Home & Garden: Make Your Own Abandoned Car Garden
Part 3: Making the Goodies
Tanya A. Brown

In the previous two parts of this project, we showed you how to decorate a pot and create a miniature junker. In this part, we'll create or purchase some of the goodies which bring life to the scene and finish arranging the garden. You may find these tips helpful for decorating your own scenes even if you choose not to make the garden.

• Making the pink flamingo
• Making the drink cans
• Making salacious reading material
• Where to buy miniatures
• Final scene arrangement and maintenance

Materials

• Pink polymer clay (Fimo, Sculpey, Cernit, etc.), plus black, green, or brown polymer clay to match your scene
• toothpicks
• black paint
• glue (optional)
• wire
• Tools for smoothing the clay; if you don't have any, use disposable plastic eating utensils

• Cut a piece of wire to about the length of a toothpick.
• Make four small balls of clay. One should be about half the size of a dime (approx. 9 mm), with the others correspondingly smaller, as shown in the picture at left.

Bend wire into a smooth S shape. This will become the foundation for the flamingo's neck.

Roll the largest piece of clay, tapering it to make the flamingo's body.

Rough assemble the flamingo by poking one end of the S-shaped wire into the body, and the other end into the head. Poke in the toothpick legs.

For ease in handling, you may wish to do an initial baking of the flamingo at this point, rather than waiting until the neck is wrapped. Read the instructions on the clay wrapper for time and temperature guidelines.

Wrap the flattened "snake" around the wire neck. (Doesn't it remind you of a pair of leg warmers?)

Smooth out the neck, carefully blending in around the body and head. Bake, following the directions on the polymer clay wrapper.

After baking, if the toothpicks are loose, glue them into the body. Take another glob of clay and make a base for the flamingo. Bake again.

If your flamingo has been hitting the bottle and is a drunken sort, you can paint in black Xs for his eyes.

Touch up the toothpick legs with pink (mix red & white if you don't have any pink) to match body.

You're done!

Materials

• 1/8" diameter dowel (Assuming a 1/25 scale vehicle, and drink cans that would be about 3" wide in real life.)
• aluminum foil
• epoxy or glue
• silver paint
• various paint colors
• X-acto or craft knife

Saw off a length of dowel. (It's thin enough you can probably cut it with your craft knife, if careful.)

Apply epoxy to one side of a piece of foil, then roll it around the dowel. Let it sit until dry.

Making salacious reading materials
(AKA "girlie magazines")

What could be tackier than a few miniature girlie magazines tossed in the back seat of your junker?

Very satisfactory "magazines" can be made by printing or Xeroxing vastly reduced copies of actual magazine covers and folding them in half. (No doubt this violates all kinds of copyright laws, so don't do this as a business pursuit.)

Sources on the web:
You can find magazine covers for such standbys as Playboy at various websites. Sample URLs aren't listed here since the addresses are subject to frequent change, no doubt inspired by letters from the legal counsels of various magazines. (We'd also like to avoid some four year old's wandering through our pages and onto a site featuring clinically detailed photos which some hapless parent will no doubt get stuck explaining. Thus far, most of our warped content at least requires the ability to read and the patience to wade through some pretty dense paragraphs.)

Once you find an unsuitable image, you can save it by clicking on it - PC users, use your righthand mouse button. Hold the mouse button down until a popup menu appears, then drag down to an option such as "download picture to disk" or "save target". The image can then be opened with your favorite image editing software or with your web browser.

You'll have to experiment with the printing magnification, perhaps through a trial-and-error process, but if your car model is 1/25 scale, aim for a final size of approximately 1/2" high.

Using real magazines:
Don't worry if you don't have any salacious magazines on hand; see my list of tips below.

If you're brave, you can take a real magazine into a copy store and make a color Xerox of its cover. Again, aim for a final size of approximately 1/2" high. Unfortunately, such copies are not cheap, and a lot of paper will be wasted.

You can also try photographing the covers. Lay out several at a time on the floor, opening them in order to expose both front and back covers, then stand on a stable chair or stepladder to photograph a batch of them. Or lean them against a wall and photograph them from across the room. Try taking photos at several distances in order to get different magnifications; hopefully one of them will be close to what you need. Once the prints are developed, carefully cut out each cover and fold it in half to make your magazine.

If you have a scanner and image editing software such as Photoshop, you can scan the covers and shrink them digitally. Several covers can be laid out in one file, thus conserving paper when printing. Some beautiful results can be obtained this way.

Where to find (un)suitable magazines:

• If you have a son or stepson, check under his mattress, behind his dresser, or see if magazines have been taped to the underside of individual drawers. (Take note of where you found them, and be careful to return them to exactly the same place so as to not embarrass him.)
• If you're a married female, look on your husband's side of the closet, either on the back of difficult-to-reach shelves, or down in the dark recesses at the lower back. Again, be careful to replace the magazines once you are done. (However, if you'd like to play a cruel prank on him, remove one of the covers, staple it over the contents of a news magazine, and replace it in the pile.)
• Check cupboards in the garage.
• Ask a male friend to obtain or loan you copies - but be very careful, as this could be misinterpreted as soliciting intimate attentions.
• If all else fails, visit a liquor store outside your neighborhood and purchase your own. If idea intimidates you, you can don a wig and sunglasses.

Where to buy miniatures

You can, of course, simply purchase miniatures - there's no law that says that you have to make everything. Our whiskey bottle, at left, was one of our purchases. Unfortunately, it was bought about 20 years ago, so there's no telling where to find ones exactly like it.

Magazines such as Dollhouse Miniatures list stores which sell miniatures, or you may find a store near you by looking in the phone book.

Additionally, a search on Yahoo will turn up many suppliers such as Hobby Builders Supply, which also does business by mail order. Although Hobby Builders doesn't offer a whiskey bottle, they do have green long necked beer bottle and a set of six filled wine bottles.

Finishing your garden

Now that you've prepared the pot and made your vehicle and accenting goodies, you can finally finish this project and move on with your life! Simply pose the vehicle in the pot, and toss in the accents as desired.

Don't worry too much about getting your model wet when you water your plants; our car looks just as good as it ever did - which is to say, not very! And if some of the plants die, so much the better! That'll just make your scene more realistic.

Part 1: decorating the pot | Part 2: making the junker