Saturday 24 May 2014

Dressing table makeover

A couple of weeks ago one of my dollhouse groups started sharing pictures of their bargains from Poundland. I must admit that Poundland is not my prioritised shopping target, and since it moved from the shopping mall where I park when I visit my hairdresser I hadn't been there. But the bargains were too good and besides a challenge: I like making ugly things pretty. Not that they are really ugly, but not quite the furniture you put in your dollhouse and feel proud of.



As a first try, I made a seat for one of the chairs: 



I am not sure I am happy with the result, but I don't know yet where these chairs are going. 

My next attempt was a dressing table: 


There is nothing radically wrong with it, but it is plain. Plain things beg to be made over.

I made a dressing table for my Victorian house some time ago.

 

I still like it, but because of the clothes-peg legs it is larger than 1:12, and when I put a chair in front of it, it looked ridiculous. And anyway, it was time to make something new. I like the ornate mirror, so I decided to keep it. As I was looking for a suitable contraption to fix the mirror, I found a plastic ice-cream spoon. If you think it's a strange way of fixing a mirror on a dressing table, let me tell you that my genuine eighteenth-century dressing table is made exactly like this (although admittedly not with a plastic spoon).


Then I painted the table ivory-white, and just to show how a tiny detail makes a difference, here are pictures of before and after I added a length of lace on the front:



Here it is now in its interior, and the scale is right to go with the chair. The perfume bottles, by the way, are made of beads.




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