Cemetery

I have a family that is pretty funny most of the time.  For my 50th birthday they came up with a Snow Village Halloween tombstone with a buzzard sitting on top of it.  You could personalize it with any of the typical "over the hill" ages.  Well, far be it from me to leave a piece unused, even if it is an insult! In past years I made a cemetery with just the one tombstone.  This year I decided we needed more.  So I bought some balsa wood, and using my handy x-acto knife cut out some different tombstone shapes that I found on the internet.  I painted them gray, then used some of that textured snow on the tops.  I wrote the names of some departed family members on them, including the evil genious beagle we lost last year.  

You may think I am kidding about the evil genious part, but I am really not.  Grover was a rescue dog we got when he was about 3 years old.  He was the sweetest dog in the world unless you got on his bad side.  When you were doing the dishes and loading the dishwasher, he would steal utensils, plastics, and even ceramic plates and cart them off to enjoy in private. Any spoon that was slightly chewed was said to be "Groverized".  If he wanted something off the counter he would try to push something over so he could jump up on it to get closer to the food.  When my daughter brought home a new puppy to live with us, Grover acted pretty cool about the whole thing.  That is until my daughter watched them by one of the holes between our yard and the next door neighbors.  We had put a brick in the hole to keep Grover from making the hole any bigger.  Well, as she watched, Grover moved the brick out of the way, shoved Bear through the hole and started moving the brick back.  They did eventually become best friends, but on Grover's terms.  

Anyway, here is the picture of the cemetery.  

Lighthouse

One of the things I love most about my Snow Village display is my lighthouse.  I wanted to be able to display it on a cliff, rising up from the ocean, but I wasn't sure how to accomplish that.  I found a gray plastic four cornered bowl at the dollar store.  I glued a bunch of small rocks to two sides of the bowl and then also applied some moss that I bought in the model train department. I also broke up some twigs and tossed them randomly among the rocks to make it look like driftwood. 

I really wanted something that would look like water, but wasn't real sure how to get there.  I finally took some clear plastic wrap and painted long streaks of 3 different colors of blue and green with glass paint.  I frequently mixed some of the colors.  After it dried, I scrunched it up to form "waves" and wrapped it around the base if the cliff.

  

Airport

I forgot to mention in the last post that I use a strange method of keeping the backdrop fabric from falling off before Christmas.  If you have ever tried to tape fabric to a wall, you will know that the weight of the fabric will pull it away from the tape at the top.  I have no idea where I came up with this, but here's what I do.  I take some pretty substantial string and staple it to the top of the fabric.  I put a staple about every 3 - 4 inches.  For some reason this seems to stick to the tape better.  It's NOT foolproof.  There are always one or two that seem to give me problems.  I have two right now that are escaping the tape.  I would have liked to fix them before doing these posts, but I had shoulder surgery last week and I don't currently have two hands available.  It will just have to wait until I get out of this sling.  

My village is different every time I set it up.  There are some things, like the airport,  that are pretty consistent, but there are always differences.  I use some styrofoam to get to different levels, but I also like to use bowls and plastic containers from the Dollar store.  They can nest and hold other small items so they take less room to store than big blocks of styrofoam.  I use twinkle blanket as my base and I tear off pieces to use as snowdrifts, and to cover wires, etc.  

Since I have already mentioned the airport I'll talk about it first.  My son has always loved planes, so it was not surprising that I would end up with the red and the blue ones.  Once you have two, you may as well get the third one!  Then of course I had to have a runway.  I got two pieces of wood and painted the tops of them with gray stone paint.  I used a small set of white lights (35) and used clips with double sided tape to line the runway.  My son informed me that runway lights are blue.  I could not find a small set of blue lights with white wires.  I did, however, find blue covers for my white lights at Hobby Lobby, so I could make my white set blue.  I also got blackout caps which you can use to cover lights that you don't need.  Sadly, I can't find the caps anymore. 
 

 

I wanted to have a cool moon, so I took two napkin rings and taped them together, then fastened a single light inside.  I positioned the napkin rings against the backdrop fabric so that I get a nice round moon.  I always hang one of the planes.  This is when the slatted shelves come in handy!

Sorry, this is one of the backdrops that is falling, but you can still see the moon.   

 

Structure

As our collections grew we kept trying to come up with better ways to display them in limited space. My mom had her husband build her a white bookshelf for her display.  The problem is that most shelves are too shallow to hold much more than just the buildings and we have LOT of accessories. 

So here is my solution.  I bought some shelves from a hardware chain that are intended for garages.  They are 36" wide and 24" deep.  The only problem with them is that they don't have solid shelves, so I have to put stiff cardboard or plastic on each shelf. 


I now have 2 of these.  I am only 5'2" so I could never see what was on the top shelf, so I took the top shelf off and created a 3rd set.  This way everyone can see displays on the top shelf.  I had to create a bottom shelf using Styrofoam under the two shelves I took off the tops.  With this arrangement I now have 66 square feet to work with.

 

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Now part of my problem is where I wanted to set them up.  I have a mirrored wall in my dining room, and when I set up on that wall, you can see the reflection of all the ugly stuff behind it.  So I went to a craft store and bought some midnight blue fabric that has a variegated pattern on it.  It looks kind of like a night sky.  Fortunately, this is fabric they have all the time, so as my village expanded, I could get more.   This fabric also hides all the cords running down from the top shelves.  On some of the backdrops I painted snow flurries and on some I painted stars with glitter paint.  I left most of them blank. 

How I Got started

My love of Christmas villages started when I would help decorate my Grandma Rosie's house.  She had a set of old small cardboard houses and we would set them up.  It was pretty exciting for the kids because we put them on the wooden valances over the windows, so we got to use a ladder!  There weren't any lights involved since this was the 60's and miniature lights weren't around yet.  I've just recently learned that these were probably called Putz houses.

When I got married I got a set of small ceramic houses, then for Christmas, my husband got me a big ceramic church.  I had no idea at the time that there was anything "collectible" about it. The next year I got an Inn, and the year after that I got an even bigger church.

Flash forward a few years...my mom and I discover that what I have are Department 56 Snow Village pieces!  My mom starts her own collection, and we get serious about tracking down more of them.  We discover that a department store has them every Christmas and puts them on sale half price the day after Christmas. We would stand outside in the cold waiting for the doors to open, then race upstairs to grab as many as we could.  When my kids got a little older they would go with us and since they were faster they would get up there and start making a pile for us to go through.  (Yes we exploited our 8 year old kids!) Many of them didn't have boxes but since we weren't really interested in them as collectibles we didn't care.  Pretty soon I had a bunch of stuff.  I had to stop because I just don't have the space to store it.  



I have all these boxes in a large upstairs closet, and there is just NO MORE ROOM!