Disaster inspection

As some of you, my dear readers, already know, my large Victorian house, Womble Hall, was badly damaged during relocation from the UK to Sweden. It's too late to complain because it has been in storage for almost a year, and even if I could get compensation, the damage is done, and no money can replace it. I am particularly frustrated because the movers packed chairs and tables in layers upon layers of cardboard, while they transported the delicate dollhouse without any protection at all! But there is nothing I can do about it, so I am pretending that Womble Hall was bombed during the Blitz and has to be restored to its former glory. The former glory, by the way, is this:

On the outside:

And this is what I got out of storage

I considered sitting down and crying, but it wouldn't be of much help. This house has cost me more money in kit and material than I am prepared to confess, as well as about 2000 hours of work so I am grateful I got it over in one piece - well, almost. I anticipate the repairs will take many, many hours, and I will take it easy and enjoy it just as I enjoyed building it before. Maybe I can make improvements. Maybe I can re-decorate, as they would have after the Blitz. On this positive note, some closer inspection. It is much, much worse than it looks. The lights do not work of course; several windows are smashed, floors are broken, wallpaper torn.

One of my cats immediately discovered the perfect hiding place. This is a classic: cat in a dollhouse. Something from a horror movie.

I have now barred the front door with a piece of cardboard because he did some further damage in the room. I can't imagine how this huge cat can squeeze through the tiny door - and turn round! Cats are amazing.

It took me weeks to approach the house because I really didn't know where to start. I then decided to start from the attic because it seemed the least damaged. I couldn't be more wrong, because that's when I discovered that the roof has gone off. It's a miracle they didn't lose it altogether. So I removed it, but I know I won't be able to put it back on my own.

 

Two dormers are falling off, two window sills are missing, the ceilings are torn, and on the outside tiles are missing. That will be the easiest to replace. So far I have put the roof away in my store room, safe from the cats.

Then I stared at the attic for a long time, again not knowing where to start.

 

I decided to restore one room at a time, so that when I have done one room I will see the result. This is how I worked last time round, even if it meant that I had to remove objects from rooms every now and then. And I decided to start with the room that seemed in need of least work, the guest bedroom on the right.

More than two years ago I wrote a series of blog posts showing the various rooms in Womble Hall, which will now be very helpful in restoring them. Here is the guest bedroom, although I have made some changes, including new fabric on the canopy.

As I said in that post, the floor in the guest room is still made from self-adhesive paper, admittedly in a sophisticated pattern, but my intention was to replace it with hardwood at some point. I considered whether this was the right point and decided against it. It takes about 50 hours to make an interesting floor for a room this size, and at the moment I'd rather use these hours to make more repairs. When the house is fully restored, I will make new floors. I know this probably goes against common sense, but I do want to see the house in presentable shape soon.

So I did some cosmetic repairs: glued on wallpaper and mouldings that had got off, straightened the floor, and that was it. I think the room is inhabitable now - apart from the roof of course. The beam is hiding the light strip so it will either have to be mended or removed. I suspect that lighting technologies have developed since we wired the house four years ago.

Also against common sense I put back as much of the furniture and accessories as I could find in my storage boxes. The four-poster was also slightly damaged, but it was easy to mend. I will have to remove everything when it comes to putting back the roof, but meanwhile there is one room at Womble Hall where poor residents can live, and there is even a portable heater to keep them warm.

To be continued.

Dealing with treasures, cont.

If you are curious about what I did with all the treasures I showed in my previous post, here are some reports.

I was right about the unusual chest of drawers: it looks great in the yarn shop. The old table was, like in so many projects, a temporary solution that just hanged on, until the right piece turns up. I have put some stuff in drawers.  The cash machine is probably slightly too big, but I don't think it matters. It looks much better than the old, modern one made from a printie.

Removing the glass and putting it back was easy, so my glazing solution works well. (You can see the before-image of the shop in the linked post).

Replacing the chandelier in the reception room was surprisingly painless. I didn't even have to remove the whole floor above, just lift it a bit. I think I did the same when I put up the current one. This is possible because I always assemble floors on card so they are relatively easy to remove or lift.

