Sunday 3 March 2019

Library room box, part 2


In the previous post, I stopped at adding mouldings. For almost all mouldings in the past years, I have been using full-size embossed wallpaper. At first, I did what all miniature-makers do: took wallpaper samples from stores. But I noticed that this particular wallpaper was extremely useful so I decided that for the royal sum of £8 I could afford a whole roll that would probably last my whole life.

 

Since it is a small room box I only needed one long strip that covered all the three walls.

 

The floor surface is also small, so I decided to invest in an elaborate parquet. I have used this pattern before, but again, I don't think it matters, because the people who are getting the library will not have seen my other projects. Anyway, it's fun to make and only took a couple of hours. I used various stains on coffee stirrers. Mitre shears are a must. I sanded the floor thoroughly and used a drop of cooking oil for the final finish.

 

The floor is assembled on a piece of card and inserted into the box. Normally I don't glue on floors in case I need to take them out later. But I don't think I will need it here. (I hope I am not wrong).

So what next? I need to attach the box to the book cover.

 

As I mentioned before, the box is slightly smaller than the cover, which means there will be edges visible around it. But the endpaper was torn, so I had to do the same as I did with the front endpaper: use a spare one.



In the process I discovered that the front endpaper needed trimming, which I of course should have done before I glued it on. But it was easy to amend.

You may wonder why I am showing you all these boring steps that don't take the project much further, to the exciting bits. The thing is, unless all these boring steps are accounting for, it is easy to forget how much work there is behind even the most elementary tasks. This step had to be done, and even if it wasn't complicated and didn't take long, I could not move on without it. People who only see results have no idea how much effort goes into every piece. (You, dear reader, being a miniature-maker yourself, don't need to be persuaded).

But now comes the really tricky phase. I need to attach the box to the back cover, and I don't think simply gluing it on with do the trick. I should have thought about it before and used staples or something before I added wallpaper. Well, too late now, I am not ripping off the wallpaper now (and I don't have another large piece of this paper).

So how am I going to do it? How am I going to do it? I will keep you in suspense until tomorrow.








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