Let There Be Light! And... Also TOYS!

OK what's Christmas, even in a small Midwestern town, without at least one store selling toys for the holiday? Not right, that's what. So let's make a toy store.

I showed you this building before, with sticky-tacky-crazy snow that adheres to buildings out here in the prairie (I don't have to explain that to people from the upper Midwest, you foreigners will just have to trust me). This thing is like 3" x 2 1/2".

The first trick is to get the windows frosted. A fact of life. The snow that you see on the outside of this building is going to crumble off over time and have to be renewed. The thought of scrunching down and also treating the window frost as well is just way too much, so we need a permanent effect. What you see below is simple Scotch tape, the unclear kind, just set across the windows from the INSIDE that has only been pushed down in spots which leaves bubbles in the tape that look like... you know... frost.

There's no way to get around it. If I want to have a display seen through the windows I have to miniaturize real life to some degree. This means making a shelf for the toys to be on in the windows. A small sliver of balsa wood keeps it light and functional. Now you may notice in this picture that another, larger bit of balsa has been added just above the windows, wall-to-wall. What's that you say? That's the ceiling of the first floor. A ceiling. What did you expect?

OK before you start wondering if I've completely gone off the deep end - think about it. If I light this building from the inside and DON'T do that the whole building - all the windows on every floor and even the side-entrance doors - is going to light up. I don't know about you, but I've never seen a second story that lit up when the light went on downstairs. So I need to separate the floors. Otherwise it just looks like somebody just stuck a random light up a model. That would be inexcusable! You'll see better later.

Now, it's possible to buy a whole bunch of small trinkets (just look at the junkyard) and fill up the space with scale-size toys and such; but the budget isn't totally limitless and - besides - I need to further defuse the inside light. So I go to the trusty interwebs and download little Christmas toy gifs, shrink them down and print them out.

I'm using an extra piece of balsa in this picture to demonstrate what happens next, but after cutting out the re-sized toy gif I edge-glue it to the balsa shelf I made inside.

And with the printed side facing the window, the rest of the paper acting as sort of a screen so you can't completely see inside the store, a wreath set inside the door (also a printed gif), and the top floor obviously separated from the first, a small "squint test" gives the perfect illusion of a toy store at night during the Christmas season.

Plus an unintended benefit is that - somewhere - there's a crack in the balsa, making the turret look like there's a tiny night-light in there... which is pretty damn cool.

So, what do you want for Christmas this year?

Do you see the part of the building under the windows sort of "glowing"? Yeah no building does that. I don't have a picture of it but after the windows dried I painted the inside of those areas black to stop the glowing. I think this piece is pretty much ready except for some anal things that I'm sure will happen to it before Thanksgiving. Not that I'm anal but... you know.