French cottage style bedroom

I am getting bolder and bolder with my Chippendale kits and want to try different techniques and finishes. I have several kits for chest of drawers, that are mostly similar, and my large house doesn't have room for more chests, so I decided to make a chest that didn't fit into any of my projects. The chest itself wasn't particularly interesting to make, exactly because they are more or less the same. I won't show it step by step, but what I did was paint it with antique white acrylic and then add decoupage decoration. I had never made proper decoupage, and I am not quite sure I made it correctly, but I was very pleased with the result.

The drawers are not glued yes, because I always insert drawer handles before I glue on the fronts. The kits comes with standard handles and plates, but I didn't think they were suitable for this style. I wanted something like I have on my 1:1 chest, metal rings. I have plenty of these from junk jewellery, but they must be attached to the drawer in some manner, and it took me some time to figure it out. As usual, I was just rummaging through my supplies when the solution jumped at me. 

 

These champagne wires are among the best and most versatile materials. Easy to work with too.


 

When I shared this picture in my Facebook groups, one friend commented: "Yes, this is what I always do". And I thought I had invented something remarkable.

Anyway, this piece did not fit with anything, but I wanted to make something to go with it and made a bed. Again, I won't show how I made it step by step, because it is exactly like other Chippendale beds, with stringed bottom. Like the chest, I decoupaged the headboard before assembly. 

 

Making the mattress was again straightforward when you have made it several times, but I have always had issues with bedding because it won't stay. Then I remembered a trick I have seen either in some book or on the web. If you want a piece of fabric to stay, glue it to aluminium foil. In this case, I didn't even have to glue, I simply sewed it inside the blanket.

 

Now I could tuck it in neatly. Mind, I would never ever have this pink in my own bedroom. But this seemed appropriate. And the two pieces went nice together.

 

Now, however, I had a dilemma. I already have a shelf full of single miniatures that do not fit in any existing projects. I put the chest and bed tentatively in a cardboard box, but realised I would have to make the whole environment: floor, ceiling, wallpaper, and the box was too small, and a larger box would be too large... So I made a compromise.

 

This is my first corner vignette, and next time I will do it better. When I asked advice of my miniature friends, they suggested foam board, mdf and other stuff, but I am a recycler, I don't want to buy materials unless absolutely necessary, and also I wanted to make the scene then and there. The wallpaper is a printie from the web, and I made the floor quickly (relatively, maybe two hours) from self-adhesive shelf lining, cutting 4 cm strips and gluing them in a pattern. I used 1:1 embossed wallpaper for mouldings.

The dressing table and the chair are temporarily borrowed from a different project. I have another table kit and may make it in the same style, or perhaps it's not necessary. Maybe sometime I will develop this project in a whole room box or even a small holiday cottage, but at the moment the two pieces are nicely displayed.  

By the way, the tea service comes from a set of earrings an American friend has given me.

Mosaic table

I have recently invested in another huge bundle of Chippendale/House of Miniatures kits, 35 pieces all in all. I still had some from previous purchases, but it was a good deal, and who knows how much longer these kits are available since they were discontinued since 1980s. I wonder how many of each kit was produced and how many can still be in circulation. It is expensive to get them over from the USA, but it's the only way, and if you split shipping costs by the number of kits, it's tolerable. I have only bought kits I know I want to make again - I am never again in my life making the breakfront or wardrobe. Or maybe I will some time in the future. What I am saying is that, once I have made all existing kits and have now started on duplicates, I want to experiment with different finishes and decorations, and I will also be bold.

While I was waiting for my parcels from the US, I kept thinking of possible variations of kits I had made before, like I have already done with Adam furniture. One idea I had was to make a table with mosaic tabletop, and the best kit for this was doubtless Queen Anne tea table. When I first made it, I failed spectacularly with mouldings, so this time I was very careful. I am worthless at mitring mouldings, even after all these years.

