New Addition to Giveaway Prizes

I had promised that my Suggest-A-Name Giveaway would include extra, mystery items not shown in the photo of prizes. There will still be some mystery items in the prize, but given there is only just over a week to go in the giveaway and the number of entries is decidedly under-whelming, I've decided to reveal what the major mystery bonus item is in the hope of enticing a few more entrants.

It is a hand made straw witches hat in a dusky mauve. It is about 1 1/2" high and sports a black hat band trimmed with black feathers and mauve flowers.  Here you can see Hetty modelling it:

If you would like to have a chance to win this hat as well as the other prizes (which include a straw mat, a faux leadlight window and a pair of candle sconces), please leave a comment either on this post or the original giveaway post here that includes a suggested name for my Witches Shop or a suggestion of something witchy to include in the shop.

Castle Starcaster - Week One

Well, what can I say? Pressing a mould into clay over and over and over and over and over again for hours on end is rather boring. In fact it is incredibly, mind numbingly boring. The results, however, are worth the effort.

I use a mix of paperclay and ordinary air-dry clay, one pack of paper clay and half a packet of air clay. Once thoroughly mixed the clay is rolled out into a thin sheet (about 1-2mm thick) and large enough to cover the entire wall. PVA glue is then spread over the wall and the clay sheet pressed over it and trimmed to size. I then added the stone effect using Impress Moulds made by Malcom's Miniatures. Each set of stone moulds consist of half a dozen individual moulds, each creating a stone of different dimensions. The stone moulds look like little plastic mallets from side on, but when the end is pressed into the clay the result is a single stone block. By using the moulds in random arrangements a random stone pattern is achieved but it takes time. To give you an idea, the wall in the foreground of the above photo took about three and a half hours to complete.

Despite the many times I paused while working with the moulds and thought "Wouldn't it be better just to buy some stone look paper?" I persevered and worked slavishly on the outside walls of the castle until all the side walls of the castle were finished. Now all I have to do are the three front panels and those funny little round tower bits on either side. And some of the inside rooms. Maybe. The finished stonework is not perfect but never the less looks good. The effect of the moulds and clay is much more realistic than either paper or stencils and probably only bettered by genuine stone slips. Once all the stonework is finished, the stones will have to be painted to complete the effect. At the moment the plan is to make them light grey.

For those of you planning to use air drying clay, I'll share a few tips. When rolling the clay out, use a plastic rolling pin (a piece of PVC pipe works well) or a wooden rolling pin covered in plastic as the clay tends to stick to wooden rolling pins. Approach the clay like a baker. When you roll out dough you dust the table with flour first to prevent the dough sticking. Do the same with clay, but use talcum powder instead of flour. If you find the clay sticking to the moulds, use more talc to dust the moulds the same way you might use flour to dust biscut cutters. Measure and mark out a horizontal line every 10cm to help keep your stonework level. Use cling film to cover the areas of clay you're not working on to keep it moist until you're ready for it. If the clay starts to dry out, use a spray to lightly mist the clay with water, but be sparing. The more water added to the clay, the greater it's tendancy to crack.

Finally for today, welcome to the 77th follower, sophie appleton. She is another follower who doesn't appear to have her own blog, but as ever, if you do have one Sophie all you need to do is let me know and I'll add the link.

P.S. Is Cyndy out there? I'm still waiting to hear from you so I know where to send your giveaway prize.

The Mystery Room

One room, so many choices! I just can't decide what to do with the room on the middle floor of the tower. Here are some of my current ideas for the room and why I like or dislike the notion: Armoury Castles are defensive structures, so need a supply of weapons to be defended with. I included an armoury in the last castle I made and discovered that making good weapons isn't easy - all my swords came out wobblely for a start. Buying them is very expensive and to fill an entire room I'll need a lot of weapons. I don't think the location of the room is good for an armoury - it's too far away from where all the "action" would be. Lastly, I have already decided to incorporate arms into the Treasury, so adding a separate armoury would be duplication. Bedroom I've tried a single bed in the room and it takes up too much space in the room and doesn't look right at all. It could be a nursery with much smaller cribs and other early childhood bits and bobs. The problem with this idea is that I wasn't going to put a door in the doorway, so the children would be free to crawl out of the room - right onto a big staircase with no rails at all! It doesn't strike me a being particularly safe for the kiddies. Muniment Room The muniment room was a place for storing and displaying important documents. I think just about every miniature home I've ever done has included a library or study or just a room with lots of books and paper. In Highcroft, there is already the Sorcerer's Study with a shelf that will be filled with books and scrolls and yet another depository of written materials is earmarked for the catacombes. Do I really want yet another bookish room? How hard would it be to make display cases for the documents? Still Room The still room was where the herbs and other plant matter harvested from the gardens was turned into ointments, pastes and other concoctions to be used for eating, treating illness, cleaning and a variety of other purposes. Ideally this should be near the garden and probably out of the way of the rest of the castle because I'm sure from time to time there were rather unpleasant fumes were generated there. It should be added as part of the as yet unstarted right hand side wing of the castle which is where the garden will be. (Unless I decide to ditch the whole right wing and just stick with what I've already got of course). Throne Room No, not the sort associated with garderobes and cesspits! This throne room would be where the kings and queens of the kingdom granted audiences and listened to the concerns of their people. The main feature would be a very grand chair, raised on a dias with rich velvets draped liberally about. Again, the room is in a bit of a funny position in the castle to put it to this use, but has the least drawbacks (that have so far occured to me) of all my present ideas for this room. Weaving Room Basically, a room with a big weaving loom in the middle. Perhaps a spinning wheel. A few stools and pieces of sewing and material. The catch is am I able to make a convincing loom? Even with a pattern and instructions from an old dollshouse magazine, it still looks kind of complicated to me.

