Lamps and candles

I will not be showing every picture of every room where I have now added mouldings made with full-size wallpaper (I am glad I invested in a whole roll rather than pinching samples). As I show further details of various rooms please pay attention to the mouldings, and I will draw your attention to any particular aspect. I've done all rooms on the upper floor: master bedroom, bathroom, corridor and smoking room. I think it looks nice and neat. I cannot say it was child's play because it was a lot of quite difficult precision work; but it was certainly easier than using proper wooden moulding. If I some time in the future decide to add wooden cornices I can place them on top of paper.

Meanwhile, I have also been doing some other things. I had a miniature shopping binge in Stockholm last month.

Of these lovely objects, I have already shown what I did with the kitchen shelves. Some things went immediately to their natural locations: the rocking horse to the nursery, the cutlery to the kitchen, the chair to join its twin that I bought in the same shop last year; the doll to the music room. Some of the ornaments have also found their right spots.

 

But my favourites are the two magnificent chandeliers.

It took me a long time to consider where they would be best displayed. The grand reception room seemed a natural place, but no, it actually didn't work ar all; the style was wrong. So the reception room will still have a plastic Christmas tree decoration. While I was deciding I added a chain to the chandelier that didn't have one.

 

I have various chains from junk jewellery so it was easy. The hard thing was the candles. The smaller chandelier has candle holders. The shop owner suggested that I use birthday-cake candles, but they are far too large, even cut in two. It doesn't look natural. So I made candles with my usual technique, from dowel. It suddenly struck me that there is a simple way to calculate how tall a candle should be: a real candle divided by 12.  Which is 2 cm. No wonder all my earlier attempts failed. My candles were too tall.

The other chandelier has spikes, and the shop owner wasn't confident with advice. I have tried to put birthday-cake candles on such spikes - let me tell you, it doesn't work. Possibly if you make your own candles and make holes in the bottom while they are still soft, and they will crumble anyway. So I had to think of another way. I won't burn real candles inside a dollhouse so it doesn't matter exactly in what way they are fake.

This is what I did. Painted a drinking straw and cut 2 cm long bits. Put a bit of tacky wax into each end and added tiny bits of thread for wicks. Then put the candles on the spikes, with wax holding them in place.

I still wasn't sure where I wanted the chandeliers. Pieces like this should be foregrounded, and eventually I decided that I will have them foregrounded, literally, on the two levels of the Great Hall. They will match each other and immediately attract attention.

 

Yes, immediately attract attention because the candles are all lopsided! They are temporarily attached with small sticky dots. Of course I only noticed after I had taken the picture. It doesn't matter, however, because I will still need to drill a hole and find a suitable ceiling rose.

The other one looks better - this is the one with candles made of straws, they are more stable.

Mind, both rooms are still under construction - the stais aren't glued yet.  So you need to use your imagination to see what it will be like some time in the future.

As I have now invented this new way of making fake candles I made two more to go with an ancient mirror I bought in the same shop last year. It has candleholders with spikes. I have now put it in place, with candles.