The above photo is of the real-life Pasticceria Penso in Trieste. My goal was to recreate the awning for the dollhouse shop, but with two of them, one for each window.
I first trimmed some green fabric to size, sealing the edges with Fray Check. I find it easiest to trim close to, but not precisely, the final size before applying the Fray Check. This way, when I do the final trim, less Fray Check shows at the edges, giving it a neater appearance. I made the scalloped edge using a pair of pinking shears.
The next step was to make a stencil using our Cricut cutting machine. Just like I did for the hanging sign, I pulled the lettering directly from a photo of the bakery, using Photoshop to create two images, one for the word “Penso” and one for “Pasticceria.” The part that reads “dal 1918” was too small to work with, so I left that out. Otherwise, my plan was to match the placement of the words, with “Penso” on the far left and “Pasticceria” to the right.
For the stencil itself, I used Cricut brand stencil vinyl, but as I had read in some online reviews, it was fairly tricky to work with. The minuscule specks of vinyl that comprised the negative space in letters like “o” and “e” were difficult enough to keep from peeling off the backing while “weeding” (the term used for removing the parts of the vinyl you’re not using), but they really did NOT want to adhere to the fabric. I had to peel them individually off the transfer paper with tweezers and place them on the fabric one at a time. It took me over an hour of painstaking work to get them all situated correctly. (It took so long in part because I lost a couple dots in the process, but luckily I had saved all my failed stencils, the rejects in my attempt to get a perfect result, and was able to salvage the missing dots from those.)
Once I had the stencils in place, I used a mixture of white acrylic paint and fabric painting medium to fill in the letters.
To support the fabric, I bought a pair of extendable brass dollhouse curtain rods. They came with eye screws for attachments, and these became the primary consideration in my design. I needed something to attach the screw to but that would also be strong enough to serve as a bracket. I still had the 1/8″ square plastic tube that I had used for the hanging sign, and the eye screws just happened to fit perfectly into it. The tube wasn’t stable enough as a bracket by itself, so I bent some 1/32″ x 1/8″ brass flat bar into “L” shapes and glued the lengths of plastic tube along the bottom.
Since the plastic tubes were white, the brackets needed to be painted. I went with black, seeing as that would match the hanging sign and give the impression of wrought iron. I also painted the ends of the curtain rods.
Next, I sewed the fabric to the curtain rods. I had to cut out a small bit of fabric on each side so that it would fit neatly around the eye screws.
After inserting the eye screws into the plastic tube on the bracket, the awnings were ready to mount. One final element I needed was a strip of wood to hold the top of the fabric in place where it attached to the building. I used a 1/4″ x 1/16″ strip of balsa wrapped in the green fabric. I glued the fabric on, which left some stains as you can see in the picture, but these will be almost entirely hidden underneath the awnings.
The awnings were the final element I needed to complete on Pasticceria Penso. The bakery is now ready to be filled with pastries!