Since the new chandelier has a hanging hook rather than a ring, I thought about a new way of attaching it. Rather than using thin wine wire as before, I made a loop from champagne wire, put the ends through the hole and bent the ends. It is a stronger fixture; it looks both neater and more natural. The whole operation took me about five minutes. In case you wonder, the ceiling rose is made from a cheese box lid.

Obviously, I had to remove all objects from the drawing room above, and when I was putting them back I thought that the new clock would look nice on the chest. And more period-correct.

This is what happens: adding and replacing all the time. We do this in our 1:1 life as well, don't we?

I planned to move the chandelier from the reception room to the upper hall, but it proved next to impossible. The floor above is firmly attached, with a staircase glued on to it, so that would demand serious reconstruction I am not prepared for.

 

After trying the chandelier here and there, I have decided to replace the one in the music room. I am doing it reluctantly and with a strong sense of guilt because this chandelier was among the very, very first objects I made, more than ten years ago. I still like it and will use it in another project. But at the moment this feels the right thing to do.

Again, I didn't have to remove the whole floor, and I used my newly acquired technique, although this chandelier has a ring rather than hook. So this time I did the opposite: made a hook out of wire, ran it through the whole and bent, then hung the chandelier on it. This way, next time I want to change the light, I won't have to remove floors. Why haven't I thought about it before? Seems elementary now.

So the music room now looks like this (I see I need to adjust the candles - they keep falling off). 

Wait a minute, you are probably saying now, what about the master bedroom that was supposed to get one of those grand chandeliers to match the mirror? Ah, do you remember the two-arm chandelier I was planning to put into the working kitchen? It is now going into the master bedroom. The room above is nursery which doesn't even have a hardwood floor (reminder to improve this!) so it was as easy as it can be. And here we are. Yes, the ceiling rose is a yogurt lid. 

Full view of the room:

I am sooooo pleased with all these changes, not least because they turned out to be significantly less arduous than anticipated. And as I am looking at the rooms, it feels they have always been like this. A good sign.

I now have two nice lights to use somewhere else. I am sure I will think of the right place for them.

The outcome of this exercise is that I have discovered carefully suppressed flaws that need attention (not just the nursery floor), and I am looking forward to returning to Womble Hall after a long pause while I was occupied with other projects.

Come back soon.

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!

Step by step: basement entrance hall

For obvious reasons there was no basement entrance in my first house, and actually no entrance at all since I didn't have any front walls. In the cabinet house, I made a door and fixed it, improbably, on the inside of the front, because I didn't want to give away the mystery.

In planning the basement in Womble Hall, my first instinct was to remove the central divider altogether and have a large entrance, but then I decided I wanted a larder after all. At the early stages of the basement, I just put some baskets and crates in the hall. My idea was that it was the delivery entrance from which things would be carried over to the kitchens. It was also a suitable space to display some interesting objects from the original house, like the barrels (made from corkscrews).

I started making a diamond-patterned floor for this hall (scroll down to the end of the blog post to see it), but at that time I wasn't yet very good at making patterned floors, and it ended up completely crooked. I discarded it and replaced it which a piece of chequered  fabric (my husband's old shirt) glued onto a piece of old card. It has remained so, but I will replace it eventually, maybe returning to the first diamond pattern because it was pretty and period-authentic. I will have to remove skirting to do this.

I didn't move on a lot, but kept adding Chippendale furniture to it, like the double chest and the dower chest. They take a lot of space, but there is no other place in the house to put them. They also obscure the view of the back part of the room, so I will need to think of a better way. There is a dresser at the back that does not belong in scale or style or anything. It's an antique piece that I like very much, but it will have to go. I will most likely make another open-top dresser. The sconces at the front are fake, made from felt-tip pen caps. The ceiling light is from an online shop - one of those things I bought early, before I knew I could make them.

 

There is a lot more I can do in this room. The walls are bare, but what would there be in a delivery entrance? Shelves maybe?

Through the door at the back you can see the rear corridor that I have already mentioned in several posts. Perhaps in the next post, I will reveal all the secret spaces of this house. Come back soon!

