Roman turret, part 8 in which a fire is lit and various items are added

Read the previous posts about this project: part 1, part 2,  part 3, part 4 and part 5, part 6 and part 7.  

As I mentioned in the last post, I cannot finish the exterior until we have eaten enough eggs, because I need egg cartons to make stones. I had just enough to finish the right and left wall, but now I will have to wait. It doesn't really matter because it is just the back wall, but I still want to cover it.

Meanwhile, there are many small things to attend to. For instance, I was dissatisfied with the fire because it just didn't look right. After a number of various attempts, I gave up on using a tea light - it doesn't work in this scale. Instead, I cut a quarter-circle from a piece of foam board, painted it to match the walls and built a fire with twigs from my garden. I burned the twigs slightly on a candle for the effect.

Then I covered it with glue and sprinkled some red glitter on.

Next, I added two metal bowls. If you want to know how I made them, read this. I am glad I remembered them because they fit in nicely. And then of course there must be some food cooking in the bowls. The large one is couscous (reluctantly, as I don't like using real food in miniature projects, but it was less than a teaspoonful), and the small just tiny bits of leftover twigs. I think it looks like chunks of meat. I may add onions. 

The wall behind the fireplace must be blackened with soot. For soot effect, I burned some matches and crushed them, then painted with my finger on the wall.

Maybe not enough? I put some more twigs in a pile by the side.

Not sure whether the large cauldron is right here. But I am not attaching things permanently yet.

On the same wall, I wanted a shelf with some kitchenware. I made the shelf from craft sticks. The bowl and plates are from the same set. The shelf wouldn't stay so I had to support it and leave to dry overnight.

The metal ornament hanging from the ladder is an earring of unknown origin. I think it looks like a Roman thing.

On the upper floor, I wanted a wall bracket with a torch. In my Tudor house, I made wall brackets from beer rings, so I thought I would do it again, but see, the scale didn't work! And I wasn't sure how to make a Roman torch, although Wikipedia was helpful with images. I first tried to make flames from tissue paper, but it didn't work at all. I was about to give up, but browsing Pinterest, without results, I suddenly got an idea.

 
It's the same technique as making dolls' hair, and I think it worked fine.

 

I made a bracket from a small eyelet.

The sign from Hadrian's wall also had a rack on the upper floor with some fabric hanging on it - not sure whether it's supposed to be clothes, maybe a cloak?

I used a coffee stirrer and toothpicks to make a rack. I should have put a coin beside it for scale, but it's tiny. And it is probably a cloak hanging on a peg.

 

(Don't you love this character? I do. He told me his name is Cat).

There are probably other interior details I can add, but otherwise I feel that the project is finished. Of course, a project is never finished, but it is finished enough to be shared with people who are not interested in work-in-progress.

A picture doesn't do it justice. Maybe I should try to make a video to show it at various angles and zoom into details.

This has been a small but challenging project. Because I have been relatively free and because it has been far too hot for gardening, I have worked several hours a day so I estimate it took about 80 hours all in all. It gives a better sense of the scope of effort.

I enjoyed it a lot and I am really pleased with how it has turned out. If you enjoyed following my work please leave a comment.

More Chippendale furniture

This past weekend I also made some more Chippendale miniatures. I have already shown a lyre back chair, and I have now made four of these.

Just as I predicted, the moment I put these into the room, the old ones felt wrong. So they are now moved to storage for another project, some time in the future. Or perhaps for sale or swap. Likewise, the old side table is out, and the new Hepplewhite side table has replaced it. It is incredible what a difference it makes.

I have further made a shelf.

 

It is very elegant, and it will be filled with books, but I have no idea how to hang it. I want to have it on the inside of fronts, mostly because I am running out of space for furniture. I will try to mount it with velcro, like I did with curtains.

Last but not least, I made a lowboy. I didn't know what a lowboy was before I started making these kits, so once again, this hobby is highly educational.

The up-done chests from Poundland in the background now feel completely wrong so I am looking forward to making more Chippendale pieces. Come back soon.

Basement roof

I will not share all details about improvements and repairs in the basement following new lights. I had to sand and scratch upper edges of walls to fit into roof grooves - something I didn't know six montts ago when I worked on the basement, but which I learned from assembling the main house. I removed the fronts to work more comfortably. I repaired the broken door posts and fixed wallpaper that had come off. Againt my principles, I attached jars, plates and other utensils on tables, shelves and dressers with sticky dots because they will keep falling off, and it's a lot of trouble to put them back in the limited space of the basement rooms.

