The House on the Hill

Welcome to the fully furnished and landscaped Pumpkin Cottage, or as I now call it, the "House on the Hill".

Upstairs in the cottage is the bedroom.  Originally I wanted to put twin beds in here, but I had to drop back to just the one bed as squeezing two in would mean that one of them posed an immense fire hazard due to the covers being practically in the fireplace.  A double bed would probably have worked, but I'd already made the singles, so being lazy I just dropped back to a single single.

This is the first 48th scale house I've been brave enough to try using polymer clay to make accessories for.  The jug, bowl and chamber pot on this wash stand are examples of this.  So it is possible to make things tiny enough to work in a 48th scale house, but I did spend most of the time I was working with the clay combing the floor for tiny little bits I'd dropped because they were too small to hold onto and work on at the same time.

 Downstairs, there is a kitchen area to the right and a living space on the left.  That floral bar behind the desk is actually a sofa, I just can't get a photo from any angle that allows you to see this.

One thing I don't like about this kit is the ceiling height on the ground floor.  Yes, it may be right for scale, but it is so low it makes it hard to see the details on the far side of the room.  It's not even possible to wiggle the camera in for a good shot of it.

And when you try to get a photo showing the far side of the room, the camera blocks all the light and the flash is so high up on the camera it actually flashes the top floor while photographing the ground floor leaving the ground floor in shadow.  So when working in 48th scale always remember to photograph the furniture before fixing it into place.

With the inside furnished, I started work on the gardens.  Petite Properties do make a garden kit to compliment Pumpkin Cottage, but they didn't have it on their site at the time I bought the kit (and I had spent more than enough money anyway) so my garden is entirely from scratch.  The base is an MDF disc from the craft store intended for use as a place mat.  On top of this I added three layers of polystyrene foam each layer smaller than the last.  This was then carved to create a smooth hill on which the cottage could sit.  The hill was painted green and covered in model railway 'grass'.

The picnic table is another Petite Properties kit and came for free on the front of a Dolls House and Miniature scene magazine some months back.  The whole reason the house has a garden was to find a place to use the table so I felt a little stupid when I realised I hadn't left enough flat ground to sit the table on.  The solution was to use a piece of bark to create a platform for the table to sit upon.

The trees in the garden were all hand made and I think are far the best trees I've ever made.  The trunks are balsa wood dowel.  Bunches of floral wire were pushed into the wood to make branches.  This was then covered with texture paste to give a rough, bark like texture.  After painting the branches were given foliage in the form of lichen moss (again, from model railway suppliers) except the weeping blossom tree in the front of the house which was given flower soft blossoms instead.

The paths were made by taking white sand, fine gravel, a little grey paint for colour and mixing them with PVA glue and then pouring them into place.

The rest of the garden was dotted with flowers made of flower soft in various colours, bushes of more lichen or model rail fake foliage as well as 'rocks' which were either pieces of bark, left over 'path' or actual pieces of pebble.

Unlike so many of the projects I've done recently, I actually really like how this one turned out.  I think I have gained enough experience with 48th scale now to say I'm ready to attempt creating one from scratch.  Just like the first 12th scale building I made from scratch, I'm not thinking small, er unambitiously.  You know how I like castles . . . . . .