Four Projects

 As scary as it may sound, there are now only five weeks left until Christmas.  Normally, I intend to create a Christmas themed scene, but am busy working on other things in the lead up to Christmas and it gets put off for another year.  Not this time around though!  I was lucky enough to find a nicely sized gift box in a local store and have started transforming it into a Christmas-y vignette using (almost) only items I already have on hand.  The wall is papered with gold and brown scrapbooking paper and the floor in green carpet.  The fretwork at the front is a room divider I bought forever ago but never used.  The fireplace came out of my box of miscellanious furniture and was repainted from mahogany to marble while the fire box within is made out of balsa wood, lace and a polymer clay lions head.  Dan is sitting on an armchair made of balsa and covered in red velveteen with a matching footstool (again made of balsa).

Here's how the tree was made:

Step One: carve a cone shape out of oasis foam.

Step Two: cut pine roping into sections about half an inch long and press into the oasis cone.

 If you're a little short on roping, don't go all the way around the tree, just do the front part where it will show.

Step Four: Use the plastic reel from an empty roll of sticky tape (or similar) to make a base by covering it in fabric and press it into the bottom of the tree.

The next step is to decorate the tree, but you'll have to wait until next week to see how I do that!

I had intended to make this scene with items I already had on hand, but decided to lash out and electrify it.  I already have some spare fireplace bulbs so I've ordered a string of lights for the tree and a lamp to go next to the chair.  I figure to hide the elcetrical connections in a big present under the tree.

Coming back to ongoing projects, my bedroom roombox window has been installed.  The window is made of strips of balsa wood glued onto a backdrop that was a free cut out in an old Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine.  The curtains made last week frame the window.

 I'm still re-arranging all the furniture in here.  This is how it looks at the moment.  This arrangement makes room for a fireplace on the back wall and a chaise by the window.  I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it so by next week you might find it's been totally rearranged again.

Tilli's house hasn't been ignored either.  All the rooms now have rugs on the floor.  These were made by printing rug designs on something called "canvas paper".  It's paper that has the look and feel of fabric canvas and is designed to make printed images look like they were painted on canvas.  It's perfect for rugs as it has a woven texture and always lies flat on the floor without curling up.

Both bedrooms have had their fire surrounds installed.  A fan shaped jewllery finding was used to create a fire screen for each room.  I haven't fixed the curtains in Till's bedroom, still building up the courage to tackle that problem.

 Downstairs in the kitchen/dining/lounge room, new furniture has been added.  There are two small coffee tables, one at the end of the couch and one between the two armchairs.  A third large coffee table fills the floor infront of the fireplace.  All the tables are balsa wood tops with plastic chess men for legs.  A set of shelves by the fire was made with pieces of "Tiny Turnings" and yet more balsa.

 To help put the size of Tilli's house in perspective, here's how it looks when Dan pays a visit.

 And when he actually makes it inside:

And now for a surprise.

Last month I dressed a doll to enter in the fantasy dressing competition run by DHMS magazine.  Now that the deadline for competition entries has past, I can finally show you what I created.

I call him the "Dragon Wizard" because of his Chinese influence.  I think he turned out absolutely perfectly even if he comes dead last in the competition.

Now I just have one problem . . . . what do I do with him now?  He's been standing ontop of the CD player in my ipod dock for the past month, dangerously close to where I slosh paint and glue around and sooner or later he'll get splashed.  I need to find someplace suitable (and safe!!) for him.

Whew!  That's it for this post but come back soon as I want to get your opinion about which of two very different projects I should start to work on next!

Curtain Call

This week involved making four sets of curtains with two very different results.  The curtains for the roombox bedroom are quite possibly my best curtains yet.  They are made of damask with silk dupion tails and swag.  The total height of the curtains is about 20cm.  The next step is to make a window for them to frame, then they can be hung on the wall.

 At the same time as making the curtains, I dressed the bed for the room in more of the silk and some pink brocade.  The bed covers are fairly basic with no fancy flounces or frills because I didn't want them to detract from the bed itself.  I am thinking however that I need to add a canopy over the bed of some kind.

