Danish house, part 5

 Read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 of this story. 

Once again, I am renovating this house for a specific purpose, and a true collector would probably be horrified, because many authentic details will be lost. I bought this house extremely cheap, and I won't ever sell it as a vintage item so I can do whatever I want with it. 

And I want a roof that looks like a house roof, not like a dollhouse roof. It's fine when the house is a toy for a child to play with, but a single-sheet roof does not look natural. So it's not just that the roof was damaged - it needed a new look. 

I carefully studied period-correct roofs (there was a very interesting discussion thread, in Swedish, about various options), and I considered using corrugated cardboard for tiles, but finally decided on plain black slates. 

I have done this before, and this time I didn't use cereal boxes, but rather recycled binders from my old students' theses that I had been saving for this purpose. They have just the right colour and texture. 

I marked the tiles with a bone folder - an indispensable tool that I originally acquired for book binding, but that proved extremely versatile. Then cut the sheet into horisontal strips and glued directly onto the roof, shifting every other strip. 

I think this picture very clearly illustrates the difference - and I almost forgot to take it. I turned some of the tiles upward a bit, to make them look more realistic. I may also sand them slightly to age them. 

It took the time it took, but I am very pleased with the result. I will probably paint the ridge black, but will keep the wooden beams. I don't like the look of the chimney but haven't yet decided what to do with it. 

Next, and as a little side project before embarking on floors, I made curtains for the living room. I wanted something unusual, and I remembered that my mother-in-law, who was very much into modern design, had curtains matching wallpaper, and this felt exactly the kind of thing a functionalist designer would do. 

It took some thinking and a few trials-and-errors, but finally I figured out how to do it. 

First, I printed out the Jacobsen wallpaper in very thin, 45-gram paper. Then I cut two bits of corrugated cardboard (the one I had discarded for roof tiles) and glued on the wallpaper to emulate folds. For rod I used a skewer, hung the curtains into jewellery jump rings and attached with eye screws. 

Of course you cannot fully draw these curtains, but they look much more realistic than most dollhouse courtains I have seen, including those in museums. 

Well, now I have no further pretexts to avoid dealing with floors and the ground-floor wallpaper, but it is a serious decision, and I need to think it through. Meanwhile, I will focus in some details, like period-correct ceiling lights. I can also make some kitchen items. Come back soon! 

Step by step: reception room

As I have been making and sharing Chippendale furniture recently I have realised that I have no good pictures of Womble Hall room by room. When I post something saying that this particular piece will go into this or that room I have no pictures to link to.

I have also been planning to write blog posts following the progress of one and the same room over two years. Yes, it has been two years, and I am not finished (depends of course on how you define "finished").

It will take me some time to write these posts, but I think it will be interesting for myself, and for you, dear reader. Occasionally, when I look at some old picture I can't believe what it once looked like.

I will start with the reception room, and I will both insert pictures and links to earlier relevant posts.

So: the main kit arrived just about two years ago, and I started priming and painting, but I made a dry assembly at an early stage, to see what the various rooms might be. In this post, for instance you can already see that I put in a fireplace, a mirror and Chippendale chairs, and they have remained in the same place.

I had not remembered, when I started writing this post, that I actually began with the reception room, testing the walls and the paneling. So here is the very first picture of the reception room:

 

The wallpaper is not the same as in the final decoration, the upper rail is cut from a 1:1 wallpaper, the floor is from the old Victorian house and now in a different room. But the white panel with golden squares is still there.

The next thing I made in this room was a chimney breast. I didn't have chimney breasts in the old house, but here I wanted to do everything properly. This is what it looked like when I was finished:

Note that I had some objects in the room all the time, even though the walls were bare. I thought it was important to have the details for overall effect.

In the next step, I removed the back and painted and wallpapered it while it was flat, which I still, after many mistakes and failures, recommend rather than decorating a fully assembled house. In this picture you can see the back wall of the reception room, now with the final wallpaper and beginning of paneling.

It took almost three months before I moved on with this room because I was working on the basement. But when I went back to reception room it was time to decorate the side walls. And I made a daring attempt.

Here is what I ended up with. It was grand, but eventually I had to tear it down. The seams didn't look neat, and I couldn't think of a good way to fix them. Pity, because it does look fabulous. But I know I would have gone crazy after a while.

