Paintings

I love to be surrounded by art. I bought a whole stack of musty old art books at the local book sale this summer, and cut them up to paper my dorm. It is the same way in my dollhouse.I can't seem to resist paintings in miniature. This copy of Renoir's In the Meadow is probably my favorite painting. Josephine Meyers does amazing work, and the painting has a lot of sentimental value as well.

I found this painting of ships at the IGMA show a few years ago, and couldn't resist it. The paint has a lovely dimension in real life, which is hard to find in miniature. Most of the paintings I see seem to be thinned down oils, applied with near-invisible brushstrokes. The strokes in this painting are so lively in contrast.

This painting is by an eBay seller named Sylvia Rose, who sells mainly dollhouse curtains, tapestries, and re-upholstered furniture. She only lists a few of her oil paintings on vellum each year. Many of her paintings are copies of Vigee Le Brun, one of my favorite artists, so I'm always tempted to bid, even though I'm quickly running out of wall space in my dollhouse!

Bamboo Chair

This was one of the very first miniatures my mom made for my dollhouse. I desperately wanted a bamboo chair for the parlor, but couldn't find anything that looked right. Nothing was quite as delicate, and the "bamboo" all looked unnatural. So mom made the bamboo by wrapping wire around thin dowels, then built the chair. The rush seat is made from stained string. I painted the chair.

P.S. Sorry about the picture quality. I found my camera, but the charger was not in the case for some odd reason. Two steps forward, one step back.

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!

Two more scrap screens

Well, I never expected to be away from this blog for so long! It's been a crazy few weeks, but now that I'm back at school things should settle down. I have worked on a few miniatures in the interim , though I haven't done much more with the miniature school besides a bit of very dull shingling.

I dug out the extra unfinished screens I ordered for this scrap screen project,to make two more scrap screens.

For this screen, I used the dividing pieces which were included loose with the unfinished screen (from Matlock Miniatures) which I had left out on the first screen. I also added a narrow gold trim at the last minute, just before the varnish went on.

I'm really pleased with the way that the gold breaks up the black and helps define all the different panels..

After finishing the black screen, I wanted to try another screen with a dark background. I used a deep blue (though it is lighter than it appears in the photos below) for my third scrap screen. I left the dividing pieces out, and just left the screen with single panels. I went online and found 9 period illustrations (of Greek myths) which I glued in first. Then I surrounded the illustrations with the scrap. This was actually the most labor intensive screen of the three, since I had to use very tiny pieces of scrap in most areas or risk covering the large central images.

As with the first screen, all the individual pictures were hand cut. None of the images are repeated more than once on a screen, though I had to reuse some pictures on all three screens.

Nothing new

Sorry to have abandoned the blog for the last few days. I haven't done much miniature work lately, other than a bit of shingling on the finishing school. I've had a slew of errands and appointments this last week, and I've been preoccupied with finding things for my dorm. I had my wisdom teeth out this morning, so I expect to be out of things for a while longer, but I promise to resume proper posts soon.