(I believe the design of the basement does not presuppose the level of sophistication I am doing. The furnished basements of this model that I have seen feature, for instance, an empty garage with one car, an empty entrance hall without the back corridor, and a half-empty kitchen).

I also put up two new shelves that I bought in my favourite miniature shop in Stockholm a few weeks ago. They look genuine early 20th century to me, and I hope they are because they were quite pricey. They came with two lovely tin jars that say "Sugar" and "Coffee" in Swedish, but I will pretend that the master of the house bought them from a Swedish merchant.

It wasn't possible to hammer in nails without damaging the shelves, so I drilled holes and glued in nails cut to the depth of the hole.

Here is an interesting observation on perception psychology. Most of the tin and pewter objects in the working kitchen I made myself, covering plastic with metal paint. They look fine enough. But if I place a couple of "genuine" objects in the front, you will perceive all other objects as genuine as well. (It is like using dialects in theatre: an actor only has to speak in a dialect for the first five minutes of the performance; afterwards you will "hear" the dialect even though it's not there. The same with limping or other physical traits). In the second picture, only the coffee pot on the left is genuine pewter, everything else is painted plastic. But because you see the coffee pot first you will be deceived to believe that all other jugs are also genuine. This is great to know when you plan your rooms. One-two genuine objects will do the trick.  

After this I could no longer postpone the critical moment of putting on the roof. I considered turning the structure upside down as it might be easier, but decided against it because of all the hanging objects on the walls that I would have to remove.

To my surprise, the roof fit quite well, with some persuasion and a rubber hammer, but once it was in place, I didn't want to risk taking it off to use glue. So here it is. 

 

You cannot see the details, and there are no display lights yet, but now there is a roof. You can see details in my earlier posts, for instance, here.

The next step is to attach mouldings, and since I am now clever and know how to use full-size wallpaper for moulding this is what I am going to do. I have already put in wooden skirting so it will have to stay.

This is also the right moment to decide whether I want ceiling lights because I will need to drill holes and fix the lights before I put back the main house. They will be fake, and I am not sure I want any at all because the ceiling is low, and ceiling lamps will obscure the view. Perhaps I will just have fake wall sconces.

I have some time now before term starts so I hope to finish - I mean, really finish - the basement soon. Stay tuned.

Fixing shelves

Finishing the basement, I have serendipitously found a solution to a long-time problem. As any dollhouse maker knows, it is next to impossible to attach shelves onto walls. If you use tack or even superglue, sooner or later the shelves will fall down. I have tried to glue thumbnails to the back of shelves:

Yes, they work. Sometimes for years. But one day they fall down, and if you have something breakable on the shelf it breaks. Or maybe your shelf is in a hardly accessible corner of your room, and you will stretch all your arm muscles trying to fix it.

As usual, I was searching for something else when I had my eureka.

I have used these hooks for all kinds of purposes, but suddenly I realised that if I just bend the hook into another loop it will be just what I need.

Now I have solid hooks that I can use to attach the shelf to the wall. Of course I could have made these double loops from a piece of wire (which I will do in the future) but I had to see the hook to come up with this very simple solution that I happily offer to all dollhouse friends.

 

If you wonder about the shelf itself, I made it many years ago for my very first house, using a bit of wooden strip and two pieces of a photo frame. The utensils come from a game, the name of which I don't know in English, but it involves picking up these tiny things from a pile one by one, without any other moving. I have saved this game since I was a child, through all moves and losses. It is made of some precious wood and still smells wonderful after fifty years.

More furniture improvements

Now that I have figured out how to make the kit furniture nicer it's just a matter of patience. I made a table for the drawing room

A bookshelf

with book rows cut from a magazine

An armchair

 

After which I gained so much confidence that I decided I could make something that was missing from the kit. I took the side pieces from another armchair and used the empty template to make the seat and the back. I used a cheesebox, and because I don't have any elaborate tools I simply cut it with scissors.

 I don't think my sofa is significantly inferior to the one mising from the kit.

 Of course it still looks more like a park bench than a sofa, but wait...

Here is the whole set. I stained and varnished the furniture, and unfortunately the stain didn't stick where there was some glue left on the sofa: there is an ugly patch that I will do something about. The ceiling lamp is a toy from a Christmas cracker, and the table lamp is a chess piece with a plastic tube cap. The carpet is paper, cut from a catalogue and fringed all round
 

Modern study

In the middle of the upper floor there was a square hole, the size of a window. I have no idea what the creator of the house intended it to be. I considered building a winding staircase, but there was already a staircase, and it would take too much of the floor. So I just sealed it. I wanted this corner of the house to be bright green, but I didn't have green paint so instead I papered it with colour printer paper. Remember, there also was a window in the wall which I had sealed (the bedroom is on the other side). This room is a study. I first wanted it to be an artist's studio, but then I remembered that magnificent shelf I had in the cellar of my original house and realised that its time had come. The shelf was twice as large as I needed, so reluctantly after all these years I sawed off a bit. 

