Working on Sea Breeze has suddenly become a humbling experience. Everything looks nice - I'm not denying that. But it felt like more went wrong this time around than with any other kit I've made to date.
Photo 2 features a couple points of pride, but also represents a lot of crafting time.
The wire work took an especially long time. I fiddled with one of the wires for "wind chimes" for so long, the casing came off the end. I painted the stripped part and it looked awful. At that point I was getting fed up, since I'd spent quite a lot of time on the wire work for this single sign, so I just trimmed that piece off. I have no complaints about the result. Very cute.
The infamous shutters were easy in comparison, but also time-consuming. I dropped one on the floor, which caused a brief moment of panic, but found it right away.
Photo 3: this is the first time I've assembled a kit with the main piece lying down at times.
Photo 4: I've been making a lot of use of glossy Mod Podge. I straightened out this piece later, not to worry.
Photo 5: I'm not sure why I spent so much effort on those little coffee bags when you can't see a dang thing in that shop.
The hanging beads also caused no real difficulty. I didn't take a photo of how I made them, so here's a description.
I put a tiny little dot of Aleene's in the bottom of an electrical tape case, used the tiny point of my quilling tool to moosh the end of the thread into it, then threaded the seed bead onto the thread and mooshed it into the glue as well. Repeat four more times. Once the glue dried, I gently scraped the thread and bead off with a plastic razor blade. I will use this technique on the other bead strands later on.
This post is getting long, so I won't go into depth with everything that went frustratingly slowly, that didn't come together as well as I'd hoped, or that I straight-up goofed up. There's plenty of that represented in photo 1, even if you can't see it.
The worst is this white wooden piece in photo 6, that is sticking out of the front of the kit. I left about a mm between the shop in the back and the mirror, and that came back to bite me here. This will objectively cause issues when it is time to put the front piece on.
If you have any thoughts about a tool that could trim this down, please help 🙏
I haven't gotten far with the right side, but I was happy about how the little black lanterns turned out. I used a black acrylic brush marker to paint the paper triangles and create a consistent Iook.