By Christmas 2014 I had made significant progress, but had still not glued the shell together. At my Christmas party, people admired the house, but they didn't see that it wasn't glued together, that the wallpaper was white-tacked, that the stairs were not attached at all, or that the windows and doors weren't properly inserted.

By the end of January, I made the ceiling decoration:

I haven't got a detailed description of how I made this one, but a similar.

Mid-February, I was prepared to start gluing, but that's when I noticed a lot of small mistakes, including the reception room walls. This is what it looked like when I made the correction. Note that I had given up on the previous upper rail and instead used edges of a paper placemat.

Mid-March I finally glued the shell together, and the reception room, or what would become the reception room, can be seen in the left bottom corner:

 Of course you can see it as a step back, but at some point the shell had to be glued. As soon as I had managed, with huge effort, to force in all floor dividers, I put back as many objects as I could. So at the end of March the reception room looked like this:

And on the whole it still looks like this. The Greek statues are souvenirs from Greece. The chandelier is a Christmas ornament. The white pedestals are wedding cake decorations. The vases are from charity shops. But of course it didn't end here. For instance, I added fire to the fireplace. Not huge progress, but anyway. The old floor has been moved elsewhere so it's just bare primed surface.

 

In June 2015, I made a new floor for the reception room. It was a long project that took weeks. By that time, I had finally got mitre shears, and cutting crafts sticks became easier. After that, the room looked like this:

I believe by this time I had glued in the windows, but I had to wait with the doors until both this floor and the floor in the adjacent room were finished.

At the end of November 2015, my son-in-law helped me install lights. The reception room looked grand for Christmas.

Here, the door is properly set in, a Chippendale daybed has joined the chairs, and there are pictures on the walls. All small details, but make a huge difference.

In December, I made curtains for most of the rooms, including the reception room. And I also made new ceilings for all rooms, using the Adam gift wrapping paper. And added expensive Georgian cornices. After which the room looked like this (the cornice on the left looks a bit untidy, but that's because there is a wire clip in that corner):



You would think that was it. Well, maybe some more pictures, some more ornaments, but no major alterations. But a dollhouse project is never finished. I found a new chandelier. After that, the room looked like this:



Not a big deal, you say? Come and visit me and let's hear what you say then.

So this is how long I have come, two years after I started. 




As you see, there is now a doll, and I think she fits perfectly in this environment. Of the details, there is a Chippendale corner chair, window seat and fire screen. But don't ask me whether it is finished. It will never be.

More curtains

Curtain time again! I have fourteen front windows, and this is a very good occasion to decorate the inside of the fronts to create a sense of more rooms. So far, I only have yellow curtains on one wall, matching the one in the dining room. 

I will not show the technique because as was exactly the same as last time, and you can also see some other curtains I made. It was a while ago, and I didn't remember how I made them so I had to read my own instructions. I used a 50p silk scarf from a thrift shop. I pleated the main curtains, and I made very straightforward pelmets. For tie-backs I used ribbons from my stash. As with the other curtains, I used velcro-type picture hanging to attach the curtains to the wall.

I put a mirror between the curtains, and I will probably add wall sconces,  but because the wallpaper is patterned I will perhaps not hang any pictures or other ornaments - it won't look good. But on the green wall I will definitely add pictures.

This is what the front looks from the outside:

On the opposite front, I didn't want to have heavy curtains on the upper floor, and I also wanted more space for pictures, so I made fake roll-ups from a length of lacy border. I thought I would have the same curtains for all four windows, otherwise it would be to much. On the floors below, there are only two windows and a door.

It looks nice from the outside:



I took this picture before I added ivy.

Now all the remaining windows look bare. I will need to make more curtains. Come back soon.

Further fun with curtains

You are probably tired of my curtains, but there are some new techniques I want to share. I tested the yellow curtain on the inside of the fronts and thought it looks great. So I decided to make two more yellow curtains. However, I wanted to improve them, and first I tried to make a valance after a pattern I found on pinterest. This is an excellent tutorial which I have saved for the future, but at the moment I felt it was a bit too sophisticated. But I utilised the idea by cutting a pattern from card, intending to cover it with fabric.

While I was rummaging through my big bag of lace and trim I found something that gave me a better idea. I had used this trim in my retro house, just as it is, but I saw immediately that it would go well with the yellow curtain.

