next day). I had already decided how many windows I wanted (three--one big one and two smaller ones) and so my dad cut them for me :)

When they were all cut, I tested painting them and it worked fine so I carried on and painted them all. After they were dry, I glossed them with Modge-Podge, but I was feeling a little lazy so I only glossed the outside lol

I glued the first wall on and used a wooden block to prop it up so it would dry straight (still can't believe it only took me three days!!!)

And finally, all the walls were finished and glued, one after the other. I cut and painted the window frames for each window, and even added the finishing touch, a frame around each entire wall, to really make a statement that these two building were one.

And so it was done!!!

FRONT

BACK (decorated)

Mrs. Sweetpea runs the new and renovated Little Acorn Nursery. All the children love it there!

Over all, I'm so proud at how this turned out. Thanks for inspiring me to try my best with all my projects and I hope this inspires you all in turn!!!

Have a great week,

Emilie