“Frilling” might not be the right word (or a word at all), but after I completed the Victorianna’s downstairs bay windows I felt like they were a little too plain. I wanted to spruce them up a bit before adding the porch trim, which will make them harder to reach. Here’s what I started with. […]
Category: Dollhouses (Page 12 of 27)
With the Artist’s Cottage addition assembled, it was time to stucco the outside. For years I have been using watered down Elmer’s wood filler as dollhouse stucco (here it is on the Rosedale, and on the Artist’s Cottage itself). I recently ran out of wood filler and when I went to buy more, Home Depot […]
In between rounds of stucco and paint on the Artist’s Cottage addition I finished the window and door trim. I almost didn’t add any trim to these — I liked the simplicity of the stained frames sticking in through the stucco. But some of the holes weren’t cut straight (for example, the top and right […]
Last week I bought this gorgeous Braxton Payne fireplace on eBay. It’s a limited edition from a 2007 convention in Fresno and the auction said it was half scale. I love Braxon’s fireplaces and own a few — including the Southwestern beehive fireplace in my quirky Spanish Revival artist’s cottage — but I’d never seen […]
I think die cut dollhouses look best when the plywood is covered up. It takes a lot of sanding and prep work to give luan plywood a nice finish, and I’ve never managed to completely hide slots/tabs no matter how much wood filler I use. My back to back Victorianna is half birch plywood, which […]
My Victorianna has a deep living room in need of a couple of modern couches, but the pickings are slim in half scale… so I made my own! These are made with wood and suede scrapbook paper that looks just like the suede/microfiber that’s so popular on couches lately. They’re kind of time intensive, with […]
The Victorianna’s been on hold until I could make a Dollhouses Trains and More run to get all the trim needed for the exterior bay windows. (I was spoiled when I lived five minutes away from that place!) I made that trip over the weekend, so progress will be coming soon. First, though, I finished […]
Something tragic happened in the Victorianna. At some point after we moved to San Francisco last fall the bathroom floor I loved so much got totally bleached out. My new workshop didn’t exist yet and the sun must have been shining through the garage window onto the house. I didn’t notice until it was too […]
Between the Thatched Cottage and a recent Craigslist score, I’ve been on a bit of a dollhouse buying jag lately — so I didn’t buy this one when I saw it on eBay a few weeks ago! But I did recognize it as one of Jackie Deiber’s half scale pull-apart houses, and I reached out […]
A while ago I had my eye on this resin wishing well from Miniatures.com. At $28 it’s pretty pricey, but I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to make something like that and tucked the idea away. Now that I’m working on the Thatched Cottage, I decided to give it a try. Read on for […]
With the Thatched Cottage’s walls painted I moved on to the floors, using the same thin wood veneer I’d used in the Victorianna (but a different color). I started by staining the subfloor so any spots that showed through wouldn’t look like raw wood. I hadn’t done a particularly good job keeping wood filler and […]
I don’t know what materials were originally used to create the texture on the outside of the Bill Lankford cottages. Possibly spackling compound. In the past I’ve used watered-down wood filler for a stucco effect (Rosedale, Artist’s Cottage) and since I’m more experienced with that than spackle, I decided to do something similar to add […]
These are two half scale Bill Lankford cottages I bought separately off eBay. The one on the left is officially called “A Place for All Seasons” because it came with two bases, summer and winter, that could be swapped out. (Mine only came with the summer base.) The one on the right is fully enclosed […]
I’m at a point with the Victorianna where I’m doing a lot of work with little noticeable progress. Case in point: a month after my last post about the porch, I’m still puttering around with it. First of all, the siding is all on. This house was so easy to side compared to ones that […]
Remember my last post when I said that breaking something can make it better in the end? Sometimes that’s true. Other times you spend lots of time and money and effort trying to get the broken thing back to how it was before. That’s what happened with the front door on the Gull Bay Cottage. […]
Sometimes breaking something makes it better. I learn this lesson over and over, working on dollhouses. One short day after posting about the front door pediment I made for the Victorianna, I destroyed it. I was checking to see how it fit into the hole I cut into the siding, and pressed on the center […]
I’ve been doing small stuff on the Victorianna that hasn’t really been blog-worthy, including a lot of thinking and looking at pictures to figure out how I want to handle the porch. Like with everything else in this house, I’m not following the directions. CatColorado’s Victorianna gallery on the Greenleaf forum has some good pictures […]
Ever since I finished my Little House in the Big Woods cabin a few years ago, I always intended to add a base with landscaping. I wanted to make a wooded scene with outbuildings and a vegetable garden and cows and horses and a chicken coop and a covered wagon and other details from the […]
Every year, the Half Scale Yahoo Group does a swap, and I participated this year for the fourth time. It’s a fairly large affair — this year we had 39 participants — so it’s important to come up with items that don’t have too many steps and can be made relatively cheaply. The value of […]
When I chatted with Jim Marcus about the Little Belle, he commented that it’s hard to paint a house like this because you have to be a really good painter to do justice to all the small details. He pointed out that when the house is all white, the shadows serve as a sort of […]
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
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