Dealing with treasures, cont.

If you are curious about what I did with all the treasures I showed in my previous post, here are some reports.

I was right about the unusual chest of drawers: it looks great in the yarn shop. The old table was, like in so many projects, a temporary solution that just hanged on, until the right piece turns up. I have put some stuff in drawers.  The cash machine is probably slightly too big, but I don't think it matters. It looks much better than the old, modern one made from a printie.

Removing the glass and putting it back was easy, so my glazing solution works well. (You can see the before-image of the shop in the linked post).

Replacing the chandelier in the reception room was surprisingly painless. I didn't even have to remove the whole floor above, just lift it a bit. I think I did the same when I put up the current one. This is possible because I always assemble floors on card so they are relatively easy to remove or lift.

Since the new chandelier has a hanging hook rather than a ring, I thought about a new way of attaching it. Rather than using thin wine wire as before, I made a loop from champagne wire, put the ends through the hole and bent the ends. It is a stronger fixture; it looks both neater and more natural. The whole operation took me about five minutes. In case you wonder, the ceiling rose is made from a cheese box lid.

Obviously, I had to remove all objects from the drawing room above, and when I was putting them back I thought that the new clock would look nice on the chest. And more period-correct.

This is what happens: adding and replacing all the time. We do this in our 1:1 life as well, don't we?

I planned to move the chandelier from the reception room to the upper hall, but it proved next to impossible. The floor above is firmly attached, with a staircase glued on to it, so that would demand serious reconstruction I am not prepared for.

 

After trying the chandelier here and there, I have decided to replace the one in the music room. I am doing it reluctantly and with a strong sense of guilt because this chandelier was among the very, very first objects I made, more than ten years ago. I still like it and will use it in another project. But at the moment this feels the right thing to do.

Again, I didn't have to remove the whole floor, and I used my newly acquired technique, although this chandelier has a ring rather than hook. So this time I did the opposite: made a hook out of wire, ran it through the whole and bent, then hung the chandelier on it. This way, next time I want to change the light, I won't have to remove floors. Why haven't I thought about it before? Seems elementary now.

So the music room now looks like this (I see I need to adjust the candles - they keep falling off). 

Wait a minute, you are probably saying now, what about the master bedroom that was supposed to get one of those grand chandeliers to match the mirror? Ah, do you remember the two-arm chandelier I was planning to put into the working kitchen? It is now going into the master bedroom. The room above is nursery which doesn't even have a hardwood floor (reminder to improve this!) so it was as easy as it can be. And here we are. Yes, the ceiling rose is a yogurt lid. 

Full view of the room:

I am sooooo pleased with all these changes, not least because they turned out to be significantly less arduous than anticipated. And as I am looking at the rooms, it feels they have always been like this. A good sign.

I now have two nice lights to use somewhere else. I am sure I will think of the right place for them.

The outcome of this exercise is that I have discovered carefully suppressed flaws that need attention (not just the nursery floor), and I am looking forward to returning to Womble Hall after a long pause while I was occupied with other projects.

Come back soon.

Dower chest

This is once again a project that I did with my miniature group. It was fun to make together, and there are always some small bits of advice you can share.

 

I will not show all the sixteen steps I shared with my group since they were mostly technical, but this was an interesting kit, not like any other I had made before.

I used the light teak stain that I had used on some other recent miniatures, and I stained all parts first. The front, back and sides then had trimming to be glued on, preferably aligned.

 

Assembling the chest itself was easy, and assembling the frame proved easier than I had anticipated.

 

Then I had to glue the chest onto the frame, and the frame had to go into the notches in the corners of the chest. I hadn't done anything like this before.

 

Up to this, it was smooth, and even though the drawer didn't fit and I had to sand it down, it all went well.

But then I had to make and hinge the lid, and for this I had recently bought a wonderful new tool:

 

Another tool I didn't know I needed badly. It is called pin vise, and it can drill the tiniest holes imaginable. Why didn't anyone introduce me to this marvel nine years ago!

With it, it was easy to drill holes for the hinge pins, and while I did make several mistakes, in the end it all went fine.

The final result was stunning, I think.