Step by step: larder

There was no larder in the original Victorian house, but there was a cellar where storage of food, preserves, wine and other stuff started. There was no space for a cellar in the cabinet house, so some of the objects were in the kitchen and some were saved for later. And "later" came with Womble Hall that had a suitable room for a larder, to which a door leads from the working kitchen. The larder appeared briefly in some pictures in this previous post.

To display miniature food you need a lot of shelves and other storage so this is where I started. Then I just kept adding stuff, such as glass jars. Eventually, I built more shelves and also aged them with diluted stain for otherwise they didn't look natural.

Most of the food is handmade by me, although there are some things that came in large bundles. Of course cheese and bread would not be left on shelves, particularly with mice running around, but with closed cabinets of course you cannot see the stuff. So this is typical poetic license.

There is a lot more I can do in this room, like adding wall units or hooks to hang things from. The problem with overcrowded rooms is that eventually you cannot see anything in the background, and this room is narrow and deep. But even as it is I think it is a nice complement to the kitchen.

Step by step: working kitchen

Reiterating: the difference between best kitchen and working kitchen is that the former is for show while all cooking is done in the latter. This explains why the working kitchen in Womble Hall is so much more crowded and messy.

In my post about the best kitchen I described how it came about and how it developed so I won't repeat it. I will start with planning the working kitchen at Womble Hall.

Both kitchens would be in the basement, and after some considerations I decided that the working kitchen would be to the right, because from that room there was a door to what could only be a larder. (There is also a door at the back leading into the rear corridor to which I will return in due time).

I decided to keep the flagstone floor in the working kitchen, simply because I had put so much energy into it.  There were other options, but really, I liked that floor too much. I also kept the splash wallpaper, although of course I had to make a new set.

I worked quite a while on the basement before I put on the roof. And that didn't happen for a long time, by which I discovered that some things were left unfinished.

But after I assembled the whole house I didn't do anything radical in the kitchen, just kept adding things here and there. The most conspicuous change was the new cupboard. Reluctantly, as with many other items, I discarded the first dresser I made when I was a beginner. But the sink is still there, and the very first table is also there. As are the dolls.

The utensils in this room are mostly recycled rubbish. The milk canisters, for instance, are eye-drop containers. The black pots and pans on the shelf on the left wall are painted wood. But if you look carefully and know what you are looking for there are some expensive antiques hiding among other stuff.

Among interesting features of this room are servant bells.

The door in the foreground leads to the larder, which I will probably show next. The door in the background leads to the corridor, and when the main lights are switched off, light comes from the corridor, which I will also show in due time.

There isn't much space for more stuff here, but I have a whole wall of utensils on the inside of the front, and I keep adding to it. I need to put stuff into cupboard drawers. Nobody will ever see it, but it's important for authenticity.

Step by step: bathroom

Bathrooms are very interesting to make, just like kitchens, because there are many tiny details that you can add more and more of.

This is what the bathroom in Womble Hall looks like at the moment. It is on the upper floor, next to the master bedroom. There isn't a direct door from the bedroom to the bathroom, but you must go through a corridor. Maybe it's not correct, but there wasn't any other natural place for the bathroom.

 

The very first bathroom I made was in my old Victorian house in a bookshelf, which I keep referring to. I still have the bathtub, and I keep changing my mind between it and the current sugar-bowl with lion feet (you can see a glimpse of it in the picture).

In the next step, I added a washbasin and other stuff. I was a beginner then and didn't know what materials and tools to use, but I had fun. As you see, the tiles have found their way into Womble Hall after all these years.

When I moved the house into a cabinet, I kept the bathroom, but it became very small. Yet the concept is the same, and has remained so.

When I started planning Womble Hall I wasn't sure where the bathroom would go. I first thought in the attic, but it would be very uncomfortable for people in the bedroom if they had to run upstairs in the middle of the night. I also considered the large right-hand room on the upper floor, that eventually become the study.

But already on the very first picture of the shell, long before it was glued, you can see the bathroom in its current place.



I made the first attempts decorating the bathroom early in the project, precisely because I simply copied it from the previous house. Maybe it was my lack of imagination, but I really liked the old bathroom, and even though not a lot has survived, the general sense has. As I explain in that early blog post, I have seen pictures of bathrooms in people's dollhouses where they have just pasted the whole sheet of tiles on the wall, and it doesn't look natural. So here I pasted the tiny tiles one by one. Yes, it did take some time. But I am never in a hurry with my mini projects. The floor is also a commercial sheet that I bought very early in my mini-making days, today I would have made in myself. But the sheet was not large enough, so the back part of it is a photocopy. Can you tell?

