Angela's Birthday Box

This is the miniature box I made for my sister Angela's Birthday. She loves gardening and has a beautiful yard. I wanted to make her something special because she is always thinking of and doing for others. I love you Angela.

I made everything including the box. I found the tutorial for the wheel barrow at this blog and the blue pieces at this blog (watering can, wash tubs and pitcher.) I really had fun making this box and I think it turned out well. 

The wheel barrow is made from mat board (yes the stuff you use in frames). It was a simple build following the tutorial listed above. I painted mine to look like old wood, but you could do almost any finish on it you wanted.

  

The gardening tools I made from scratch. They are made from paper, wooden dowels and toothpicks (the rake is from toothpicks). 

The blue pieces are made from the blogs listed above. They are made of paper then sanded, painted and glazed to make them look like metal. It is a lot easier than it looks, lol. 

The flowers and plants are paper. They take a little patients and time but worth it in the end. 

The 'clay' pots are actually wood. I just painted them with terracotta paint and filled them with dirt. For the 'clay' pots I used actual dirt from my front yard mixed with glue. I made these before I learned about faux dirt (used coffee and tea grounds dried in the oven).

The background is grass scrapbook paper. It is out of scale on purpose. I wanted the garden scene to look like a little fairy garden hidden in the tall grass. The ground is faux dirt. (Yes is smells like coffee which is a bonus, lol.)  

I made the bags of 'Potting Mix' on my computer and printed them out. I glued and filled them with cotton. Then I hand stitched the bottoms and tops, leaving one partly open with soil coming out.

The box itself is made from mat board with a plastic cover over the top and front. Then I used dollhouse wood trim around the edges to finish it off. The trim and the outside of the box is painted tan. I also added felt dots to the bottom to protect whatever surface Angela places it on.

Hope you enjoy this blog post. If you have any questions please let me know.

Dollhouse Remodel Day 1 and 2

My blog right now is mostly going to be about remodeling my dollhouse, but there will also be other things added here and there. I do a lot of different crafts, but mainly I make dollhouse miniatures.

I have wanted a dollhouse since I was a teenager, but never had the money to get one of those kits. A few years ago this really awesome person (Sissy) gave me two old dollhouses that her daughter no longer wanted. They are smallish and need some work but I had my dollhouse finally. Now here it is May 27, 2012 and I am finally going to get to remodel those houses. (Please ignore date on pictures. I have to reset it every time I change batteries and I’m lazy, so the date is not correct.)

   

(My amazing husband David cleared out a space in his man cave/garage for me to work and made me a work table.)

Day 1: I spent the first day (05/27/12) taking pictures, measuring and drawing plans. That took some time but it will be worth it when I start the actual work.

The Plan:   My plan is to put the two houses together to make on nice big dollhouse. I also want to reshingle, replace the ginger bread details and the porch railings and totally redecorate the inside. Plus a lot more.

1. The houses have thinner walls than most of the new dollhouses. They are about 1/8 inch and the newer ones have ¼ inch walls, so I’m going to reinforce them with some thin ply board my husband has lying around the garage.
2. I am moving some of the windows and doors so I will have to cover the outside walls as well.
3. Also to make the windows more uniform I am going to square up the round top windows.
4. The stairs will be moved so that I will only need one staircase. 
5. I want to put lighting in and that has to be done before flooring and wall paper go in.

This is just a quick list. There are a lot more things that are going to have to be done before I can start the decorating part.

Here is a picture of the 2 houses side by side so you can get an idea of how they will be put together. 

The remodel:  Of course the biggest part is actually putting the two houses together to make one big dollhouse, (from here on the biggest house will be referred to as house A and the smaller one as house B) but that is just the beginning.

One of the biggest challenges was figuring out the stairs. I need to have access to both second floors from one staircase (I’m going to use a ladder for the 3^rd floor attic). It took some thinking but I finally got it worked out. The next thing was deciding which front door to keep, but I worked that out in my head last night while I was trying to go to sleep. Then there are things like building up the foundation on house B so it’s the same as house A, making the front porch bigger so I can put some rocking chairs and such on it and matching the houses up so they look like one house and not two glued together.

Here are some more before pictures:

House A

House B

As you can see the houses need some work. There are also some weird angles in the second floor rooms of house A that I'm trying to decide what to do with. I could build 'boxes' around them or just work with them like they are.

Day 2: 05/28/12

Demolition:  I started the demolition today. It went a lot faster than expected. I was originally going to remove the old shingles and replace them but they were really hard to get off and left a mess.

I decided it would be easier to remove the roof sections and then cut new ones and replace them completely. This will also make working in the attic easier.

Here are the pictures of what I’ve gotten done so far.

As you can see I have all the roof pieces off of both houses. (In the last picture you can see on that white piece that I labeled them so I would know which goes where later.) I also removed the porch from house B and the porch railings from house A. I took off both of the bay windows. I didn’t like the one on house A so it had to go. I liked the one on house B better but decide to put French doors in there since I didn’t have a ‘back’ door. That room is going to be the Dining rooms so French doors will be nice in there. I also rough cut the round top windows to square. They aren’t straight but since I’m covering the walls anyway it won’t matter (I have to re-cut them anyway.) I removed most of the ginger bread details and saved them. I may reuse some of it, not sure right now. 

Well that's it for now. More to come soon. Thanks for reading.