Highcroft Castle - Week Thirteen

This week it was the Great Hall's turn to aquire some furniture. The original idea was that the Queen and other high ranking diners would be seated on a dias in the centre of the room with the less important guests on benches to the sides. The "high" table would be semi-circular allowing for a brazier to be placed in the middle to keep everyone warm. The furniture that I've made for the Hall (everything bar the brazier) is pretty much exactly as I planned from the start of the project. . . . . . Too bad it doesn't look right in the space. Tall backed chairs on a raised dias right in front of the arched doorways at the back make the arches look lower - too low. They are supposed to look grand and impressive, but now they just get lost. Those seated at the sides of the dias will be indanger of toppling off it. The "low" tables and seating might squeeze a total of six diners, but would be better if there were only four. A total of seven guests at a banquet? It seems like a small gathering for such a grand occasion.

So . . .

I'm thinking that I will change the layout of this room. I'll block off the arched doorway on the right and turn it into a stained glass window. (This was supposed to be the doorway to the right wing one day, but the wing may never be added anyway and if it is, I'll just have to put fake doors in the back and have it connect to the main building via imaginary, unseen passageways.) The dias will move in front of this window so that the diners sit with their backs to it, still on the semi-circular table with a brazier in the cut out middle. I will then add either one long table with benches down the middle of the room (running from the dias on the right to the left wall) or two or three separate tables running from the back wall to the front, probably the former but it depends how things fit when I get around to measuring. The only problem with this arrangement will be that the symetry of the room will be ruined. So if I decide I don't like the room a-symetrical, I'll change it again and just have one simple long table running the length of the room, no dias, no curves, but more space to play with.

But all this will be handled (maybe) this week - I'm supposed to be telling you about last week. In the Great Hall the furniture has been made, as usual, from balsa wood with a few embelishments of wooden beads and some laser cut fretwork. The fretwork used in the chair backs was purchased on ebay from  amd5758 .  This seller has some wonderful castle/medieval pub type items, both ready made and some bits to make your own like the fretwork. The chairs themsevles are very simply made from four pieces of balsa wood - the back, the seat and two sides. These pieces were draw on paper to make sure they looked right, then the paper became a pattern for the chairs. A hole was cut in the backs to insert the fretwork and I may add a bead as a finial at each side of the backs. The table is similarly simple. It is merely balsa wood cut to shape supported on legs made from beads "strung" on toothpicks. The tip of the toothpick protrudes a little from the top of the beads, allowing me to push them into the balsa wood table tops to ensure everything is locked together. The dias is just cardboard covered in grey carpet with some red and gold braid to trim the edges. Also in the Great Hall, I've placed some scrap wood look paper at the back of the minstrel galleries, confirming that they do look better with a darker colour behind them. Now I just find some deep coloued paper that will look good with the room to use as a permanent wall covering.

Not a lot happened in the sorcerer's study this week. The bookcase I started modifying last week was supposed to be painted with layers of successivly lighter paint, lightly sanded to reveal the layers, but the midnight blue looked so good just as it was i decided to leave it as it was. I simply added a little rub on paint in light blue over the raised designs on the plaster trim pieces to highlight them. I've been collecting books to put on this bookshelf for months. Whenever there was a % off sale at one of my favourite Dollshouse stores, a pack of blank books was included in my order. It never occured to me to measure the height of the shelves I wanted to put them on. Yes, you guessed right, the books are too tall to fit on the shelves. I'll either have to pile them on horizontally instead of vertially or make my own books the right height.

The drawer's I've raised on stilts looked to good in their orginal finish to repaint, so I thought I'd just paint the bottom and have a contrast. It didn't work - the unit doesn't look like it's meant to be one thing with the bottom painted blue. So this will be painted as close to the wood colour of the top as possible. If this doesn't work, I'll have to repain the whole thing. Lastly, I made a quick table for the room out of balsa wood and recycled newel posts which still needs painting.