Now to move on to curtains of the less sucessful kind.  The curtains for Tilli's bed and bathroom were made from a light green linen and are . . . pretty horrid to be kind to them.  It's not the scale (24th instead of 12th) that is the problem, its the way I did the windows.  The windows and roof line are all angles with no where to really hang curtains from making it really awkward to get the curtains to hang and look right.  Add to that the fact that I either didn't starch them enough or weren't left to dry long enough as all their pleats unpleated themselves while I was struggling to get them in the right spots.

Fortunately Tilli's bed was much more cooperative.  It's fairly basic, just a bed sized slice of foam for the mattress while the headboard is the one that came with the foam house kit.  The base of the mattress was covered with a ruffled trim to create a valance while the bed cover is a lilac cotton covered with a white and silver lace.

The bathroom curtains are just as bad as those in the bedroom.  They're also too long and hang down behind the toliet.  As you can see I'm replacing the so called bath tub that came with this 1/24th scale bathroom set with a larger built in tub.  If you recall the original tub was a tad on the small size.  The frame is balsa wood and foam while the tub itself is airdry clay.  When the clay it dry it'll be trimmed around the top and painted to match the sink and loo.

 Downstairs in the lounge is another set of curtains that rest somewhere between the green and the pink ones in terms of success.  They are a pre-crinkled fabric with a piece of fancy trim used as a pelmet.  Not horrible but not fabulous either.

At the kitchen end of the ground floor, the kitchen has been installed.  The cabinets are simple box shapes covered in thin cream card.  Extra rectangles of card ontop of the fronts make the cupboard doors.  Dashes of gold leadlighting outliner give the impression of hinges while the handles are pieces of gold wire positioned on blobs of outliner.  The countertops are balsa wood.  The oven is balsa wood with wooden bead feet painted silver.  I still need to add a hood over the hotplates. 

You may be wondering where Tilli does her washing up and keeps her refridgerated foods.  Unfortunately, the answer is that she doesn't.  There just isn't room to include a sink and a fridge in this house.  Infact there are lots of details that there just isn't room for which isn't surprising when you consider the house was intended to be a cheap toy.  Next time I do a 1/24th scale house I'll design it from scratch and allow space for everything!

House of Firsts, Room of Seconds

I'm flying along with Tilli's house.  All three floors are assembled and decorated and the exterior cladding is in place.  There are a lot of "firsts" for me with this house; it's my first 1/24th scale house, the first house I've cladded with weatherboards, the first house I've adapted to include dormer windows and believe it or not the first house I've done with a proper bathroom.

The weatherboard cladding is made of thin balsa wood cut in strips about 1cm wide and glued onto the walls so that each strip slightly overlaps the one below it.  In the middle of each side wall is a chimney.  The chimneys are made of solid blocks of balsa wood with cavities carved out to create recessed fireplaces in the rooms.  The thick, solid wood helps to keep the thin foam walls straight and sag free.  The wood was covered in pollyfilla into which a random stone pattern was made with a toothpick and painted stoney grey.

 At the moment, the front of the house does look a little odd, a little unbalanced.  This is because I decided the positions of the windows based on how the furniture was arranged on the inside rather than how it looked outside.  Hopefully once I add a porch/balcony onto the front and make windows and doors to fill the holes it will look better.  The roof has been adapted to include three dormer windows, two in the bedroom and one in the bathroom.

 Inside the house is progressing well too.  Each level was wallpapered before the house was assembled.

 In Tilli's bedroom on the top floor I used a floral fabric as the "wallpaper".  The floor is made of more balsa wood.  A sheet was cut to the size of the floor and then I used a ball pointed stylus to press lines into the balsa to give the impression of separate planks.  Dots drawn with a lead pencil give the impression of nails holding the boards down.

The bathroom next to the bedroom is papered in the same fabric with white wooden panelling on the lower walls.  I bought a "1/24th scale" bathroom suite to go in here.  As you can see in the above photo, it's basic, but adequate although the sink could stand to be a fraction higher so Tilli doesn't have to bend to wash her hands.

The bath tub is a different matter however . . . .

Tilli may be able to clean her feet in that, but to take a bath there's no chance.  I'll have to use some clay to make a built-in bath along the back wall, one Tilli can actually get all of her in at once.

