End-of-year reflections

I marked the last day of miniature-making year by sorting my rubbish supplies.You know, those zillions of boxes and jars in which you save all will-come-handy-one-day things that you then forget about and never find when you need them. Boxes into which you sweep all current projects from the desk when guest are expected. Bits of wire, buttons, plastic cogs, golf pegs, broken pens, pretty ribbons. I do have well-organised Very Useful Boxes for all these things, but sometimes you are in a hurry or simply too lazy to put things in the right place. However, at least once a year...

Whether there is a symbolic significance in this action I don't know.

I have also thrown away a good deal of saved materials of the kind that are easily replaced, like champagne wire or tea lights. I have once again stated that there is a lot of stuff I haven't used so far, but maybe one day. It has happened that I found a thing useful five years after I had saved it.

For the first time in weeks and weeks I can see the surface of my workbench. For how long?

In the middle of the afternoon there is a knock on the door. It is amazing that in the UK, New Year Eve is a working day, and post is delivered. My long-awaited order from the USA.

 

It will keep me busy for a good deal of 2016.

When I re-read my blog posts from last December, two things strike me: how much I have done since then and how slow I have moved on. This time last year, the house wasn't assembled yet. I was decorating walls. I  was making the roof.

But to an untrained eye I am sure the house looks just as it did then, held together by tack and masking tape.  

I have spent 553 hours working on the house during this year.  (This does not include other miniature projects, such as furniture or dolls).

And I can see the result. I am proud of the work I have done: floors, ceilings, doors, mouldings - details that outsiders may not reflect upon but that take hours of patience and frequently hours of frustration. Most of all I am proud of the lights.

I am looking forward to another happy miniature year. Together with gardening, miniature-making gives me the energy to work and live. It gives me peace of mind. It gives me the joy of creation.

I wish a very happy new year to all friends, real and virtual, who have assisted and encouraged me, to all my unknown blog readers, to all miniature lovers. See you in 2016!

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.

Adam ceiling, dining room

My next Adam ceiling project is the dining room.

If you haven't yet seen my ceilings, here is the grand hall, the upper hall and the smoking room.

To make the dining room ceiling, I had to remove the floor in the room above it, which is the smoking room. (By the way, I did add a filigree ceiling rose to the smoking room ceiling, which was easy). Luckily, for whatever reason, one of the skirting boards in the smoking room had not been properly glued, so it was easy to lift up the floor. Of course I had to remove all the objects first. I also had to remove all objects from the dining room.

The old ceiling in the dining room is one that I was very proud of when I made it, almost a year ago. When the decoration - a plastic placemat -  fell off, I glued it back with very strong glue. Now I had to remove the decoration which still left me with a thick layer of glue. There is only one effective way of removing old glue, with a hair dryer. So that's what I did. It took longer time than I wanted to spend on such a trifle.  

Since there was already a drilled hole in the ceiling, I had to centre the paper around this hole and arrange the pattern accordingly. I glued on the filigree ceiling rose, which, unintentionally, made it much easier to test the paper. There is a chimney breast in this room so that I had to cut the paper around the chimney breast. All this should have been done a year ago, but then a year ago I didn't have the Adam paper. So I felt like a poor architect hired by a mad customer to put in new Adam ceilings in a house. 

Here is the result:

There will be coving of course, to cover the edges. Also, while I was messing about, one string in the crystal chandelier broke so I will have to mend it. Good that it broke before I put it up again.

I think it is a magnificent ceiling, and the whole house is starting to have a completely new look. I feel a bit bad about the old plastic placemat that has been so helpful for many projects, but it's time to move on. Come back soon.

Adam ceiling, upper hall

I left off yesterday having made some preparations for the ceiling in the upper hall that I resumed today. The problem with upper hall ceiling (as with some other ceilings I will yet have to consider) is that it is already decorated, and, firstly, I like the decoration, and secondly, it would be a huge trouble to remove it. Hence, I need to decorate the ceiling with Adam paper around the existing ceiling panel.

 

It is interesting how bare the ceiling looks now that I have started making Adam ceilings. Half a year ago when I first made it I was perfectly satisfied.

As with the Great hall ceiling, the paper is far too large. I thought I would use the same technique I used when I made the great hall: by cutting the details and pasting on a sheet of lining paper that I would then paste on the ceiling. However, when I cut the pattern and tested, I realised that with the existing panel I would never manage to make it neat. So I decided to paste the cut-outs direct on the ceiling.

First of all, I had to drill a hole for the chandelier. It wasn't possible to remove the floor upstairs, and there is a partition in the middle anyway, so I drilled as close as possible to the partition (and will later hide it behind skirting). Then I assembled chandelier - filigree ceiling rose - circular ceiling pattern.

 

At the very last moment I realised that it made sense to glue the metal rose before hanging up the assembly - one step less to think about. Then I led a metal wire through the drilled hole and fixed with tape. Then I glued the paper circle onto the ceiling.

 

As I said, the original pattern was far too large, but I cut various details and arranged them in a somewhat symmetrical pattern. I like the result.


I may add some more details, but probably it will be too much. I will leave it like this for a while. I guarantee that there is no other ceiling like this in the world, in any scale.

This room is now very eclectic with Adam ceiling and Victorian tiles, but Victorian houses were eclectic so I won't worry about it.