Decorating the ground floor.. #blogtoberfest13 day 21

Yesterday I decorated the ground floor of the dolls house. It was loads of fun and really very tricky! The only way I could get inside the tiny spaces was to lay on my tummy on the floor and wriggle up close, quite funny. My daughter picked out all of the paper, it is 1/12th scale but seems to work in the 1/16th scale house well. I painted the eaves with some acrylic paint ready for the next fun project for the tiddlers. I am hoping to get them finger painting a flower mural. Pretty pleased with how it is looking, it is beginning to look loved.


Jolene x

Wallpapering the dolls house roof.... #Blogtoberfest13 Day 9

Last week Ruby and I picked out some fab bright card and vellum from the craft box to wall paper the bathroom. It is now wickedly green and deep purple, I love it! Luckily we found some purple felt stashed away in the box too which made for great carpet.

We have been buying some wonderful little bits and pieces of furniture on ebay and the dollhouse family have started to move in too. Here are some snaps of how things are looking indoors right now.




Through browsing on ebay I am starting to find out a little about the names of makers  1/16th scale furniture, Barton, Lundby, Triang, Dol Toi......

Yesterday evening my hubby and I set to work on re-papering the dollhouse roof. To be honest I wasn't sure I'd make a good job of it on my own because the shape is so tricky.

At first I ordered three A3 sheets of red pantile roof paper thinking that A3 was much bigger than it actually is...then when the paper arrived I realised that the pattern runs portrait instead of landscape which meant  joins on all four of the largest faces including "filling in" triangles on either side of the centre portion.

I ordered more paper and while waiting for it to arrive used A3 sheets of plain paper and drew arrows all over them to show the direction of the pattern and begun to play about to make a sort of template/plan on how to cut the paper and the best place to start on the roof.

It's by no means perfect but nowhere near the lash up job I had anticipated. The kids are going to be thrilled with it when they wake up :-D

Have a lovely day, Jolene x

Papering the first rooms.....

As a crafty treat for Roo this evening she and I gathered some supplies together to wallpaper her dolls house bedroom. I decided to go for PVA for hanging the wallpaper as we already had plenty here. We used scraps of the paper in her own bedroom that were stashed away for a rainy day.

I did the cutting and Roo had a fun time pasting the walls with PVA ready for putting up the wallpaper in her mini bedroom.



Below is a snap of Roo's finished mini bedroom. I've used self adhesive purpose made dolls house carpet for the floor that I had found on ebay. It was really easy to cut and apply. I suspect when we get around to decorating Roo's real bedroom we'll need to redecorate her mini bedroom too :-D

Next I covered the outside lower story walls with yellow brick  paper - bit of a mishap when I forgot to cut out one of the windows before sticking the paper to the wall but I think I got away with it by snipping a cross in the paper from the centre to the corners of the window and folding and sticking the paper down inside the window frame.

The next job was to paper and carpet Ethan's mini room to look like his proper bedroom too. This is not a very clear picture as the paper has silver Dinos all over it, really cute.

I didn't remember to lave a little flap of extra paper to run down to the floor and under the carpet so there is a little white line around both of the rooms where the paper and carpet meet. I'm thinking that adding skirting boards at some point would be a nice thing to do to make it look much neater. I will definitely remember to leave an overlap for the floor on the next rooms to get papered though!


These three pics show how I made some plaster to render the front door alcove and pathway around the  house. It is a mixture of white emulsion, PVA, and food colouring.

The next bit was really fun, I dabbed the gloopy "plaster" on with a paint brush to give the alcove and pathway some interesting texture. I'm not sure what to do with the pathway area next really, maybe the kids will want to paint it grassy green or maybe we could make some planters and pots of flowers to decorate the outside space. I saved the left over gloopy mixture in an old coffee jar just in case we need it again for something.

And this is where the house is at so far.... I wonder how long the gloopy painty sand mixture is going to take to dry!

Here are some useful links on how to wall paper a dolls house that I found on google...

http://www.dollshouse.com/dhe/content/how-to-wallpapering-tips.aspx

http://dollhousedecorating.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/how-to-put-wallpaper-in-your-dollhouse.html

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/five-ways-to-wallpaper-a-dollhouse-177887

Jolene x