 For the middle floor I bought some sets of Avon furniture that was going cheaply on ebay.  It's a fraction small for 1/24 scale, but then so are the rooms it's going in.  the study is papered with some striped wallpaper that came free with a DHMS magazine years ago while the bedroom walls are covered in more fabric.  The floor in both rooms is covered in a buff carpet.

Between now and Christmas I want to finish Tilli's house and one or two other small projects and organise myself to start my next "big" project over the Christmas break.  The first of those other small projects is a roombox bedroom to display the very lovely, very pricey bedroom furniture I bought for Preston House, but didn't use.  Would you believe that at the moment no one seems to make a room box in kit form?  The exception here is the Dollshouse Emporium, but theirs is very small and very over-priced.  I had to buy a ready built room box which isn't ideal for two reasons, first the postage cost of a built box will always be higher than a flat packed room and second, the built box will be more likely to be damaged in the post than the flat packed. 

Still, at least now I have a roombox and have started working on it.  It's been patched up where it got banged about in the mail and given a coat of sealer.  I pulled out the fancy chinoserie style wallpaper that I also bought for Preston House and then decided not to use and instantly decided it looked wrong with the furniture - too fussy.  So out came every other paper I have and eventually I settled on a grey-green scrapbooking paper with a pale medallion pattern.  I've always envisioned pink sheets/covers on this bed so the question now is, what colour flooring to use . . . . ?

Buff Carpet. . . . . ?

Cream Carpet . . . . . ?

My favourite, Green Carpet . . . . . ?

Or wooden floorboards, maybe with a fancy rug?

 Hmmm . . . . . What to choose?  I like the green carpet the best, but is it too "butch" for what is otherwise a very feminine room?

Witch Shop - Week Seven

Yikes!  Another new follower to welcome!  Hello and welcome to Agata of http://idolcidiagata.blogspot.com/  When I first took a look at the photos on her blog (its written in Italian, so reading it was out without waiting to get it translated) I thought "Wow, that is some impressive miniature food!" but when I looked at the photos more closely I realised Agata makes 1:1 scale food.  Real food that really looks incredibly good.


At the start of the week I decided that yes, there was room for fireplaces in the two upstairs rooms of the shop.  One of the things that had made me heasitant to add a fireplace in the reading room was the opening roof above the fireplace.  How could I make a chimney that looked good both when the roof was closed and open?  I solved the problem by creating the impression of a chimney without bothering with an actual chimney.  This was done with a sheet of paperclay the width of the fireplace unit and the height of the wall, angled at the top to match the angle of the roof.  I used my herringbone brick impress mould to create the impression of bricks in the clay and when dry, painted them to look like bricks and glued the sheet to the wall.  The fireplace itself was made from corrugated cardboard.  It has a high hearth and two openings in the front, one for a store of firewood and one for the fire itself.  The design was based on my hazy recollection of a Tudor fireplace I think I saw in a dollshouse magazine once.  It is finished off with more clay, another impress mould and brick coloured paints.  Because the fireplace juts out from the wall but the "chimney" doesn't, there is a nice wide ledge ontop of the fireplace to display some heatproof witchy items.   The afternoon tea spread for the withes reading group will have to go on the little table to the side of the fireplace or on the coffee table in the middle of the group of chairs.  I do have an old tea trolley in my box of miscellaneous furniture, but there is no where for it to go.  What ever gave me the idea the rooms in this kit were big and spacious?  I could do with them being at least half as big again!



In the Bedsit I made a simple rectangular fireplace that covers about two thirds of the back wall of the room.  It was made out of thick corrugated cardboard which was then coated with some polyfilla and painted white to resemble rough plasterwork.  The hearth was covered in a thin layer of paperclay on which I used my herringbone brick impress mould.  The back of the fireplace is prebought MDF brickboard. Both this and hearth were painted first in mortar grey, then dry brushed successive layers of brick tones of reds and browns before the lot was covered in "soot" (black paint).  A thin strip of balsa wood accross the top of the opening creates the look of a lintel while some bits of black wire bent into hooks and stuck up the chimney make pot hangers (or do I mean cauldron hangers?).  Now Hetty has somewhere to cook her meals and can keep warm in winter.  There's just one problem in this room though, I can't fit a table in it.  So Hetty can cook over a fire, but doesn't have anywhere to prepare the meal before it goes in the pot, nor anywhere to sit down and eat.  The only solution I hve for this is to make a folding table attached to the wall that takes up no space when not in use, the only problem no one will be able to get in or out of the room when it is in use.  It may not matter anyway as I have just bought a shiny brass bed for the room that I hope will fit.  There is a good chance that when it arrives I will have to completely rethink the room to fit it in.  So I won't be making any changes in this room for a couple of weeks until the bed arrives and I have the chance to see how it looks.

