Progress on the Queen Anne Rowhouse has been somewhat stymied by one disaster after another with the electricity. On October 3, I ordered eleven half scale lights from Swan House DIY for a cost of about $130. (They didn’t show up until Halloween, but that’s a story for another time.) Of these, four were Houseworks brand and the rest were Cir-Kit brand. Houseworks and Cir-Kit offer almost the exact same lights and in these cases I chose the Cir-Kit because I liked the designs a little better.
Two similar lights (Cir-Kit on the left, Houseworks on the right). I liked the base better
on the Cir-Kit light, so I picked that one.
I’m not a big fan of the shiny brass that comes on pretty much every miniature light fixture, so the first thing I did was attempt to paint them all flat black to look like cast iron. But the paint didn’t want to adhere to the shiny finish on the lights and scraped right off. After painting most of my lights this way, I scraped off all the paint (pretty easily!) and scratched up the surfaces with a nail file.
I then painted on a coat of Gesso for the paint to stick to.
And then finally painted them black again and added a coat of matte varnish for protection. The paint still scrapes off if I’m not careful, but after devoting several hours to this process, I was ready to move on.
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