While the assembly was drying, I went back to the green curtain. Nobody corrected me last time when I wrote that I made tassels. I didn't mean tassels, I meant tie-backs. But I wanted to have tassels for such grand curtains, and it was easy to add. I guess everyone knows how to make tassels, but if by chance you don't, here is how you do it.

 

And here is the green curtain, with tie-backs and tassels. I will now insert it back into the room, probably fixing permanently with strong velcro.

Roll up curtain

After working with elaborate curtains I felt I wanted to make something simple, and I made a roll up curtain. In the attic, ceilings are low and windows smaller, so roll up curtains would be just right. In fact, I have one already, in the nursery, that came with some bundle.

It isn't neat, as I see now, probably needs ironing, even starching.

I have another commercial roll up, with a fabric that doesn't fit into my period, but it shows how easy it is to made.

 

Point of departure. The fabric is the same as the bedding.

 
Result:

As compared to hours spent on fancy curtains, this took about fifteen minutes. I am pleased. Here it is in the room:

More curtains

When you repeat a design, it goes faster, and you improve all the time and may want to re-make the first attempt. But it still takes a couple of hours to make curtains with this technique. 

This is how the purple curtain turned out:



I have also tested it in the reception room:

Because, as I noted yesterday, I am suddenly not at all sure that the yellow curtain goes well with the reception room decoration. So I moved it tentatively to the dining room:

I think it looks much better here. I am not fixing any of the curtains permanently yet; I will be moving them around for a while, until I am fully satisfied.

However, I am sure that this curtain is in the right place:

Just as in 1:1 environment, once you have hung up a curtain you cannot imagine how it could ever not have been there. The room has a cosier and more natural look.

Now I have made three curtains with exactly the same technique - except that the green one has a fringed pelmet - and I guess I could go on and make fifteen more for the remaining windows, but I may also try a different approach. There is scope for imagination, as Anne of Green Gables says.

Curtain attempt

Now that most of the interior decoration is done (I just have five more Adam ceilings to make, but there is no rush), I can start adding small objects.  I have three shoe boxes of objects from the old house: toys, vases, ornaments, paintings, mirrors, flowers, rugs, books. Plus all small things that I have bought or found in the past year, waiting to find their place. In  principle, I want everything to be movable, and I also want to see how things look before fixing them permanently. However, if you white-tack paintings they will start falling down soon, and the wallpaper will be damaged. And so on.

Anyway, today I made curtains. My issue with curtains is this:

 

This does not look natural, and I have always wondered why even professional dollhouse makers, like here (V&A Museum of Childhood, London), don't see how unnatural it looks.

I have read about making curtains with corrugated cardboard, and I have been saving some for this purpose.

Here is my point of departure:

 

Corrugated cardboard, a 30p silk scarf from a charity shop, lace, ribbon, a piece of L-shaped moulding, grill sticks. Patience.

As it turned out, the glue I used was wrong so I had to start over again and got distracted by another scarf, but to begin with, I glued lace onto the moulding:

This assembly is with different lace, which was originally a curtain that came with some joblot, but it wasn't neat. I had to cut it to suit my purpose.

 

Then, using a more appropriate glue, I glued the fabric onto corrugated cardboard and pressed in with grill sticks. I am sure there is an easier and smarter way of doing it, but this is how I did it.

 

After a while, when it had dried, it looked like this:

 

And this is what I wanted it to look like, since I was all the time consulting a picture I got from the net, but it just showed the result, not the process.

Next, I had to glue fabric on the other side of the cardboard piece because otherwise cardboard would be what you see through the window. The picture from the net withheld this information, but I figured it out myself. It also gave a neat side of the curtain.

 

Now the right-hand curtain is glued onto the lace assembly.

 

Repeat. 

 

Now the pelmet. I did try to make a wavy one, by stitching in two places in the middle, but this particular fabric didn't look good. So I had to go halfway.

And finally tassels. That's what often make miniature curtains look unnatural. Don't tie tassels too tight. I am not quite sure that this ribbon is right, but I can change it later.

 

I think that for the very first complicated curtain ever I've done well.

It is not attached permanently yet so I can trim everything that needs trimming. (As you see, the white-tacked paintings are falling off). It also strikes me that this curtain is perhaps too yellow for the room so I may move it elsewhere. But here is what it looks like through the window:

With trial and error, it took me four hours to make this curtain. It was a good way of spending Christmas Eve.