Castle Starcaster - Week Fifteen

I started the week back in the bedroom dressing the bed. I took the less is more approach here and topped off the foam mattress with a simple bedspread and pillow in a deep blue cotton printed with a floral pattern. I then made a few other improvements to the bedroom; I added a heavier coat of white to the walls so they no longer look so badly painted. I cut a round "cow skin" rug for in front of the fireplace, recovered the chair in fabric to match the bed and played about with tapestries for the walls by temporallily hanging them with blu-tac. There's still something missing in this room, but so far nothing I've tried has looked right.

After giving up on playing about with the bedroom, I moved my attention up a level to the top floor. There I made and installed the ladder that provides access to the roof above the top floor. The ladder pivots so that when not in use it can be raised to the ceiling out of the way and then lowered when someone needs to get up to the roof. The ladder itself is finished, but the pulley system to raise and lower it is yet to be done. When lowered, the ladder sits at a forty-five degree angle to the floor. Most ladders rise more steeply than this, but this ladder needed to be clear of the railing arround the top of the spiral staricase (the addition of which is another of this week's acheivements).

And that is about all for the Castle this week. I'm thinking that next I should make a start on the final "room" of the castle, the roof garden. This will occupy the roof above the library and be accessed via the door in the side wall of the top floor room. The garden will be fairly simple, a clay tile path, some low box hedge, a few flowers and maybe a pond or fountain of some kind.

Dancing Dragon Inn - Week 18

 It was one of those weeks were there were lots of bit jobs done, but nothing really seems to have gotten done.  I started the week finishing the furniture for the top floor.  In the left hand room I added feet in the form of wooden beads to a chunky wooden shelf unit, stained it and filled it with linens and other bits.  This fills in the end wall between the two beds.  I rennovated an old desk to create the washstand by the doorway by removing the upper shelf and staining it to match the shelves.

Because people in Inns often have luggage, I made four simple sack like drawstring bags to scatter about the place.  As I had fabric out to do this, I figured I might as well start dressing some of the people for the Inn.  So far there is a barman, sorcerous parton, lady, kidnapped princess and a pauper in the process of being dressed, but none of them are finished yet.  Most only need their wigs and head gear seeing to and a bit of trim on their clothes.  There are a lot more people yet to do for the Inn.  I had thought I might set the goal of having the Inn finished by the end of January so I would be free to play with Cumberland Castle, the Retreat and Stratford B. kits, but having started on the people and remembered how slow it can be to dress them, I really doubt this will happen.

I made the fire for the tavern fireplace from some pre-bought andirons, a couple of twigs, some beads and pva glue diluted in water.  The andirons and twigs were covered in dabs of black paint (for soot/charcoal) and the twigs were glued in place on the andirons.  Some black and red seed beads were mixed in diluted pva glue and tipped over and pushed under the andirons and logs to make embers/coals.  Once the glue is totally dry, which will take several days, the whole lot can be peeled off the plastic sheet it is stilling on and installed in the fireplace.

At long last the doors have hinges.  They were made from faux leadlighting outliner.  I drew a hinge shape on some paper and slipped it into a palastic pocket.  I then traced the design with the outliner and filled it in, moved the paper and repeated the process until I had enough hinges.  Once dry these were simply peeled of and stuck onto the doors.

Finally, while I'm discussing faux leadlighting, here are some photos I don't think I've shown you of a couple of faux leadlighting projects I worked on over the Christmas break.  These aren't in miniature and both designs came from the book "Fairies and Fantasy - Learn to paint watercolour" by Meredith Dillman.  The finished pieces are both mounted on mirror, which is hard to take a good photo of, so please ignore the reflections you can see.