My first room box

When I first started playing with dollhouses the idea of a room box felt alien. There was so much to do in the dollhouse, why would anyone want to make anything else? I was, however, inspired by Eva Malmsten's rooms that were all in different styles, so eventually I saw the point. Eva makes her rooms in wine boxes, and I had never seen them in Sweden - or perhaps never bothered to look. I don't remember now why my husband brought me the first wine box, but apparently we had been discussing the option. It was soon after we had moved to our house, and I had a party where people admired my dollhouse, and a colleague said: "Oh I wish I had a house like that!" So I told her I'd make one for her. Not a whole house, but a room box. I asked what style she wanted, and she said Victorian, since she is a Victorian scholar.

You need to think slightly differently when you plan a room box because it has its space limit, its given breadth and depth and height. And you need to decorate the walls, floor and ceiling before you can put anything in.

 I started by painting the ceiling with an ordinary indoors decoration paint, and I put in floors cut from a placemat. For wallpaper I used a paper napkin.

 I made the window from a plastic fruit container and used a souvenir doll apron for the curtain, glueing a landcape cut from a magazine behind the glass pane. Then I made the heavy fabric curtains on top of that. I experimented with some furniture that I had bought at a flea market. The table seemed to fit in fine.

 In my dollhouse I have a fireplace that I bought on ebay when I was a novice and didn't know I could make fireplaces. But for this room box I made a fireplace, and I learned from a book how to make a credible coal fire.

I made the mirror frame the same way I made picture frames with lolly sticks and grill sticks. I made a sofa just like the one I have in my house, but it had to be smaller to fit into the room box. So scale is deceptive. I made a side table from a chess piece, sconces from paper clips and pen caps, a fruit bowl from a plastic medicine card and fruit from clay. The champagne bottle is a candle, and the cake is made from a plastic bottle cap. I cut the rug from an old shirt. I also made a fan palm and a marble pedestal to put it on, behind the sofa. The stupid thing is that the final picture I took before I gave away the room was hopelessly blurred. 

Herringbone floor

I had seen a picture of wooden floors someone in my discussion group posted. I had also seen Eva Malmsten's gorgeous floors. So I decided I would make a herringbone floor for the living room. Now, I was no longer on sick leave, but working full time, in a new place, with new responsibilities. Yet miniature making suddenly had a new purpose: relaxation after a long and hard day of work. Since a good deal of my work is reading, I cannot relax over a book, as other people do, and we don't watch television. The house we rented had a minimal garden, and it was too late in the year for gardening. Therefore, making herringbone parquet was exactly the pastime I needed.

This corner is about 1% of the area I had to cover. It felt like making a jigsaw puzzle of ten thousand pieces. But I was not in a hurry. The material is lolly sticks glued onto a cardboard surface. Evening after long evening...



 

And finally

This is what it looks like in the house. Of course most of it is covered by furniture and carpets. But I haven't cheated, it's there all the way to the back wall.

Building the cellar

This magnificent shelf comes directly from one of Eva Malmsten's books. It is a lamp shade, and I found it in a thrift shop very soon after I had started making the house. I would have never thought of it as useful. Talk dollhouse eyeglasses! This is the cellar of the house, and of course in the cellar there must be sacks with flour and potatos (which I made from a kitchen towel, filled with beads), and beer barrels. The smaller barrel is a corkscrew, and I added a tap made from a drinking straw and a bead. I made the two black barrels in my pottery class. The shelf must be filled with preserves:

I made most of the jars from pieces of disposable champagne flutes left after a party. I glued each tiny tube to a piece of transparent plastic food container, and I cut lids from medicine cards. The preserves are seeds and dried plants from my garden. Eventually, I filled the whole shelf.

 

This ancient photo frame lay upside down at a flea market, and I saw immediately that it was a cellar door.

The final touch was this wine rack, made from a plastic vegetable container. The bottles are eyedrop dispensers, painted green. The labels are cut from real wine labels - there is usually a tiny image on the back. The corks are match heads.

Joining the club

In the beginning of March (2008) I joined the Swedish miniature-makers' discussion group, Miniatyrforumet. This was the first discussion group I joined outside my profession, and I was quite anxious about it. I had looked at the pictures and felt inadequate: here were all these people doing these wonderful things, and there I was with my amateurish attempts. I had uploaded my pictures on Flickr, mostly for myself to be able to watch in a sequence, but also for some close friends to share with. There are typically two reactions when you share a picture of a dollhouse (or show them in real life). Some people say: "How nice" and that's it. These are people without miniature eyeglasses. But there are people who immediately start asking how you made this ot that, and then you recognise a soul mate. (The most enthusiastic observer of my dollhouses was a young man who makes miniature railways). So the reason I wanted to join the group was to share my work with someone equally engaged. I swallowed my pride and wrote a self-presentation on the forum and posted some pictures. And guess how much response I received! Dollhouse people are surely the most friendly people in the world (but if you are reading this you know it). I even got acclaim from my role model Eva Malmsten. This boosted my energy, and I have ever since read and posted on the forum regularly, getting ideas and sharing ideas.

There are hundreds of dollhouse communities in Britain, but I have never tried to find any. It's far too intimidating.

