So far, work on the Little House cabin has involved a lot of staining, then waiting for the stain to dry. On Sunday I started by staining the remaining house pieces. This might not have been necessary since I’m planning to cover everything with shingles or siding outside and skinny stick “logs” inside, but I didn’t want any raw wood to show through.

While the stain dried (outdoors, because of the fumes), I worked on “dirtying up” the chimney grout. I’ve never really done this before so I just made it up as I went along. I started by watering down some gray paint. I then spread this over the grout and stones.

Every so often, I’d wipe the wash off with a damp sponge brush to prevent it from drying on the stones. I went over the whole thing a couple of times, making sure the stones themselves didn’t end up painted.

The first wash was a bit too light, so I mixed in some darker gray paint and repeated the whole process. Here’s what I ended up with. Not sure it’s realistic, but it’ll do. After taking the photo below, I painted the whole chimney with matte varnish to protect it.

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The Hillside Victorian dollhouse is coming along nicely, but after six months I’m ready to work on something else—something smaller. (It’s probably got something to do with the fact that the next step on the Hillside Victorian is to paint a zillion windows… not my favorite task!) I have several half scale kits laying in wait, not to mention the Rosedale isn’t quite finished, but I’ve had two small (in theory) projects calling me for a while and decided to treat myself by picking one of them. One is a toy store set in the Greenleaf Buttercup. The other, which I decided to tackle first, is a log cabin based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods.

(Hmm, I only just realized that both of these projects are an excuse to relive my childhood. Um, even more so than playing with dollhouses. Okay, never mind…)

I was inspired to do this by Shamrockgirl18 at the Greenleaf forum, who has been building a 1:12 Little House cabin out of a Duracraft kit. I have always been a Laura Ingalls Wilder nut… I used to dress up like her (had the right hair for it!) and play one-room schoolhouse. I’ve read the whole series of books a zillion times. In the early 1990s I visited family in Minnesota and they humored me with a trip to the Plum Creek dugout site and and Little House on the Prairie gift shop. Good times. More recently, I read a really interesting biography that goes into what’s fact and what’s fiction in the Little House books, and I treated myself to the full-color collectors editions and reread the whole series again.

Last summer, I bought a half scale cabin off eBay for $25. It’s called the “Sugar and Spice Log Cabin,” by Joyce Hagarth, and this black and white picture was the only image with the auction. I couldn’t find any info about it online but took a chance.

(By the way, if anyone reading this blog knows anything about this house, please email me! I’d love to learn more about its origins.)

Since then, I have been collecting half scale items and furniture kits to go inside it, and today I dug in on the house itself.

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