In the picture below you see a door in the back wall. Behind the door is a corridor, and in the next picture you can see what I made there.

 

As with all other rooms, it took a long time before I could make any final arrangements. In this case particularly, I had to finish the rear corridor (which I will show in due time), but as soon as that was done, the basic work on the bathroom was done as well.

After that, I added some objects, and the final touch came with Adam ceilings.

Since then, I made the Chippendale dressing table and two small tables - you cannot have too many tables in a Victorian house. I may add another mirror over the dressing table, and the hooks keep falling off, as you see, I must fix them better.I also want to make a proper Victorian water cistern over the toilet. Once again, a project is never ever finished.

Step by step: upper hall

Like the grand entrance hall I described yesterday, upper hall has no predecessors in any earlier projects, and, also like the grand hall, I had no other options than to build it as designed. (I guess I could have closed the stairwell and make a different room, but then the grand staircase would not lead anywhere, and that wouldn't make sense).

This is the most recent view:



Similarly to the grand hall, it took me a long time to plan, and, for instance, I knew that I needed to finish the floors before I could attach the railings.

I knew from the beginning that the hall would be yellow, so when I tentatively painted the back of the house, the back wall of the hall was yellow and has remained so.

 

This is the first picture of the hall - the shell not glued yet, and it stayed the same for a very long time. I put some objects in so that  it didn't feel totally empty - as I did with all other rooms, but at this point I didn't know at all what else might be here. I made a chandelier to hang over the stairwell, but it was too heavy to attach with tack, and it would be some time before I could attach it permanently.

During the Christmas party in 2014, that I have referred to several times, the hall looks just as three months earlier, but my guests didn't notice that there were no floors nor railings. Just tells you how much people pay attention.




I thought I would have long vertical panels on the back wall that I cut from old postcards, but then I found a set of magnets in a museum shop. This was still before I glued the shell.

When I finally did glue the shell, I was busy making floors and hanging wallpaper, and anyway, I didn't quite know yet what I wanted to do with the hall. I would put in some objects and then move them away as they found their place elsewhere. It wasn't until April 2015 that I finally decorated the ceiling as I had planned for a while and attached the chandelier, but only because I was sealing off the rear corridor from the floor of which the chandelier was to hang.

At some point I must have inserted the window, but not registered it. It is a slightly stupid window because as my house stands by the wall, there is no view and not even any light coming in,although I have ideas about what to do with it.

In the pictures from late November 2015, when my son-in-law made lights, you can still see that the upper hall is a mess.





No floors, no railings, and even the doors are not inserted yet. But all other rooms were sort of finished, so it was high time to deal with the hall.

I finished the floor, which was a laborious task, but truly rewarding.

 

I say it in the linked blog post, but I will say it again: I estimate that it took me 50 hours to make this floor. Talk patience!

Then I finally tackled the small back stairs and the railings, and if you have ever made railings you know that they just won't stay. Again, I could have discarded the railings that came with the kit and built my own with individual spindles, but this will be in my next life.

 

Looking back at the process, like this, makes me realise again how much time and effort lies behind every part of this project. I am glad I have documented it in detail, for instance, finally inserting doors,  adding mouldings and making the Adam ceiling.

And that's it, really. All that has changed - or has been constantly changing - is new Chippendale chests and side tables moving in and out.



There is only so much you can have even in a Victorian room, so I am not sure what else may happen here. It is doubtless a very grand room and probably the first you see because it is exactly at eye level. I am pleased that it has turned out so well.

Step by step: grand entrance hall

I have realised that I never finished my step-by-step, room-by-room tour of Womble Hall. The last room I showed was the smoking room, and prior to that I also showed the reception room, music room,  drawing room, dining room,  and master bedroom. There are quite a few rooms left, even before I move on to attic and basement.

This is what the entrance hall looks like today. Like everything else, it is not finished. Nothing is ever finished in a dollhouse project. But it is finished enough to be displayed with pride.