 

Then something went terribly wrong. When I varnished the chest it all went gray. Can varnish have a use-before-date? Or maybe I hadn't cleaned the brush properly. It took me hours to polish the gray away, and after that I took no further risks, so it is still unvarnished. 

I haven't yet decided where I will put it, because the house is getting crammed. So far I have put it into lower entrance. 

Dower chest

I was looking forward to making this kit, and this weekend our group made it together. I wanted it to go into the guest bedroom where the bed, the chest of drawers, the night stand stand and the mirror have red mahogany finish so I used it again. About ten coats before I was satisfied. But I wanted the inside of the chest to be dark green, so it took some time to figure out which would be inside and which outside. I made one mistake and had to paint over the green with a dark brown paint and then stain on top of that. As it turned out, it was unnecessary because this bit was later covered with moulding.

I will not show step-by-step pictures, but just as with the cellarette I didn't trust myself with hinges and used ribbon to hold the lid.

 

I like the piece, and it fits nicely in the guest bedroom. I will have to fill it with bed linen.

Chippendale double chest

 

I didn't expect this kit to be different from other Chippendale chests, but it was, and therefore I will once again show a step-by-step project. It was easier than I had expected, but it was, because of this different technology, very interesting to work on.

Here are the chests I have made:

Chippendale 3-drawer chest, which was my very first, and which I later also made in another version

Chippendale chest on chest

Chippendale bachelor's chest

Chippendale serpentine chest that I apparently haven't shared before:

Chippendale chest of drawers that I haven't shared either (I wonder why).

So I am well-versed in the art of drawer-making, and I can recognise parts of drawers and don't panic when there are too many.

But I must admit that when I took the part out of the box it looked intimidating:

However, as I say, I now recognise a drawer when I see one, and since I didn't want to stain anything that would be on the inside I identified those parts and only stained what needed staining. I used light oak stain.

The reason I stained selectively is the dearly learned lesson from previous chest making. When you stain or paint before assembly the wood swells, and sometimes it gets next to impossible to fit shelves into grooves. So as you see I stained the top, the fronts of drawers, the front trimmings and the legs. I didn't at that point quite understand how the front trimmings worked, but I wasn't too worried about it.

I did what I have now learned to do, with chests and other pieces that have drawers, such as hutch cabinets, dressings tables and the wardrobe. Although the instructions say otherwise, I glue the drawers first of all. Exactly because it is then easier to identify other parts. But also because I have a couple of times used wrong parts.

In this kit, there are nine drawers of three different sizes, and it is crucial to use correct parts. So I played a little jigsaw with them:

This way I was confident that each drawer had the correct sides and back. Believe me, it's no fun to find out that you've done it wrong.

Now the drawers are done and drying, and I can start the main assembly.

As I said I had anticipated a very complicated structure like some other chests I had done. But this wasn't a problem at all. Could it be because I had not stained the shelves?

I didn't even have to hold the assembly together with rubber bands, although I did tape it after the final step: 

Now, the interesting thing about this chest, and the reason why there were so many parts hard to identify is that, unlike other chests, it has front trimmings. These have to be glued one at a time and carefully fitted. It may not be obvious in pictures, but in the left picture I have have glued on trimmings from the left central divider and further to the left, and on right picture I have glued on the rest.

And in this picture I have glued on the tiny columns on the sides. I didn't even notice them on the cover picture.

After this, I glued on the top and base, then glued on the feet.

 

All in all, it wasn't a lot of work, and there were no unforeseen problems. Until I started inserting the drawers, and they didn't even remotely fit. Maybe some of the trimmings sat a quarter of a millimetre too high or too low. Not much I could do about it now, other than sanding away a quarter of a millimitre of each drawer.   

Let me tell you sanding down nine drawers isn't a winner. It took me a week. (Okay, I didn't sand 24/7, but I sanded every now and then, a couple of hours a day, for a week). 

Drilling 36 holes for handles wasn't particularly exciting either. I started with a pushpin, but gave up after three fronts and used an electric drill. The holes are rather large, but when covered by plates it doesn't matter.

By the way, I don't know how much longer I will be able to do this kind of work. My sight is deteriorating. Better hurry before I get blind. 