I will not show the project step by step, because it was exactly like the previous one (except that I did somewhat better with moulding). I used three coats of stain: brown mahogany, red mahogany and more brown mahogany until I was happy with the tone.

Before I glued on the legs, I made the mosaic tabletop. I learned to make egg-shell mosaic some years ago,  and I also made a tabletop then, although it doesn't feel as perfect as I thought then. But the technique is the same, and I again used two paints, gold and bronze. They are only slightly different, but the two shades create a nice effect.

 

Yes, I glued every single bit separately, no cheating. Tweezers and toothpicks and patience. I didn't clock the work, but estimate two to two and a half hours. I certainly feel it was worth the trouble. It's definitely OOAK, and while it probably is not good enough for Kensington Dollhouse Festival, I am really proud of it.

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!

Really small things

Every now and then I feel a need to challenge myself.

I have recently made some teeny-tiny things of the kind that makes you feel proud and that only other miniature people can appreciate because everybody else just thinks you are crazy.

Some time ago I made a kitchen cabinet. In the top cabinet I have some pretty cups and plates, but I have nothing in the drawer, which is of course absolutely wrong. I have recently by mistake bought a bundle of very nice things, including a set of cutlery. Just the thing you put in a kitchen drawer, yes?

But you cannot just put cutlery in a drawer, can you? The mistress of the house would be furious. (I would be in my 1:1 kitchen). 

  

You need a divider. And I can finally sort the cutlery in the right order: spoons, forks, knives. My husband and I have different opinions on this, and to avoid conflicts, I let him win in out 1:1 kitchen. But in my miniature kitchen I can have it my way.

 

 

You may have noticed that there are other interesting items in this bundle, like tin openers and a corkscrew. Of course a Victorian house would not have prominent twentieth-century tin openers because there were no tins at the time. But corkscrews... Did Victorians use corkscrews? I have always said that you learn a lot from miniature-making. A corkscrew is a very old invention. And I have for a long time wanted to have a corkscrew for my cellarette. It fits perfectly in the drawer.

 

But wait a minute! I have actually wanted to make a corkscrew! Obviously, I won't throw this one away, but having it as a model, I can make another one. All we need is a spring, of the kind you find in ball-point pens, and I have saved tons of them.

 Cut a piece, then drill a hole in a toothpick... Yes, you heard it, drill a hole in a toothpick.

Put the spring through the hole and trim. Then cut the toothpick to appropriate length.

You know which one is the original and which I have just made.

Speaking of cutlery, I have recently made some knives from hard tin foil, of the kind you find on wine bottles. Here are the steps:

It needs patience, but it's fun. Here are some more, also forks and spoons (the two spoons on the right I just used as models. They are - or used to be - earrings) .

I made some pencils for the nursery. It's easy: paint toothpicks and cut to a suitable length. You need to cut off the tip of the toothpick because it doesn't look natural. The yellow lead pencils are for the master's study. 

 

For some drawers in various parts of the house I want old maps and newspapers. There are lots of free printies you can find on the web, but the trick is to get them look old and battered. There are many ways of doing this, and I asked my Facebook groups for advice. Some was more helpful than other, and I tested a bit of everything. It's well known that you age white paper with tea or coffee. I had to be careful, because my maps and newspapers were printed with ink that runs. I used a piece of cloth that I dipped in coffee and wrung out really hard, then dabbed the paper. Then I crunched it - again very carefully - into a ball and let it dry, then smoothed it with a bone folder. Sanded lightly on the folds. Tore the edges with my nails. I am very, very pleased with the results. 

 

The maps are truly old, while the newspapers are 20th century. However, the master of the house is a magician and time-traveler so he would clearly have 20th century newspapers hidden in his house, and only he knows that one day people will walk on the moon. Anyway, it was fun to make. Took maybe three hours all in all. This is what outsiders never understand: it takes a lot of time and effort to make miniatures. You cannot just cut out a printie or assemble a kit. And that's what I love about this hobby.

