A dolls house gift - Part 2

   Now to finish the story of the dolls house gift......


       So at the end of part 1 I had made a few items for the room...I had made the butchers shop and now needed to set up the room....

Here is the room at the beginning - no wallpaper or carpet, but just testing the furniture out! I have no photos of decorating the room at all. I got some dolls house carpet and some Laura Ashley wallpaper (£1.50 for a huge roll!) and it was a nightmare to decorate.

    The box itself is quite small and wasn't very deep...as a scale room it would be smaller than a box room. It had awkward corners and everytime I cut a piece of paper to fit I would find I had cut the wrong angle - however careful I was. Long suffering husband came home to find me in tears and about to kick everything across the room. As usual, he picked me up saying "You can do it" and I had several more goes, cursing every time the paper ripped or I got the measurements wrong - AGAIN!

   As the saying goes "practice makes perfect" - Well, it probably isn't perfect - but I got the walls covered at least!

    So now the really fun part of minatures - creating the little bits and pieces. The room looks nice already but it is the little details that makes miniatures so fascinating. I love the small details that make the room. I could have left it quite basic and it would have been fine, but I wanted little elements like the spilled paint with kitchen roll and vanish carpet cleaner....the mess of paper and wood...I could have come up with more no doubt, but space was minimal!!

 So small items get added....a work mat was easy, scrap of paper - have plenty of those ;o)
   The pencil box came from a dolls house printables site I found....just print, cut out fold and glue and you have a dolls house item!

Fimo works well for minatures. Nearly every craft item here is made from Fimo. I have made paintbrushes with red Fimo, masking tape and bristles cut from old paintbrushes. The pencil is made from Fimo as are the sausages and ham. The PVA glue pot is also Fimo as is the ruler....

It was a shame that the sausages weren't exactly 1/12th scale but that was the smallest I could make without them breaking! The paint pot was a cut up plastic tube filled with acrylic paint that I dabbed along the edge of the table.

    I put a 1p coin in this photo so that you can get a clearer idea of just how tiny some of these objects really were.

And the hinges in the butchers shop do work!

The prints and tiles on the wall are printed from the photos of Gil's butchers shop that I took when I was preparing this gift.

  I knew I wanted mess....So of course in this room the blue acrylic paint has spilled on the beautiful cream carpet (not a good choice floor covering for a craft room!) I made the kitchen roll by rolling up some beige paper in a small roll and then wrapping a strip of toilet paper around it (had to be toilet paper as kitchen roll has too large a texture pattern to be used at such small scale)....I made the Vanish cleaner with pink Fimo and printed the label....scrunched up small pieces of tissue and splodged some paint on the carpet. Was a nervous moment as mistakes couldn't be made!

     A few years before, Gil had given me some mushroom print material. I knew it would work well in this room as she is passionate about mushrooms and I really wanted the room to be about her...hence the butchers shop which is an interest of hers as is the dolls house world. The silver frame has a portrait of her grandchildren and several items in the room came from her dolls house collection...I wanted it to look like a room she would have.

    The cushion was easy to make as it required only simple sewing...and was filled with semolina. Good tip for making dolls house cushions is never fill them with cotton wadding as it makes the cushions look less authentic. Filling them with semolina means they look far more realistic in their 'just been sat on' look.The laptop computer was another printable form a website - just print, cut and glue.

The finished room! - But hold on a minute....something isn't quite right here. Didn't I say I wanted it messy? Right....time to make some mess!!!! Cutting up bits of paper...scrunching paper...planks of wood, the box of scrap paper (we all have one of those!) notes, planner, letters, envelopes, C.D's - everything was scattered everywhere.....

I couldn't resist this little joke!

And here it is....the finished messy craft room...

      I hope you have enjoyed reading this two part blog post...If you have then please leave a comment. I would love to know what you thought of it.


I am entering this in the following challenge -

Simon says stamp and show - House rules