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Two more Little Belle dollhouses uncovered

Since posting my blog about the Little Belle dollhouse by Jim Marcus and Lew Kummerow, I have tracked down two more online. The first is in the Miniature Museum of Greater St. Louis. This museum acquired it from a Dallas mini museum that closed a few years ago, and they didn’t know what it was until they saw it on my blog.

Finding the second one was a total fluke. Years ago I acquired a Victorianna half scale dollhouse (a discontinued, half scale version of Greenleaf’s wall-hanging McKinley) and I have always wanted to bash it with a second one to make a rowhouse two rooms deep, but the Victorianna is really hard to find. Over the weekend I won a second kit on eBay, which finally gave me an excuse to daydream about what the bash might look like.

I was searching for pictures of houses (and dollhouses) with bay windows to give myself ideas for the bash and, unbelievably, ran across a picture of a Little Belle on Pinterest. I can’t even remember what search terms I was using and haven’t been able to “find” it again, so clearly this was karma.

The picture linked back to an eBay auction from March 2014. Since that auction page will undoubtedly go away at some point, I grabbed the pictures, but because the house is unfinished it looks about like mine (no obvious damage to the facade, though). It sold for $391.

(Hey — if you bought this house and stumbled across this post looking for info about it, please contact me!)

The auction includes a great picture of the brass medallion that Barbara Kummerow told me was only attached to a few of the earliest houses. It’s hard to tell where this medallion is located… maybe on the *underside* of the base attached to the front of the house? I double checked and mine definitely doesn’t have one.

So: 1 Little Belle owned by me + 3 owned by others on the Half Scale Yahoo Group + 2 in museums (St. Louis and Kansas City) + 2 pictured in the June 1980 issue of Nutshell News + this eBay auction brings us to 9 Little Belles accounted for, out of a limited run of about 20. I’m still hoping to locate more…

Rosy vs. the tomato

It’s been a while since I posted a too long, questionably entertaining video of my dog doing something inane. Without further ado, I present: ROSY EATS A CHERRY TOMATO!!

(The tomato was ripe. It’s a “green grape” variety.)

Music credit: “Run Amok” by Kevin MacLeod (incometech.com).

Artist’s Cottage floor & door

In the Artist’s Cottage, I’m planning to use a funky kitchen set I got at last year’s CHAMPS show for cheap (along with an Acme fridge). This kitchen lacks an oven, but in keeping with the funky “off the grid” vibe I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll add a microwave and a grill outdoors.

Behind the sink unit I’ll build a breakfast bar with bar stools, but I haven’t bought them yet so the chairs in the photo below are just to give an idea of placement. I’m also planning to paint the cabinets and cover the countertops with Spanish-looking tile.

A picture I found on Google — which I can’t find again now, despite my best efforts — gave me the idea to separate the kitchen area from the rest of the Artist’s Cottage with different flooring. I have a about half a sheet of Itsy Bitsy mosaic tile leftover from the rowhouse kitchen and cut a square to form the cottage’s kitchen floor.

Then I taped pieces of paper together to figure out what shape I needed to cut the hardwood for the rest of the floor.

This is a sheet of old Handley House hardwood flooring I got at another mini yard sale. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be half scale, but the boards are very narrow, so it works well.

The piece of flooring wasn’t big enough to do the whole house, but I had enough from the cut-out pieces to finish the front part of the floor.

I stained the flooring with Minwax Natural. It didn’t really change the color, but made the dark wood more vibrant.

I cut some double bead trim to go around the edge of the kitchen area and stained it so it’s close enough to the floor color.

And voila!

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