The upstairs hall

This is a rather quick post, since I've misplaced my camera and have to use old pictures for the moment.

I'm afraid that the hall is in a bit of a mess in the photo. The petite point rug came from a beautiful but badly damaged vintage purse. My grandmother used the frame of the purse to make a new bag which she carried during my aunt's wedding! I haven't yet had the rug backed, so it's normally in storage.

There are lots of people in the hall,mostly named after favorite book characters. The little boy in the back, leaning against the banister is from The Wren's Nest. His name is Ned (Edward), after one of the characters in Louisa May Alcott's book An Old Fashioned Girl.
The little fellow in blue is named Ellis, called Eli for short.
The nursemaid is Martha (the maid in The Secret Garden), but the baby is still unnamed.
The dog, a Bedlington Terrier, is named Marmalade after a dog that I knew as a child. Marmalade's mother, Crumpet, is sitting in the dog bed in Lottie's bedroom.
I hope to post more pictures of the house and other projects this weekend.

Little Leather Boxes

I've been working on more tiny houses, but don't have my camera at the moment (it's at home and I'm at school), so I dug up this photo of an old project instead.
My family loves these gold-tooled leather boxes from Florence, Italy. So of course I had to try making them in miniature a few years ago. They were actually a very quick project. I designed various shaped box patterns on the computer, printed and cut them out. Then I stained masking tape (a stain pen helps quite a lot) and stuck the paper patterns to the sticky side of the tape. Then I cut every thing out again, and assembled the boxes. Since I didn't want the boxes to open, I didn't bother finishing the insides, but a bit of velvet paper on the inside would probably do the trick. The "tooling" is just a bit of gold paint.

Tiny Paper Houses

I've been working on a few tiny paper houses. I design them on the computer, often looking at antique dollhouses for inspiration.

This house was one of the first I created. It was loosely based on photographs of a Tri-ang dollhouse. The doors open to reveal four rooms.
This house was my attempt to make a miniature of my own dollhouse. I couldn't figure out how to make the upper porch though, so it's not quite accurate.

This is the interior of the copy of my house.

This is another tiny dollhouse based on an antique dollhouse. The interior has four rooms. The roof of this house is very difficult to put together.

I did not design this paper model, but I re-sized it quite a bit. I found the model at this website, and printed it out at about 5% the original size. It took me a few days to put together, since I had to take frequent breaks, and I lost at least half the dormers before they were safely glued!