For this months installment, I would love to introduce you to Casey (Caseymini). She has been a member of the Greenleaf Forum since February 15, 2008. Everyone enjoys reading what Casey has to say and she has immense talent in the miniature arena. Many of us here in Greenleaf love to read up on what she is doing in her blog, Casey`s Minis.

 Casey has been a miniaturist since the early 1980s. She was an art major in college. She self taught herself all types of needlework and subsequently taught classes in shops. She has been designing in different fields for a long time so designing her own miniatures just came naturally. Her work has been published in the Nutshell News and other miniature magazines. Casey has taught classes in miniatures and worked for a few years restoring antique miniatures for Pat Arnell of the Mini Time Machine Museum in Tucson. Casey did this until Pat literally ran out of room for more antique houses. Pat just finished building a new 15 thousand square foot miniature museum. I would love to see that!  The oldest dollhouse Casey has ever worked on was a Georgian style English Baby house from 1775. It was in horrible shape and it took the longest to finish.  English nannies used to hand children a can of paint, a brush, and tell them to paint the dollhouse to keep them amused.  The 1775 dollhouse had eight layers of paint that had to be removed, one layer at a time. It is reputed to be the oldest English baby house in the US. Casey is very proud of that house.

  Casey had a couple miniature houses when she was a child. She remembers the first one was put together from a kit made of cardboard. It did not last long. Then she had one of the tin printed ones. It came with plastic furniture. She was always building houses out of orange crates in the back yard. Kleenex boxes made good beds.  Casey loves all aspects of working on a dollhouse. She says she has the attention span of a six year old and she has given herself permission to try anything that catches her interest. This can happen every twenty minutes or so, if she lets it. Start to finish, she loves it all. Except maybe the shingles. She says she never met anyone that told her that they loved to shingle a dollhouse. I have not either Casey.

  Casey`s first build was a small house for her daughter`s 4th Christmas in 1979. She was gung ho! She had no idea what she was doing, but she knew building from being around her Dad. She put it together and made balsa wood furniture for it. It did not take long to see that it would have been better to use harder wood if she wanted things to last. By the time Casey finished her house, she was planning on a house of her own. The rest is history.

 Casey says she is living her miniature dream. She gets to work on miniatures almost every day and she gets to share them with others on her blog. She shares the blog with a five and half inch witch named Tessie (pictured in this article title). The two of them have been known to get into a pile of mini trouble from time to time.  Casey does not do much planning ahead when it comes to her projects. She does have a Glencroft in the works that is called Clockwork Cottage. She says she should finish that but when something else catches her fancy, she can go off on a mini tangent. In the future, Casey would love to learn how to do miniature glass blowing.

 If she had to decide on her favorite dollhouses she would have to choose her built from scratch "Once upon a Time" castle that contains eleven different fairy tales. It is the largest one and took the most work to complete. It was featured in the Nutshell News in 1989. She is also partial to the Magnolia that she is working on now and the Harrison that is trapped in the box under her bed.

Casey has some wonderful advice for any person that would love to join our group of happy miniaturists. Just keep at it. The more you do, the better you get at what you are doing. If you see something you would like to try, jump right in and do it. Sometimes it doesn't work out and you can say to yourself "I tried it and was not for me."

Casey would also like to thank Greenleaf for supporting all of us in our work and bringing us all together.

You can visit Casey`s gallery of pictures here
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For participating in the Member of the Month, Casey will receive a $25 gift certificate to the Greenleaf Store.

Happy New Year to all!

Heidi