This is probably the only room that didn't have any predecessors in earlier projects, simply because there was no space in my other houses for a grand staircase like this.

I did, however, have a staircase even in my very first dollhouse in a shelf. I was very pleased with it, and I still think it was a very bold thing to do, just a couple of months after I first started miniature-making. When we moved to the UK and I resurrected the old house in a cabinet, I kept the stairs that didn't lead anywhere.

When Womble Hall kit arrived, the entrance hall was the only room where I didn't have to make any decisions. It could only be the entrance hall. When I dry-assembled, I attached the stairs with tack.

 

You get the idea, but it was one of the rooms that took a long time to plan. There is a rear corridor with a door on the right, and it had to be designed and finished before the final assembly. So it took a couple of months before I got down to this room, thinking it over while I was making chimney breasts and deciding on floors.

I chose to paint the walls rather than hanging wallpaper, and it was the right choice, I think, given the many other details that came later. I painted all walls flat, and I also painted the back partition. I have said repeatedly how much I like this kit because of its hidden spaces. The mysterious door at the back of the hall is exciting.

 

In this picture, from mid-October 2014, the floor is paper, and the wall panels are not finished, and yet you get a sense of what this room is supposed ti be.

The next time I returned to the hall was to make a proper wooden floor. This was still before the shell was glued. Prior to that, I had to decide on the decoration in the rear corridor. Only a tiny part of it would be visible through the door, and yet it had to be done properly. In this picture from the first step of assembly (mid-March 2015) you can see the back wall of the corridor, the half on the right, that will be visible, with proper wallpaper, and the left part, which will be sealed off, with simple printer paper.

I covered the floor of the rear corridor with self-adhesive shelf lining. You have to look very carefully to see that it isn't a proper wooded floor. You can only see a couple of square inches of it anyway.

I now realise that I missed the moment when I put in the partition. Obviously I had to insert the door before I glued in the partition, and since I have light in the corridor I must have added it before as well. The light is a LED strip with a battery attached to the back of the house. My clever son-in-law says there is a better way, but I will leave it to him.

Finally, in May 2015 it was time to deal with the grand stairs, and I came with a solution that I had initially dismissed as going too far. This is a good example of how you put higher and higher demands on yourself and how one detail leads to the next.

For instance, I was not longer happy with the floor because it felt too conspicuous. I tried once again to use shelf lining:

I cut the original sheet into small strips and arranged them into parquet patterns. But you know what? I said this before. Once you have made wooded floors you will never again be satisfied with paper. So I used the same pattern, but made the floor from coffee stirrers. 

I had various things in the rear corridor, but eventually put a Chippendale hutch cabinet there.

It looks like by that time I had glued on the rails. A dedicated dollhouse-maker would have discarded the rails provided with the kit and built new ones with individual turned spindles. Maybe I will do it some time. But for now, I rounded the edges of the spindles with sandpaper, and I also added mouldings on the outside for a more finished look.

In due time, I inserted the double doors and founds interesting door knobs. I invested in some expensive antique objects. And the final touch was of course the magnificent Adam ceiling.

So here we are, a year later: not much changed, but a few items added and perhaps some more can be added, but as I keep repeating: a project like this is never complete.

For contrast, I will show what three professional designers did with this room, whereupon the house was sold for £25,000.

Borrowers room box

On the first day of 2017 I have started  a project that I have been planning for a while. I will use it for a workshop later this year.

The theme is Mary Norton's Borrowers, a children's book about miniature people who live under floorboards in a large Victorian house and "borrow" everything they need from big people upstairs.

In many ways, the challenge of this project is the opposite of my usual recycling strategy: finding everyday objects that I can turn into something miniature. This time I must shrink myself and see real objects from this perspective, deciding what might be useful to "borrow", including tools to make things.