The final item I've made this week is the knoll sofa for the solar. Do you believe it is made from cardboard? Four rectangles of corugated cardboard make up it's frame. The side pieces were cut half way through just above the height of the seat to enable them to fold down. The back and side were covered in thin foam and upholstered with some fabric left over from an earlier project. The cushions for the seat are two pieces of thicker foam. The sofa still needs some finials on the back corners so that the sides can be tied up. Months back there were some suitable finials listed by one of the Australian based online DH stores I frequent. Now I need some . . . . yes you guessed it again - they no longer have them! Now I either have to improvise or pay to get something similar shipped from the US.

Highcroft Castle - Week Three

Still being fed up with stonework, I decided to start work on the interior of the Great Hall this week. Having been too busy lately to sit down and think things through properly, I pretty much made up the plan for the Hall as i went along by rummaging through my cupboard and shelves until I found something that would work. Normally when I decorate a room I start with the ceiling, then the walls and cover the floor last. Although I haven't quite figured out the ceiling yet, I do know that I am going to do an ornate panelled ceiling that I will assemble outside the house/castle and install as one piece when it's finished. This means that it will be easier to add the ceiling after finishing the walls. As I wanted to add a 'fake' wall at the back of the room to create the impression of a corridor beyond with flooring that continued under the wall, I decided to start with the floor and reverse my usual order of decoratiion. I considered (very breifly) using more of my stencilled stone for the floor, but as I've said, I'm sick of doing that, so quickly dismissed the idea. Next I considered using teracotta tile and pulled out some terracotta coloured air drying clay. After playing with the clay for a few minutes to see how much it would cover when rolled flat, I decided I didn't have enough for the whole floor, but did cover a piece of round MDF I'm planning to use as a floor in the 'tower' section of the castle when I get as far as working on the tower. By adding grooves in a grid pattern, I created the look of a tiled floor. Now I just have to hope that the tower will work as I hope it will when I get around to building it! With tiles dismissed, I went through my collection of assorted floor papers. There was plain floorboard (a little dull), leftover parquet floor (not enough), various carpet (not enough and not very great hall-ish), ornate victorian style tiles (too Victorian and again not enough) and lastly some black and white chequerboard scrapbooking paper. This paper was absoultely perfect and there was just enough left (this paper having been left over from the first time I decorated the house!). I gave it a couple of coats of spray gloss and (after cutting it to fit of course) stuck it into place with double sided tape. Next job to tackle was the walls. I started by cutting the back wall out of foamboard and cutting the arched openings and two fireplace openings from this piece. At this point I realised the probably wan't enough height for the balcony/gallery that was going to run accross the upper back wall. For the time being I've left them out, but may add two smaller balconies in the back corners of the room later on. I had been considering creating a wood panelled effect for the hall and as a test run decided to try a panelled wall in the corridor behind the 'back wall' as it would be at the back and largly obscured by the back wall, so if it didn't look good, maybe no one would really notice when it was finished. I found some pieces of oak veneer (left over flooring from my last castle) and stuck these pieces to a piece of sturdy cardboard. Next I cut strips of balsa wood and glued them over the veneer in a grid to create a panelled look. Lastly the whole thing was stained with watered down brown paint and sealed with gloss varnish. When glued in postion with the fake back wall in front, the panelling is quite effective, but I don't think with would work so well if you could see the walls more clearly. Plus, I didn't have anywhere near enough veneer to cover all the walls this way. So it was back to rumaging, but I couldn't find anything that really seemed to work, until I remembered the embossed paper I had used on the ceilings of Madame Bellerose's house. Beacuse I was worried about crushing the pattern, I had stored this away in a different place to my other papers and it took a while to find it, but when I did I realised this was perfect for the castle. There wasn't enough to cover the walls floor to ceiling, but I think that would have been too much anyway. I painted come pieces of thin cardboard cut to size for the top half of the walls in a beige stain. The embossed paper was the wrong colour, so I gave it s couple of coats of acrylic stain in ruby and went over that with a rub on paint in silver to highlight the pattern of the paper. All this was then stuck on the walls. I was going to show you a picture of the result of all this here, but Blogger seems to be having an issue adding photos again, so if you want to see the Hall, you'll need to broswe over to my flickr account ).HERE I still need to add a rail/beam around the walls where the two wall papers meet and of course finish around the arches and the fireplaces. Lastly, I need to create a ceiling and the basic decoration of the Hall will be finished! After what seemed like an eternity of stenciling stone, I finally feel like I am making progress! (just don't tell me that I still have to finish that stonework