Plastic house, part 5

This room was a bit complicated because of the door. The two panels with windows had to be made separately. The wallpaper and floor are printies.

Now the interior is finished, and I am going to do some furniture. I am not used to thinking in 1:24 scale, and I have no furniture that would fit. As usual, you can buy anything from a shop, and there are many things available on ebay (although significantly less than in 1:12 or 1:16). But it will be fun to make everything myself or find objects in right size. I have already found a clock. I made it long ago from a button, with the clock face cut from a catalogue.

Herringbone floor

I had seen a picture of wooden floors someone in my discussion group posted. I had also seen Eva Malmsten's gorgeous floors. So I decided I would make a herringbone floor for the living room. Now, I was no longer on sick leave, but working full time, in a new place, with new responsibilities. Yet miniature making suddenly had a new purpose: relaxation after a long and hard day of work. Since a good deal of my work is reading, I cannot relax over a book, as other people do, and we don't watch television. The house we rented had a minimal garden, and it was too late in the year for gardening. Therefore, making herringbone parquet was exactly the pastime I needed.

This corner is about 1% of the area I had to cover. It felt like making a jigsaw puzzle of ten thousand pieces. But I was not in a hurry. The material is lolly sticks glued onto a cardboard surface. Evening after long evening...



 

And finally

This is what it looks like in the house. Of course most of it is covered by furniture and carpets. But I haven't cheated, it's there all the way to the back wall.

Window

This took some time to make. The window frame is of course a ubiquitous photo frame. The lattice is made from a plastic container from a flower shop. I had two of these, and I have never seen them again. The window sill is made from a wooden blind. The view is cut from a gardening magazine, put behind the glass and held by the back of the frame.

Sofas and book cases

In the book by Vivienne Boulton, The Doll's House Decorator, I found patterns and instructions for a sofa. It is made from cardboard and covered with fabric. I had an old pair of velvet trousers that were just perfect. It took me several attempts to get it right.

 

But there was no pattern for a book case, and I had this idea that using a photo frame would be the right way. It was quite frustrating because it didn't really work as I had thought - things frequently don't.  At night I would lie in bed awake, thinking about how to make it work, and in the daytime it turned out to be impossible. But I don't give up easily. I don't like it when things don't work the way I plan. So finally I had it the way I wanted it. 

The front is a photo frame. The back panel is the back of the frame. Side panels and shelves are made from wooden blinds. The middle bar is a chopstick. The small round sticks holding the shelves are grill sticks.The upper row of books ia from Barbie, and I painted them in different colours. The bottom row is books I cut from a real book.

Two weeks into my miniature making, I had three new rooms in addition to the bedroom:

Using imagination

Among the many brilliant ideas that I borrowed from Eva Malmsten and that immediately gave my dollhouse a unique look was this Dutch tile stove. Stupidly, I don't have a good picture of it from my original dollhouse, so this is a more sophisticated environment, but the stove is the same.

I am sure I have never seen another bottle like this, before or after. It happened at the right moment. The top comes from a different bottle. In Eva's book, she glued several jars on top of each other, but I had the shelf height to fit it into. I used a envelope clip and a piece of broken chain, two thumbnails (with plastic cover removed) and a jar lid for base. The doors (it is just one piece) are cut from metal foil, the kind you get off champagne bottles. The handle is a envelope clip, and the hinges small pieces of metal that fell out of something I was dismantling.

I think this piece is still among my top-ten favourites.