There are pictures in my copy of the book that give a good idea of what the dwelling looks like and what some of the objects are. There is also a detailed description that goes:

"Homily was proud of her sitting room: the walls had been papered with scraps of old letters out of waste-paper baskets, and Homily had arranged the handwriting sideways in vertical stripes which ran from floor to ceiling. On the walls repeated in various colours, hung several portraits of Queen Victoria as a girl; these were postage stamps, borrowed by Pod some years ago from the stamp box in the morning room. There was a lacquer trinket box, padded inside and with the lid open, which they used as a settle; and that useful stand-by - a chest of drawers made of match boxes. There was a round table with a red velvet cloth, which Pod had made from the wooden bottom of a pill box supported on the carved pedestal of a knight from the chess set..."

I'll stop here, but it goes on, and more details are revealed later.

 

So there are several interesting aspects to this project. It needs to be as close as possible to the descriptions and pictures. It must be period-correct: no plastic, nothing that a Victorian household wouldn't have (of course, I can paint plastic to look like brass or tin). It also has to be real objects or objects that the borrowers could make with the few tools they have, such as needles, safety pins, or a half of a pair of scissors they use to slice "borrowed" potato.

However, before I can think about the details, some basic decisions. Because this room box will eventually be on public display, I decided to use a proper wine box. (Has anyone noticed that it is increasingly difficult to get hold of wine boxes? All shopkeepers want them for window displays). The only one I had available was the one that once was a yarn shop, then an Alice in Wonderland box. I had already dismantled Alice, so the box was half empty, but it still had the many doors, a row of lamps, wallpaper and flooring. In these situations I usually ask myself: "Who is this idiot who glued wallpaper directly onto the walls..." So this was the starting point:

 

To begin with, the ceiling in the borrowers' dwelling would not be painted. If I had a new wine box I would just have left it unpainted, but unfortunately that wasn't an option. Instead I covered the ceiling with self-adhesive shelf lining, tested and discarded for flooring in my large dollhouse. But here it worked, because the pattern should be in 1:1 scale.

 

The box is obviously upside down, so this is the ceiling, which is the floorboards of the big house.

Next, as you can read in the description above, the walls are papered with old letters, and these I printed out from the internet - there are scores of images of nineteenth-century handwritten letters.

 

The text says "scraps", but I didn't go that far. I didn't print out stamps of Queen Victoria, because I try to print out as little as possible, recycling what I have instead, and I have been saving some standard stamps - this is an anachronism I will allow myself.

Once again, the borrowers live under floorboards and use water pipes for heat and water. You can see pipes in the picture. I had been thinking about these pipes for a while, and this morning I got an idea of making them from kitchen towel rolls, but when I tested they were far too large - they just dominated the whole scene, even though they would be right in scale. I then tried dowel, but you cannot bend dowel the way water pipes bend, so I had to fall back on the well-tested method of drinking straws. They are definitely wrong scale, but as it turned out, they worked well and created the right kind of effect. 

I have a large supply of drinking straws that I use for various purposes, so I painted them copper, but I happened to have one straw painted black, so I tried painting copper on top of black, with a much better result. It really looks realistic. See for yourself. I wanted to build a complicated system of pipes, as they would have in an old house, and it took some elaborate engineering.

I will not show the whole process, but these pictures explain the method. I used toothpicks and grill sticks to attach the pipes to walls and to connect them. Then I used silver duct tape to enforce the connections, precisely like real copper pipes are connected with lead. 

You can see they are pipes, but they do not dominate the scene. 

Then I tentatively put in some suitable objects I had found. 

 

On the floor, Homily has red blotting paper that Pod borrows from upstairs. I don't know whether you can get blotting paper anywhere today, but I will investigate. So far, I have used soft craft paper. Some objects match the description. Homily knits the family's clothes from silk thread. They use thread spools to sit on. When did you last see a genuine wooden spool? I had some very old ones on my supplies. The watch in mentioned later in the book: Pod borrowed it from upstairs. The egg coddler in not mentioned, but I thought it would be just something Homily would like to have and Pod would be able to carry (he borrows a full-size cup at one point). The bath tub, that you cannot see very well behind the table, is exactly what it is in the book: a tin from foie de gras. All utensils in the shelf are metal lids so they are period-correct (well, almost). The shelf is temporary; I will make something that Pod is likely to be able to make. Of course I know how to make a chest of drawers from match boxes, but where can I get match boxes?? Will ask friends. 

This is how far I got today. Very pleased and looking forward to thinking of more things to add. 

To be continued.