Quick and Easy Miniature Hooked Rugs!

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no patience for needlework. I love the finished products, but I can only ever manage to get about three stitches done before giving up! I've tried the french knot method of making hooked rugs, and just couldn't get through them. However, I when I found these punch needle kits they looked so quick and easy that I just couldn't resist.
There are no fancy stitches, and you don't even have to knot the threads. You just push the special needle through the fabric, and it creates a hooked effect on the other side! I'm working on the Antique Rug kit for Phoebe's room. I changed the colors around to look a bit better in the room without trying to match the wallpaper exactly.
Here is the carpet after about a week of intermittent work. I started off packing the stitches far too tightly, so the design is a bit distorted in places, but I'm not worrying about that too much.

Here's the back side of the fabric. You can see the design a bit more clearly from this side. When I decided to change the colors around, I copied the printed fabric a few times, and colored the copies with colored pencils to get a sense of how I wanted the colors to work.

My Micro Dollhouse Collection

I started experimenting with making 1/1728th scale houses (dollhouses for 1/144th scale, or dollhouses for dollhouses for dollhouses) a while ago. These are some of the houses and roomboxes I made out of paper, perched on a penny.

This house was supposed to look like my big dollhouse, though I had to simplify by removing the upper porch. The house shown in the picture below is actually a bit too big, I've since shrunk the graphics down a bit.

I could only fit four rooms inside, and I decided to make it open backed, rather than front opening like my real house.

This was an attempt to copy an antique German roombox. I can't just scale down the real graphics, because they would just turn to shapeless blobs. Instead, I recreate the main features, simplifying as much as possible.

This was one of the first houses I tried to make, so the construction is fairly simple. It's still one of my favorite houses though, perfect for the corner of a micro nursery!Here's the inside. I used bits of laser cut paper on the roof, but I'm still looking for something a bit more delicate looking.

There are free tutorials for some of these houses here, if anyone is interested!

Micro Roombox

And it's been another month since my last post! Time flies! I was looking through photo files the other day, and I came across these old pictures of a 1/144th scale roombox I made acouple years ago.

Unfortunately, I don't have any other photos, as I sold this box on Ebay shortly after finishing it, and the better photos have since disapeared. Lots of little handmade details, including a canterbury full of sheet music (front right) and a blue and white firescreen (back left by the fireplace). The walls were covered with fine gold silk, and the carpet was fuzzy. The box was a butchered bespaq piece. The only things not made from scratch were the (heavily modified) roombox and the oval metal frame.