Repairing and rethinking

We have two new, young cats who have no respect for dollhouses. None of our old cats showed any interest so I could never share any of those hilarious "cat invades dollhouse" pictures. This time I put away anything that young, curious cats could tear down, and I glazed all my room boxes. It was a right thing to do, because one of the cats immediately chose the room-box shelf as his favourite place.

 

The space happened to be empty because I was working on that room box, but now I cannot deprive the cat of his preferred sleeping spot. He hasn't so far done any damage.

But you cannot think of everything. I was amused when I finally took a cat-and-dollhouse picture:

He had also been inside, although I didn't manage to capture it, and he was very careful, as cats actually are. Still the inevitable happened.

 

There is a fault in this kit design, as I pointed out to the manufacturer when I bought it. The front stairs are not attached to anything, and you cannot open the main or basement fronts without removing the stairs. In other models, front stairs are usually attached to one of the fronts. Well, not much I can do about it. And it's too late to think of what I may have done, as some people in my Facebook groups have suggested: don't allow the cats into your hobby room, and so on. I don't have a dedicated hobby room; I have all my dollhouses in my home office, and that's where I work on my miniatures. I also work on everything else there, and I like cats being by my side. So I will just need to accept inevitable damage every now and then.

Right now it's a matter of repairing. I have postponed it for a while, but sooner or later it has to be done, so let's make it sooner.

I had issues when I built those front stairs two years ago. Returning to it now, I cannot see what the problem was. Fortunately, I have kept the back panel, "just in case", and here is the case. It fit nicely, just as it should have in the first place. Was it jinxed then? Was I stupid? Was I impatient?

All right, I won't deny that it took several attempts, and patience was the key. Every glued piece must dry properly before the next step. If the cats decided to cuddle on the table right then I would have... well, I would have had to do it all over again. 

So I wish I could say that it was now absolutely fine and painless, but that's not true. I mention it because it is a very complicated project, and I don't want to create an impression that it was an easy task. But in the end it was much neater and more stable.

Then of course I had to re-attach banisters and mouldings. No way everything would fit neatly so it was once again cheating a bit with filler and air-drying clay.

While I was at it, I added a detail that I had been considering for a while. Chess can be used for so many things!

Flower basket #2

In my previous post I said I would not show how I made flowers for the hanging baskets, but I have come up with a couple of new ideas that I want to share. Maybe they are not new at all, in which case you will just get a confirmation that the methods work.

As I have said repeatedly, I am not interested in making more of the same. I could have simply covered the other two baskets with my paper daisies, but that wouldn't have been much of a challenge. I tried punching red tissue paper, but it was too thin and just got crumpled. Then I thought that I could make roses from red tissue paper. I have made roses from oven-baked clay, but they would be too heavy for a basket. The tissue paper is, as you see, a paper crown I have been saving from Christmas. I save everything, and I have made fires with red and orange tissue paper. But now, roses.

This is what I did. Again, maybe it is a well-known method, but I haven't seen it. I wrapped a piece of paper round a length of dowel that I just happened to have in front of me - anything suitable will do. Then I cut off the excess of paper leaving 1mm that I then twisted and flattened. Then I pushed about 3mm of the paper from the dowel and cut off. Here are your little roses, ready to be glued onto your basket. (Or I guess you can add stems). 

It was easy to shape the flowers with tweezers before gluing.

I showed in the previous post what I used for basket.

So far so good. Again, I could have added some white and pink daisies, but I had been looking at various images and suddenly felt an urge to make some fuchsias. There are several tutorials on Pinterest about making paper fuchsias, in easy languages such as Spanish and Dutch, and all of them use punches. If I continue to make flowers and flower shops, I may invest in more punches, but at the moment I didn't have one required to make fuchsias. But I decided to make some anyway.

I punched out some five-petal flowers and some circles from appropriately coloured paper. Making holes in the middle curled them already, but I had to curl the inside bits slightly more. For stems, I used teeny tiny stamens from a full-size paper rose the origin of which I cannot remember. It was hard work because the flowers are so small. I put a ruler in the picture to give the sense of scale. 

Frankly, I didn't have the patience to make more than these even though I have more petals. I had to curl the outside petals back a bit more. I have a magnifying glass, but it doesn't combine well with my eyeglasses.

I like the result. The fuchsias are actually hanging over the side.

Then I simply added some generic pink flowers here and there.

Here the second basket joins the first one. In this picture, I have also made some improvements, adding mouldings and arranging the display in a more interesting way.

I will make at least one more basket, and maybe I will add a shelf, some posters, rolls of wrapping paper? The back wall looks too bare. I am enjoying myself.