Making a door and expanding the bathroom

The next wall I put into my house was between bedroom and bathroom. I wanted a real door between the rooms, one that can be opened. I know you get those from dollhouse suppliers, but I have already explained that for me the challenge and the pleasure was, and still is, to make things myself. I had a vague idea about how I wanted it, and I couldn't find any instructions, except in Eva Malmsten's book again, on how you decorate a door. I had to make the whole wall with the door in it before I put in the wall into the house. It took many hours and days of frustration.

The door frame is made from two photo frames, and they dictated the size of the door. It didn't work at all the way I had expected it, but after may trials and errros I managed it. I made the door from cardboard and glued on pieces of wood for decoration, as in Eva's book. The large panels are my favourite venetian blind, and the outer panels are lolly sticks. I also used grill sticks for further effect (Eva uses spaghetti, but my princilpe is not to use anything edible). The hinges are real, very very tiny, bought at my local ironmonger's. Took hours to fix. The door knob is a paper clip.


This is the view of the bathroom

 There are quite a lot of details I need to explain. The tiles are from ebay of course, but they come in sheets. I have seen dollhouses on the web where people have just pasted the whole sheet on the wall. It doesn't look natural. Instead, I made two double rows of tiles and between them pasted single tiles, one by one. Yes, it took a long time, but you must agree that the effect is nice. The tiny corner shelf on the left is made from cardboard and toothpicks. It is just like the one I have in my bedroom. The lamp is made from a piece of perforated metal sheet, and I don't remember where it comes from. The basket on the right is a Christmas decoration - it was originally a bell, but I turned it upside down.


I made the washbasin from a cardboard box and glued pieces of wood just as I did with the door. I glued on the back with the mirror. The size of the mirror dictated the size of the washstand so it's a bit out of scale. The basin is a plastic jam container you get with your hotel breakfast.

The towel rack was easy to make with bits of wood and grill sticks. The shelf is also made the easiest possible way with bits of wood. The two stools are wooden candlesticks turned upside down.

How to make a crystal chandelier

I read about how to make chandeliers from beads in one of Eva Malmsten's wonderful dollhouse books. When I saw it for the first time I knew I would never be able to do anything like that, and then I went to a hobby shop and bought a box of beads. The pictures below are not the same chandelier I showed in the previous post, but the principle is the same. You need a lot of patience. And good tools, which I didn't have when I made the first one.

The more threads you have the more gorgeous the chandelier - and the more work of course. Eight to twelve is good, but for this one I was lazy and just took six. You need to tape them because while you thread one the others will fly all over the place.

 You thread as many beads as would make a nice lower part of the chandelier. Then you need a larger ring. For the first chandelier I used a junk bracelet, but this is just a plastic ring that I later covered with studs.

Now comes the tricky bit when you thread the upper part of the chandelier

When you have done that, another small ring to hold all the threads. 

Then of course you need to form it a bit better.

Putting up walls

I have now come to the moment, about a month after I first started, when I had to decide whether I wanted more rooms in my house. I didn't have to, but it was a challenge. I had to make a decision because I also wanted to have floors and wallpaper. Reluctantly, I made some purchases from ebay (again, I will show eventually how I made much more intereseting floors), but I used my imagination when I made the wall between the dining room and the drawing room. The dining room wallpaper is self-adhesive shelf paper.

And, viewed from the other side

And the full view of the drawing room

There are quite a few new details that need description. I wasn't confident about regular dollhouse lighting so I got Christmas tree lights. Viewed from the five-year perspective, it was highly unprofessional and quite ugly, but I was pleased then. I painted the light-holders and even the wiring. The mirror was among the very first things I made, even before I had a mitre box, therefore it isn't very neat, but I have kept it for sentimental reasons. I made the coffee table from a bit of my favourite venetian blind with four chess pieces for legs. The tea set is from ebay, as is the table lamp, made from a copper coin. But I made the chandelier.

I saw when I took the picture that it was a bit lopsided. But I made it myself, following the instructions from a book by Eva Malmsten. It is a quite a job because you need to keep the threads apart. I will show in a separate post how to do it. The large circle is a bracelet and the small a matching ring (both junk). The crystals are beads which I have threaded on copper wire. The hanging icicles are Christmas decoration.

Recycling tips for miniature-makers

The most important source of inspiration for me, at the early stages of my miniature making, and until today, has been the Swedish miniaturist Eva Malmsten. She has written several books about dollhouses, all about recycling, using your dollhouse eyeglasses and see possibilities where other people just see rubbish. It's all very nice to have expensive pieces made by professionals, and every now and then it's fun to make something from kit, but the most exciting thing about miniature making, at least for me, is turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, extracting an object from its old, useless shell, putting together incompatible objects into something new. This is creative. I cannot draw or paint, but I discovered that I was quite good at making small things. Yet without Eva's brilliant tips I would not have discovered the Marvelous World of Rubbish. Here are some things that come handy for miniature making.

 

Sometimes you see at once that buttons make picture frames and jar lids, that corks make bowls, that eye-drop containers make bottles, IKEA pegs make furniture legs, bottlecaps make pie forms, chess pieces make lamp stands. But sometimes you look at something for ages, literally for years, before you suddenly see exactly how it can be used. Or it can be the other way round: I would be looking for something to make a door handle, or a sugar bowl, or a TV screeen, or a towel rack. And I go through my supplies and find something unexpected. It is fun to copy something from a book or from the web, but the most fun is coming up with something you have never seen before. I will be showing lots of miniatures I have made from rubbish, and oftentimes they are not in any way inferior to what you can buy, and they are always unique.