Disclaimer: there are a few links to Amazon listings in this post. These are not affiliate links; I get nothing from these aside from the satisfaction of knowing that I might have helped someone get into miniatures themselves.
Project Overview
I get asked often how I got into making miniatures in the first place, and there’s really two parts of the answer. The first is simply that I’ve always been interested in arts in pretty much all forms starting when I was literally still in diapers, and I was fortunate enough to have multiple adults in my life who encouraged that creative instinct. I went to art camps, I started theater and music in elementary school, I was taught sewing and textile arts, and the only gift I received more than art supplies was books (and sometimes those books were about art). When I started high school and had the chance to get into the technical side of theater, I joined the props department and got to spend my after school hours repairing teacups that were broken during Pirates of Penzance and figuring out how to make hearts that could be ripped out of a zombies body, burst in Horatio’s hand, and have the blood wash out of everyone’s costumes for the matinee the next day during Hamlet (what, you don’t remember the epic zombie battle scene at the end, where Hamlet becomes a zombie and Horatio has to kill him again?). My first trip through college, I majored in theater focusing on, you guessed it, props.
But I don’t do theater anymore, and I haven’t in about 7 years - which brings me to part two of this origin story, and that’s what we’re focusing on today. For my 27th birthday, wanting to encourage me to get back into more of the creative pursuits I’d started to dip my toes in again, my boyfriend got me a miniature kit: and so began a new obsession.
Process
Greenhouse Kit
That first kit was one that has multiple sellers offering it on Amazon, Cathy’s Greenhouse. I don’t know for sure which brand’s repacking of that kit the one I made was, but Robotime’s kits tend to be pretty good quality in my experience. I spent my birthday in our spare bedroom (what would eventually become our craft room) blissfully watching X-Files (my crafting go-to) and finding a spectacular new joy in making the miniature door at the top of this post. Two weeks later, Covid-19 hit, and I kind of got wrapped up in that, and the kit got set aside for multiple months.
Then, in the fall of 2020, desperate for things to keep myself entertained with as the “over by Easter” pandemic seemed like it would last through the end of the year at least, I pulled the kit back out and spent another weekend watching more X-Files (listen, there’s a lot of that series to get through) and crafting, and finished up Cathy’s delightful little greenhouse in two days. When I needed a break at one point, I stopped by Michael’s and picked up a couple of bits that seemed like they fit, and gave myself the freedom to make a few tweaks to the original design to really make the greenhouse mine (sorry folks, the raccoon is not part of the original kit).
Bakery Kit
After finishing the greenhouse, I realized that I was hooked on crafts again, and dove back in head first. I spent the next couple of months dabbling in other types of crafts, like painting mini figures and embroidery/cross-stitch, but I kept finding myself looking through other miniature kits. So I finally gave in and bought another one, this time an adorable French-style bakery. Making and decorating the tiny pastries gave me a particularly delightful feeling, and tiny food in general is still something I’m quite fond of. I have to admit that this isn’t my favorite kit that I’ve done in retrospect, but it solidified one thing: I was into making miniatures. Like, really into it. Like, my Amazon wishlist was starting to fill up with miniature related things.
Camper Kit
One could argue that the bakery kit was really the end of the origin, but I think of this camper kit as the true Happily Ever After to this miniature fairy tale because this was the project where I decided I wanted to share my crafting in a new way. I had started watching Twitch streams around the time that I had started working on the bakery, and had been enjoying sharing process photos with the communities I found myself connecting with. And when I was starting on the camper kit, I also stumbled upon the Makers & Crafting category on Twitch. Something clicked, and I realized I wanted to livestream crafting. It was something that was already being done, so I knew that there was interest in it, but it wasn’t an over-crowded scene by any means - and even if it was, I probably still would have given it a shot, because connecting with people over art was astoundingly wonderful for me. While working on the camper, I continued finding ways to build on the kit’s design to make it my own - and I also started prepping to start streaming. This wasn’t a project that I did on stream (that started with the first season in my seasonal tins series), but I did record myself making a lot of it while I figured out camera angles, microphones, and how to use OBS (my chat will tell you that I still don’t actually have these things figured out, and they’re mostly correct, but dangit do I try).
And… that’s it! The rest is history (I mean, the entire post has been history, but that’s how the saying goes). In June 2021, I began livestreaming, and I’ve been streaming crafting every Saturday afternoon since. The types of crafts vary from time to time, but I always end up coming back to miniatures. There’s just something about creating tiny worlds that makes me feel like I’m home.