 

Then I put some ornaments in the shelf. Some of them immediately looked wrong, as in the left picture. I started filling it with books. I was lucky to find a magazine with a whole page of books. I cut out each square individually and pasted on card with flaps that I could shove into the square in the shelf. I made the mistake of cutting the upper edges straight, but it didn't look natural, so I had to take them out and cut again, with uneven edges.

This is how I made the swinging chair. The base is a plastic door handle, and the lever, a bit of a spray bottle. The seat and back are made of cardboard, lined with padding and covered with fabric.

 I made the writing desk from my famous venetian blind and strong wire. The CD player, speakers, remote, the computer keyboard and mouse are cut from a catalogue, while the computer screen is a lid from a little plastic jewel box. The blind is cut from a placemat. The wastepaper basket is a bottle cap. In this pictire the floor is still bare.

 

Modern kitchen development

This is what the kitchen looks like today (I have tidied up a bit, just as you do when you expect visitors). The chairs are made from champagne wire, which I learned from a friend. I thought they fit perfectly in my kitchen.

I made most of the details and utensils myself. I made kitchen shelves from bits left after I made a big bookshelf in another room. I made the coffee machine (that looks a bit tired) from a bit of plastic, a dead battery and a bottle cap. I made the orange press from a bit of a perfume spray bottle. I made the kitchen towel holder from an unidentifiable wooden peg, and the kitchen towel - from kitchen towel. The pie trays come from an eye-shade box. I cut the front of the micro from a catalogue and glued it on the front of a little box I made from card. I also cut the clock face from a catalogue and pasted it inside a spice jar lid. The fridge handle is a bit of a ball-point pen. I made all the jars, tins, boxes and bottles in a variety of ways, which I will explain in detail shortly.

Likewise, I made most of the utensils on the table. The big black bowls are cut from chocolate boxes, and the Japanese bowls, from medicine cards, painted black on the outside and red on the inside. The square Japanede plates are air-drying clay. The mugs are cut from a pencil, with half of a plastic bead for handle. A grandchild made the sushi. The eggs in eggcups, the caviar tube and the Coke are from ebay, and the sausage from a German toyshop.

 

The right side of the kitchen is more like a utility room. The fire extinguisher comes from a key ring. The garbage bin is a pencil sharpener. I made the bucket from a hotel milk container. The flower pots are thimbles. And the heating element is cut from a chocolate box.

It is very hard to take a good picture of the inside of the front wall because I can only do it through a door opening from the other side. Since it is a removable wall you can't put heavy things on it, but I made a semi-flat shelf with groceries.

Here is the wall removed from the house, just to give you an idea of how it works.You may have noticed that I have put in windows, and I will tell you how I did it in due time.

New kitchen

As I have repeatedly pointed out, kitchens are fun to make because there are so many objects in a kitchen, even if it is minimalist, and why would you want a minimalist miniature kitchen! Most of the furniture and utensils are from the old kitchen, but I have already shown the flagstone floor I made for the new kitchen. I made new wallpaper with splash technique so it looks exactly like the old one.  I had to use the space differently because of the depth of the shelf. Now I will show the details, beginning with the left wall.

The shelf with splendid copper kettles and plates, made from old coins, is from the old house, as is the work bench underneath it. All tin or pewter-looking objects are painted plastic, while the copper is from ebay or thrift shops. The two wooden ladles also came with some large lot from ebay. The bucket is made from lolly sticks, and the mop from a bit of kitchen string wired to a grill stick. The delivery boy came as a bonus when I bought something online. He carries a basket, which I don't remember where it came from, likely a thrift shop, and the fruit is from old potpourri.

Here are some more utensils, including a set of clay pots from ebay for which I made the shelf. The "copper" pie forms are made from inside of a chocolate box. The milk jar is a hotel schampoo bottle. I showed before how I made the wash-board. The scullery maid is a celluloid doll; I made her clothes. She is preparing lobster that I found in Christmas crackers. The pie forms are from make-up sets. The baskets are from various ebay lots. I made the larger pots in my pottery class. I explained before how I made the stove.