nid_dabeille | miniatures update - floors, windows, bottles

I haven't posted on my minis recently, but I've been a busy bee with my naval dispensary and great cabin roombox(es). I've made floors, I've worked on Jack's stern windows some more, and also made more bottles.

Bigger pictures below...

First, a pic of my messy living room where I usually work. MESS. I can scarcely find a place to sit. I need a bigger... something. I either need a better work surface (kitchen table moved into the living room? I never eat at the table anyway...) or I need to get a TV in my sewing room so I can work more contentedly in there. I know it's strange, but I feel really indulgent if I'm working on miniatures without also absorbing some TV - like I ought to be killing two birds with one stone (and doing TWO indulgent things at the same time instead of just one.) And naturally, I feel the same way if I watch TV without working on some craft at the same time. Often it's quilting or beads, but lately it's miniatures.

Oh, that picture just doesn't do justice to all the mess. There's mess EVERYWHERE, looking much the same. You'll just have to imagine it. Beyond that footstool, there's a huge pile of junk mail and books and catalogs on the floor. Aieee.

Speaking of floors...

Here's the floor of Stephen's section, individually planked. I used these little wooden sticks called "Skinny Sticks" from the craft store in the kids' section. A lot cheaper than buying real doll house flooring. I know some people use wooden coffee stirrers, but I don't actually know where you can buy those, and these were really cheap anyway.

I'm experimenting with a partition between his dispensary and the sick bay area. I can't decide. I want it, but it just makes everything so crowded, even more crowded than reality. I was thinking of putting a cot in the sick bay, but I might not have room. Maybe I can just cheat and make it a small cot.

You can also see the great cabin's checkered floor cloth, which is just lying in place not yet glued down. It's actually a piece of cloth that I painted and varnished myself. I did try to find a suitable printed fabric, but there just wasn't one with the right size of squares, so I had to make it myself. And very labor-intensive it was, too.

And here's Stephen's floor after I stained it. It was a very thin, light dirty gray stain (in one of those sample packets of stain from Lowes, which turned out to be exactly the right amount). I like the way it turned out.

Here are the stern windows, almost finished. I just need to add another piece of molding to the top, and the glazing. Hmm, but you can't really tell in the picture that the stained partition between each window is actually a ridged molding, quite delicately routed. I'll take a better picture later. You can sort of see on the far right, though, that last vertical strip of brown molding. I was very pleased to find it at my dollhouse store, because it looks so much like the stuff in Jack's own windows.

Lastly, here are a bunch more bottles. Most are handmade, and the glass ones with corks on the right are manufactured, and there are a couple of just weird looking glass things on the left that come from the inside of lightbulbs. I was experimenting. I think I'm going to sell some of the handmade ones on etsy - hopefully most of them (if I can persuade myself that I don't need to keep them. I don't! I already have a ton of bottles, right?)

Thumbtack on the right for scale.

ETA: And here's another picture of the windows with more detail.

They're still not finished. I need to varnish them again, and more decorative molding is going to go across the stained area above, but you get the idea. Plus, now you can see them at their proper angle.

linked at

doll_houses .

Current Mood: complacent

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

max-und-moritz.livejournal.com

Well blow me down! Grace, it´s excellent work, and I love especially how you´re sharing all the process, phase by phase. If ever I have the what-with to set up an amateur theatre troupe again, I´ll know who to entrust with the set designs :D

From:

Honey and Bee

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