This house was made over a period from August to December 2009. It was built in two cheap shelving units joined together and has five rooms over three levels; an enterance hall, kitchen, lounge, bedroom and a seance room. At the very top of the house is the bedroom, which is my personal favourite of the house. This is thanks to the furniture which was all modified in some way from it's original form. The house was intended to be Victorian Gothic in feel, but it is really only in this room that the feeling of gothic comes accross thanks to the three pointed arches of the bed and the black gloss furniture.
Downstairs from the bedroom is the lounge with a mildly clashing green and pink colour scheme. The element of pink came curtesy of the very expensive lounge suite which I decided was too difficult to recover. The best feature of the room has to be the bookshelf on the side wall whereupon a couple of naughty cats are causing trouble!
Dividing this room from it's neighbour is a set of heavy velvet drapes. These represent my first attempt at making properly pleated curtains. They were a necessity in this house to prevent the eye-smarting colours of the two adjacent rooms from meeting. Next door to the lounge is the seance room where the resident clairvoyant conducts her business. (Again, another reason the curtains were needed for where else could the summoned "spirit" hide while waiting?) The main focus of the room is the hexagonal seance table and let me just say that drawing a hexagon with even sides is harder than you might first think.
Beneath the Seance room is the enterance hall with a matching pair of curved staircases. I'm really pleased with these stairs as they were entirely handmade from balsa wood and tissue paper. Sadly, I didn't have the same success fabricating curved handrails, which rather spoils the whole room.
Finally, next to the enterance hall is the kitchen. The main table and the dresser were both made from scratch, as was much of the foodstuffs and most of the utencils on display.Spread throughout the rooms are a number of dolls, with all but the lone male of the house dressed by hand. I really got creative with the ladies' dresses in this house, or should that be "really went over the top"? In any event, some of the clothes in this house are among the best I've ever made.
This was one of those projects that seemed like a good idea in the begining. From the begining however, things went wrong and by the end I was really glad to be done with it. Consequently, the whole house has any number of flaws and is nothing like it was originally intended to be. There are any number of items missing from the house such as (fake) front doors in the enterance hall (making it an enterance hall without an enterance), frames and curtains around all the windows and no form of lighting in some rooms.At some point in the future, the flaws in this house mean it will either be renovated and redecorated to correct some of the problems, or simply stripped out and re-done as something completely different.
