With the bottles finished, it’s time to breathe some life into this bar! (And by “life” I mean “alcohol,” obviously.) I hate the permanence of gluing down accessories, but with this many small pieces it’s a necessity. I started by arranging a shelf’s length of bottles to get them in an order I wanted, and then glued them one by one to the shelf.

Next I did the glasses. All of these glasses are plastic — not as realistic looking as glass, but a lot less expensive and less fragile. The espresso maker is from Elf Miniatures.

Time to glue in the beer taps. These came from Dollshouse Emporium. They’re resin with no moving parts. The gap underneath the handles bugged me… how would these actually work to pour beer?

I made a piece to cover up the gap under the handles, and added half scale faucets as taps.

Better! But the drain area is too small.

I made a new drain by gluing window screen mesh onto a piece of scrapbook paper.

I painted it black and glued it down to the bar.

I added medallions to the fronts of the handles, made from pictures I found online.

Another mesh draining mat is under the optics.

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Inspired by the Henchmen Pub, I decided to add optics to my bar. I kept seeing these for sale from UK miniature shops and had to look up the word “optic” because I hadn’t heard it before. They’re dispensers that hold a bottle upside-down and pour a measured amount of liquor. They seem to be more common the UK than the US.

Many years ago, when I first got the idea to make a bar, I bought a batch of cheap bottles on eBay (probably from China) that were not very well scaled. I cut these down to use in the optics.

After cutting off the cap, the bottle *almost* fits.

I then cut off a small slice of the bottom and sanded so it’s a good fit. The optics are made out of pewter and can be bent slightly, but I didn’t want to bend too much and risk breaking them. I colored in some parts with black Sharpie to make them look less like raw metal and more like the pictures I’d seen online. I also replaced the labels with ones I printed.

My shelves are too thin and flimsy for the optics to hang off of them. Instead I built a box to sit under the shelf. This is the same width as the wine rack that goes under the bar, and they will both be centered in the space.

I drilled these holes with the power drill… not very well.

Here’s how they look. It bothered me that the two optics on the right sit slightly higher than the two on the left, due to my messy holes. Rather than prepare a new piece of wood, I forged ahead, thinking I could fix it somehow. (Why do something over when you can deal with it later?!)

After staining the front piece, I glued scraps of wood to the back for the side pieces of the box to attach to. (As you can see from the guide line, the two high holes are actually in the right place, it’s the other two that came out a hair too low.)

Here’s how the assembled box looks, with the wine rack below it.

So remember when I said I didn’t want to bend the pewter too much or it would break? Trying to make an optic sit a little lower in the highest hole, I *gently* tried to tilt the part that sticks into the hole and… yeah.

I tried gluing the broken optic directly to the box, but it didn’t hold. I’d ordered the optics from a site in the UK and wasn’t willing to spend a bunch of money to ship a replacement, so I planned to make a new box that only held three. Then I got the idea to stick eyelets into the holes — not only does it make them look neater, but it gives me a new way to hang up the broken optic.

I’m still kind of amazed this worked. Using super glue and tacky glue, I managed to glue the tiny nub left behind on the back into the eyelet hole.

The gin bottle lost its red stripe in the process, but at least it doesn’t have to be trashed! Because I was too lazy to fix my mistake with the holes, the four optics are not exactly lined up, but everything’s so busy, it’s okay. Ironically they’re too low to actually put a glass underneath, but I was constrained by the height of the shelf.

I’ve also continued to make bottles. After my first batch, I wanted more variety and came up with some new ideas for making Christmas light bottles.

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