 

In the end, I forced the drawers in. I will never be able to pull them out again. I could just as well glue drawer fronts direct onto the trimmings. Someone who inherits my dollhouse after I am gone will hate me for this. (Or maybe they will just throw it away so it wouldn't matter). 

The chest is going into the lower entrance. I will pretend the drawers are full of objects brought in by servants and delivery boys. 

  

Chippendale bachelor's chest

My next piece of Chippendale furniture is a bachelor's chest. As I have mentioned repeatedly, you learn a lot from making miniatures. I had no idea what a bachelor's chest was. It is smaller than regular chests because a bachelor gentleman would travel a lot and carry this chest with him (suitcases hadn't been invented yet). It has several drawers of various size and a pull-out so it could also be used as a desk.

There isn't a lot of challenge in making it once you have made half a dozen of chests, so what I wanted to do was make original handles. All there Chippendale kits have exactly the same handles, that are very pretty, but when you have many pieces in a house it starts looking a bit boring. I have already made different handles, from bead caps and paper clips, but this time I decided I would try to make interesting handle plates. I found tiny beads in my supplies, and then I used the provided handles, but bent them into a ring. I have exactly this kinds of handles in one of my 1:1 chests.

Here are the steps:

I am very pleased with the result, although I am not sure yet where this chest will go. I don't know why it looks so shiny in the picture because it is really nice and smooth. I used about ten coats of stain to have this effect.

chest makeover

After the first serious attempt to tranform cheap furniture, I felt much more confident and started on another chest of drawers. I will not describe the whole procedure, because it was exactly the same:

What I will describe is how I made the finishing details. The simplest would of course be to do exactly the same again, but, firstly, I only had three more chain links, and secondly, I always want to try new methods. I am now in the mode of finding tiny details, because I think it looks neater. I am not very good at cutting, shaping and molding. It was all fine seven years ago when I was a beginner, but I have higher demands on my skills now. So I rummaged through my "Very Useful Boxes" (honestly, this is what they are called at Staples) looking for teeny-tiny things I could use for handles. What I found was an old watch bracelet someone gave me a long time ago.

 

I couldn't find any use for it, but knew one day it would come handy, and it did. It was quite a lot of work to take it apart, but the shape of the links was just right. For locks, I took the upper part of a press stud - I had to paint it to match the handles. I also found three tiny keys that fit in prefectly.

The chest is now replacing its predecessor of seven years ago. 

The problem is of course that when you replace a piece with a more elegant one, all the other, non-elegant furniture looks crude. I must make a new writing desk (and I know exactly how), and I must make a new bookcase (not sure how, but will investigare). It feels sad to throw away things that I made in the very beginning of my miniature-making; it almost feels like betrayal. But I guess this is what you do with your 1:1 life as well: successively replace old things with new.

For the moment, I put in the old chest into my antique shop roombox and arranged a row of vases on it. It serves the purpose well.

Tallboy makeover

My most recent expedition to Poundland yielded a bundle of chests and tallboys. As with other Poundland furniture, they are fine, but dull, just begging to be transformed. And it so happens that I have just bought four wonderful books by Patricia King on dollhouse furniture-making (highly recommended) from which I borrowed some ideas. Here is the point of departure:

The first thing I did was sandpaper all the rough surfaces and edges. As you see, there were two handles missing, but I removed all of them since I was going to replace them anyway. Then I painted the chest dark brown. I tried to mix a lighter shade, but gave up.  Eventually, it turned out just right. When it was dry, I first gave it a coat of mahogny stain and then a coat of varnish.

 

For handles, I took pieces of an old ankle chain. 

 

If you think it was a h-ll of a job to take it apart and assemble again, it was. Whether you think it was worthwhile is for you to judge: 

The decorations in the middle come from another chain. The difference between before and after is obvious. But I have also taken a picture of my old chest of drawers, which was among the very first pieces of furniture I made, seven years ago. I have learned a lot since then although it wasn't that bad for a beginner.

But now, with a mix of nostalgia and guilt, I have replaced my old piece: 

It is perhaps not as elegant as the Georgian chest made from kit, but I am still very pleased with it.