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. […]
Category: Dollhouses (Page 13 of 28)
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 […]
First things first: someone who read about my Little Belle tipped me off to the one pictured at the right, which was sold in a silent auction in the Texas Showcase of Miniatures in 2012. (See here for details — I got the poster’s permission to repost the photo, though it’s been so long she […]
I just finished the bay window trim in the Victorianna’s little girl’s room, realizing too late that the header is crooked (it’s higher on the left than on the right). I thought hanging something from the ceiling near the right side of the header might distract from the crookedness. I looked online for miniature mobiles […]
Usually with a die-cut house, if I’m using the windows that came with the kit I’ll apply wood filler to the inside edges of the window to smooth them out. I do this once the trim (either interior or exterior) is glued in and then carefully repaint, to give the edges plus trim a nice […]
With my new workshop complete, I can get back to work on the Victorianna. (Yay!) This house (and all the others) got packed up in September for my move to San Francisco, so it’s been a while. When I left off I was working on the upstairs bedrooms. I want to finish the little girl’s […]
With the walls up, it was time to figure out how to furnish and organize the new dollhouse workshop in a way that 1) wouldn’t require spending a ton of money on new furniture, and 2) won’t drive me crazy when I’m trying to work in it. My old workshop wasn’t huge and I acquired […]
Since moving back to San Francisco in October, it’s been hard to get back to work on mini projects. All my dollhouse stuff is in plastic bins in the garage, some stacked up so they’re hard to reach, and I can never find what I need. The dollhouses are all over the place and none […]
I didn’t get these done in time for Christmas, but I cross stitched three designs from Prairie Schooler’s Folk Art Christmas to go in my breadbox roombox. Here are the stitched designs. They’re stitched over-one on 36 count linen, for finished sizes of approx. 1-5/16 by 1-7/8. I started with the horizontal one, planning to […]
My gingerbread dollhouse looked pretty good the way I had it, but I wanted to finish the roof and front door, and play around a bit with frosting. And… I might have ruined it. I mean, it’s still adorable, and I had fun with it, but I went WAY overboard on frosting — past the […]
My parents came to visit last weekend, and gingerbread houses were on the agenda! Here’s what we started with (read the earlier posts here and here to see how I got the houses to this point). I already built a puzzle house like the one on the left, so my mom decorated that one and […]
With the puzzle houses assembled, it’s time to make them look (sort of) like gingerbread. But first, here are some pictures of my mom’s real gingerbread houses, for context. The stained glass windows are made from crushed Lifesavers, and the pieces are glued together with melted sugar. Note the open doors. As a wee lass […]
I just moved from a house that had a dedicated dollhouse workshop to one that doesn’t. Eventually we will build a room of some sort into the garage but for now I have a corner of the garage that doesn’t have all the storage and shelving I’m used to. Last weekend I was able to […]
In one week (gasp!) I will be moving back to San Francisco and leaving the suburbs behind. The past six weeks have been busy with packing and de-cluttering and moving things to the (considerably smaller) new house, including everything that once lived in my beloved dollhouse workshop. The new house doesn’t have a dedicated dollhouse […]
Here’s the second little house I got at the miniature flea market in August (the first being the House of Hidden Treasures kit from American Craft). This one’s named Garden of Delights. This was a NAME national convention souvenir in 1996. I recognized it because I’d seen one on eBay fairly recently, and I assumed […]
With the clothes neatly put away in the closet, it’s time to finish the second girl’s room, starting with finishing the closet. I bought these 1:24 plastic crates from Shapeways and painted them pretty colors. I thought about putting something in them, but once they’re in place you can’t really tell they’re empty, so I […]