Paintings

 I have two passions; one is building my Miniature House and the other one is painting and drawing. Today I thought; "let's combine both  worlds; I'll paint something for my minihouse".  The pictures beneath show my working process.

As you can see I can almost completely change the picture while working on it....I let myself be surprised :D       

Finally, I chose the picture in the middle above to make a frame around it  and put it in the attic of my Miniature House.

 

My way of making a mattrass

In the picture above you can see a mattrass I made for a bed in the attic of my Miniature House.

I learned this way of making a mattrass from a Dutch doll's house magazine (Poppenhuizen&Miniaturen, nr. 46, april/may  2000). I have seen several tutorials about making a mattrass on Blogspot by now, but this is the way I am used to doing it and I will show you in this post.

I start out by cutting a rectangle out of foam (2 cm thickness) .

The measurements of this rectangle are 7.3 by 14.1 cm.

Next I take a piece of thin cotton and iron on some non woven interfacing fabric (in dutch: vlieseline).

By using self made templates I drew the outlines of  3 parts of the matrass on this interfacing fabric:

A: 7.8 x 14.6 cm

B and C: both 7.8 x 8.2 cm

As you can see in the picture, I also cut a long strip (56 cm length and 2.6  cm width) out of the cotton.
 This is part D. Part D  will later be sewn between part A and part B/C.


The next picture shows that after cutting out part B,
I folded about 1 cm back and stitched it to prevent it from flipping back.

I then laid parts B and C next to part A and made the outlines match.
With some tape I temporarily attached B an C together,
making sure part B was the upper part and lying on top of C.

I used a self-made template to mark on part A all spots where the buttons will be attached

after the mattrass is stitched and filled with the foam.

 I then carefully stitched part D onto part A,
the stiches very close to the edge of the fabric (approximately 2 mm away from it).
The right sides of the cotton of part A and D are facing each other while stitching.
I made both ends of part D fit together nicely.

Finally, part B/C was stiched to D/A but again I made sure that the right side of the cotton was turned inside!

After that, I turned the fabric inside out, which means the smooth and beautiful side of the fabric is the outside of the mattrass cover now. I carefully removed the tape that held part B and C together.
By using some pins I stiched again about 2 mm away from the edges, all around.
I did this on both sides of the cover.

Next  I put the foam mattrass into the cotton cover,  using the gap between part C and D.

 Last step;  the buttoning......

And this is the final result!

 

 

Cupboard for the Attic

For the attic in my Miniature House I wanted to make a cupboard. I had a plain wooden cabinet lying around so I decided to use it for this purpose. In the picture below you can see the items  I used for making my cupboard. For example, I glued a piece of decorated paper on cardboard. I cut the tiny flowers of the pattern out as little squares.



Next I sawed the wooden sticks into strips of 1 cm width. I adjusted their length and glued them on top of the cupboard as you can see in the picture below. I also drilled 4 small holes, 2 on each side of the cupboard. I put a screw in each hole and this made it possible to fit a round stick.

After that I painted the wood in red and green.

Next, I covered the whole piece with a crackling-varnish. When this had dried completely, I painted the entire surface with gesso. The gesso started to crackle very quickly! I wanted  the cupboard to have a kind of worn appearance so after the gesso had dried, I also sanded the surface.

Then, I glued the paper-squares in place like faux-tiles. And finally I applied a coat of diluted wood-stain.

So now it's finished and I can put it in place in my attic. I think I like it this way...:-)

The beautiful jug and plate are made by a miniature pottery-artist: Elisabeth Causeret.

Pillow and White Seat

 

This is a picture of a pillow I embroidered with a stitch namend "petit-point". 

I made the white seat a long time ago, with help of a tutorial in a book mentioned in my post

about the couch and armchair.

The measurements of the cushion are  2,5 x 2,5 cm.

 

chair with embroidered seat

In this post you can see an adittion to my first floor landing.

 

I took an embroidery pattern from a book and adjusted it to the measurements of the chair-seat:

 

The chair and table I made long ago form a kit.





Before cutting the embroidery out, I put some diluted Tacky Glue around it to prevent  it becoming frayed


Some extra filling for a really comfortable seat :-)

Finally wrapping and gluing it like a small package.

And there it is......



.




Brick Wall Part 2

 

In this post  about making a brick-wall (part 2)  I will show you  how I coloured  and cut the sheets of sanding-paper that I used  for creating my bricks.

After priming the sheets ( I think used about 10 or 15 sheets all together) with gesso, I covered them all with a transparant  layer of burnt sienna (this is called a "glacis" in  dutch) . I let this dry throroughly. On top of that I put some burnt umber, sometimes diluted with lots of water, sometimes apllied a bit thicker.

With the burnt umber still a bit wet, I applied another layer of transparant colour, this time I used some cadmium red. Because the layer underneath is still a bit wet, both colours mix in a surprisingly way.

I made  sure to cover all the sheets of sanding-paper with multiple transparant layers of colour,
but I did not treat every sheet exactly the same as the other.
For  the bricks need to differ slightly from each other, but must harmony together.

Sometimes I waited  for the layer underneath to dry completely before applying the next one , sometimes I put a fresh layer of "glacis" on top of a still wet layer of paint. And sometimes I just let my wet  brush drip above the sheet and wait  for whatever happens. I simply experimented  a little with serveral colours, like umber, sienna, ocre, ultramarine and white.

In the end I had lot of sheets in variations of a brownish-red,

as you can see for example in the picture below.

The next step  would be cutting the sheets of sanding-paper

 in long pieces of 5 mm width.

I made a handy tool for this;  it existed of a wooden stick with two pieces of wood glued at each end of it. Both  pieces were 5 mm width, so they had exactly the measurement of the paper strips to be cut.

I  made sure the length of my sheets fitted nicely between the two  extruding  wooden parts.







In this way I cut the sheets, one after the other, in strips of 5 mm width.

I used a strong craft-knife and frequently replaced the blades for the sanding-paper blunts them in no-time!

It's really convenient  if one glues the strip of wood on a plastic household plate (for slicing vegetables, etc) so you won't ruin your cutting-mat.

As you can see, I ended up with lots of  long strips, 

slighty (but sometimes very!) different in colour from each other.

The most efficient way of cutting all strips in smaller pieces,

is by taking a single strip and drawing a vertical line every 18 mm.

I used a piece of cardboard to do this,
so I did not have to measure every 18 mm with a ruler.

When I had marked every 18 mm on  a single strip, I held this strip together with 4 or 5 other strips. With a pair of scissors I cut every pencilmark. In this way, I got  about 6 "bricks" with every singel cut.

In the end, I mixed all single " bricks" together.

I painted the walls of the house in grey, as you can see in picture below.

After cutting all strips of sanding-paper into pieces 18 mm width, I asked the  roadmaker to drop them in front of my house :-)

Next, I drew horizontal lines on every wall of the house, perpendicular with the coners of the house. 

The distance between every horizontal line is 6 mm ( again  I used a self-made ruler, see my Post about  making a slated roof). 

 I started gluing the "bricks" on a  horizontal line, leaving about 1 mm between every "brick" .
I used white glue and this worked well.

 As you can see in the picture, I made vertical pencilmarks to be sure the bricks would  follow a straight line from the top of the house untill the groudfloor  

In this way I decorated the main walls of my house and it took me a whole winter! So now you have red both my posts about paper-bricks and you still are convinced you can do this too without having a nervous breakdown in the end, I think this is just the right technique for you :-)