The final micro-mini I will show today also took me many hours and demanded attention and patience. Some time ago, someone on FB, again, shared nail art in form of fruit. I know that I will never be able to do anything like that (mind, I have said this about almost everything I have done), so I bought a set. It was shipped from China and cost almost nothing.

 

Now, being nail art, these slices are paper-thin. The first mistake I made was gluing paper-thin strawberries onto the cake (which is a bottle top). It does not look natural, but it's too late. Next, I made a plate of lemons, arranging them a bit on top of each other, to look more like slices of lemon. You do slice lemon very thin. But the rest - I tried this and that, but it became clear that the only way to produce a credible effect was to glue three to four slices together so that each piece would be about 2mm thick. Yes, it was messy, and yes, it took the time it took. But I think it was worth the trouble.

I am not sure whether I will leave it as it is, a fruit platter, or arrange it in some other way, for instance, making some whole or half fruit from clay. But this was a good start toward something I had never done before and that I might like to do more of.

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: best kitchen

Don't try to google "best kitchen" - the first two million hits will be offers of kitchen design. Best kitchen in well-off Victorian houses or manors were kitchens for show only, kitchens where you would perhaps invite guests to admire you copperware. The real cooking was done in the working kitchen, and of course in a large houses there would be separate kitchens for servants, preparing different kind of food than for the masters and their guests.

I decided to have two kitchens in Womble Hall because I had so many interesting kitchen items, some of them not really matching each other, and kitchens are fun to make.

In the original house, I only had one kitchen that occupied a whole floor. It started very early, even before I made my very first piece of furniture. When I decided to go into dollhouses, almost exactly ten years ago, on December 27, 2007, I went to a huge permanent flea market in Stockholm to buy cheap recyclables, and among many things I found was a lovely handmade kitchen table in the right scale. I have always seen it as a good omen. And that was the beginning of the kitchen, where I made most things from rubbish.  I made a cupboard and filled it with stuff, I made a stove that I am still proud of, and it is still right there, in the best kitchen of Womble Hall. I made a kitchen sink which is also still there; and I kept adding and making things, because really, kitchens are probably the most exciting rooms to make. Some of those early things were very crude because I had neither tools nor materials nor skills. Other things I still have today, like milk bottles. I also tried making food from air-drying clay. I was on long-term sick leave, and making miniatures was a good way of coping with it. I know I am by far not the only one.

Then  we moved to Cambridge, and I rebuilt the house in a cabinet. Again, because kitchens are fun, I allowed a whole floor out of three for the kitchen. I spent hours making a flagstone floor. I wasn't on sick leave anymore, but I was depressed and very tired, trying to adapt to the new country and new job. Resurrecting and improving a lost world was soothing.

There was so much in the kitchen already, and then I got distracted and had other projects, involving a modern kitchen, a Tudor kitchen, a retro kitchen, a half-scale kitchen, so it was not until I started working on Womble Hall that I returned to the Victorian kitchen, when I also decided that I would have two.

Both were in the basement, and to begin with I wasn't sure which would be which. The suitable rooms were opposite each other, to the left and to the right, without a door between them. The right-hand room had a door into what would make a good larder, and that decided it. The working kitchen went to the right, and the best kitchen to the left. I made a marble floor for the best kitchen.

I kept moving objects between kitchens, but the principle was that showy things, like copper - real and fake - would be in the best kitchen, as well as the showy utensils, clearly not for everyday use.

The main design of the kitchen has remained the same, although I have added quite a few new pieces of furniture, including a cabinet, a chair table and some other tables. Tables are useful to display objects in a kitchen.

As to objects, I haven't made a lot, but I keep adding suitable items that I occasionally buy in antique shops. I don't buy many expensive things, but sometimes I cannot resist them. And this is a show off kitchen after all.

The door at the back leads to the rear corridor.  I will write a separate post about rear rooms, but note than when the main lights are off there is light coming from the corridor.

And if you look in through a side window you can see part of the corridor.

There is a lot more that can be done in this room, and I guess I will be adding to it forever.