I’ve started furnishing the Little House cabin. I’ve collected several Cassidy Creations kits for this house and am also planning to scratch build some of the furniture.

I started with the “big bed” and trundle bed. Little House in the Big Woods has a couple of illustrations that part of the big bed’s headboard, but not the whole thing, so I didn’t have a good idea of how I wanted it to look. A bed seemed easy enough to scratch build, but it would need enough clearance underneath to fit a trundle bed, and that made it a little more complicated than I wanted to tackle on my own.

I have a very old pamphlet named How to Make Shaker Furnishings for Doll Houses or Miniature Rooms that has 1:12 patterns for a bed and a trundle bed. I adapted these to half scale. Here’s a photo out of the pamphlet, of how the finished pieces should look.

I built the big bed first. I made these out of basswood and just cut the dimensions of the pieces in half. The 1:12 plans called for wood that’s 1/16″ wide. I stuck with this width even though it technically should have been 1/32″ wide, because I was concerned that 1/32″ wood would be tough to glue.

The headboard is a bit taller than it should be (larger than half the size of the original pattern), because this was the closest I could get at the shop and I didn’t want to cut it down, but all the rest of the pieces are exactly half the length and width from the original plans.

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