Some nice finds

I had a good time at the City of London Dollshouse Festival.  It's not very big, so I was finished in 75 minutes, but there were some nice things there.  Here's what I got, I'm going to post them here even thought they aren't all for the Willowcrest.

I've bought several things from Shepherd Miniatures for the Willowcrest in the past, their prices are very reasonable and they do a lot of shop display items.  The button display boxes and the knitting patterns are for the Willowcrest. The beach windbreak is for a seaside scene I'm thinking of making for a club project. The map and box of rose food are for my garden shed writer's retreat.

I bought a whitewood bookshelf from World of My Own for the shed as well, the map will go behind the desk (just propped there at the moment and not stuck down yet).

I couldn't resist these reasonably priced and quite cute cross-stitch cushions, which look lovely on my Victorian gazebo porch (below).

Another couple of bargains from minst.com, made from real seashells and jewellery findings. These are to add some glam to my Mulvaney Georgian roombox, which is furnished in Art Deco style.

A hidden corner

The Willowcrest is a bit notorious for the completely inaccessible staircase once assembled. Mine isn't as bad because I cut out a big opening into the knitting shop, but it's still not great.  And annoyingly, the one bulb that has burnt out in the whole house is in the upstairs landing where it is impossible to get at.  But although the landing is not really visible from the back of the house, you can see it quite clearly when you peek in the front window.  For a long time I've had this empty table sitting in there. I don't remember where I got the table, I might have made it, it looks like it is made from a kit. I wanted to put a display onto it so there is something to look at when you peek in the window.

I had a beautifully knitted cardigan I had bought a while ago, but nothing to display it on.  So I got out my box of dolls, most of which came free with magazines or were bought cheap at sales.  I chose one that had a solid body and was falling apart a bit already, and took it apart so that I just had the torso and arms.

I needed it to be a bit taller so I glued together a crude stand from balsa wood. Generally I don't like using balsa because it is so soft, like crusty sponge, but the stand will be hidden from view.

Then I wrestled the cardigan onto the stand, which was quite difficult because the cardigan came sewn shut, and the arms are bent. Not to mention the thumbs catching on everything.  I got there in the end.  Then I added two of the display boxes I bought at the show. I also had a knitted basket I had bought a while ago, which I filled up with little coloured pompoms to look like wool. And I had a couple of crocheted potholders from a longago swap.

The next challenge was to manoeuvre the finished display table through the knitting shop onto the landing, without knocking anything off in the knitting shop and without taking out the bored husband standing at the doorway.  When I finally got the table into position, I pressed down to bed the tacky wax onto the floor.  And a leg promptly broke off...

So I had to work the table back out through the knitting shop, fish around blindly for the leg and retrieve that, and then glue the leg back on and wait until the glue dried. Then repeat.  This time, I pressed down only on the feet themselves, not the table.  Success. But very hard to take a photograph of. I can also see all the dust on the floor in the photographs, something that you luckily can't see in real life as the floor is pretty hidden from view, lol.

Counter display

I'm putting together a little display to sit on the end of the cash desk, using one of the Model Village display stands I made a few weeks ago which I have now painted white.  I'm thinking it should be full of impulse buy items that you might pick up and buy while you wait to pay.  So I've glued on the scissors on cards that I made last week. And I saw at the dollshouse show someone selling miniature decorative needle packs which I thought would be a good idea. Theirs were printed on photo paper which I don't have.  I found some suitable pictures online and printed them on my normal printer paper which isn't so sharp but I think it's good enough.  I cut them out and folded them over, and decorated a couple with no-hole beads to simulate a closure, and ran a gold felt pen around the edges of another one.  It makes a good start on a display but I still need more items.

Shop Sign

I've been thinking for a long time about how to make a sign for the front of the store. I've decided to call my store 'Patches & Purls', which I like and I don't think is too commonly used in the needlecraft world. When we visited The Range a few weeks ago, I spotted little boxes of wooden letters, already painted white. They were only £2.99 for a box of 73 letters so I bought a couple of boxes in the hopes that they might work.  I'm delighted that they have turned out to be exactly the right size for the shop fascia.  I've stuck a few up with wax to see what they look like.  I had been thinking I might paint them but actually the white is quite eyecatching.  What do you think?  Leave them white or paint them a colour (what colour)?

Slow progress

I had intended to get enough done for the Willowcrest last week to put together another post, but instead a cold virus came my way and I spent several days plonked in front of the telly trying not to move because everything hurt.  I am now on the mend and back at work, although still coughing and sniffing like many of my colleagues around me. Which is probably where I caught the virus in the first place.

Before I went sick, I had painted several pairs of scissors, a couple of irons and a telephone. I'm not very happy with the irons, the castings are quite rough and the resulting paint job rather crude.

The telephone went into the knitting shop so they can keep in touch with customers. The black handled scissors have gone onto the cutting table in the quilt shop, and the irons have been partially hidden towards the rear of the workshop  so you can't see them too closely.  The orange handled scissors and the gold needlework scissors have been stuck on card for use in a shop display that I am contemplating.

I had a couple of empty shelves under the bay window.

I had a bag of fabric sample squares from long ago, and I found that if I ironed them into quarters, they looked about the right size for 1/12th scale. So I selected groups of four toning squares and ironed them into quarters, then set the folds by smearing a little tacky glue into each fold and ironing them again so that they were nice and flat and not too 'poofy'. Then I glued them into stacks of four. I made labels on the computer and then folded a strip of plastic cut from a magazine wrapper around each stack.  This filled up the shelves nicely.

I put one on the cash desk with some other fabric purchases someone is making, also ironed with tacky glue to flatten them.  I've stuck down another phone to the right of the till, and filled a little basket with thread spools made from segments of painted cocktail stick with punched circles for ends, left over from a Lisa Engler kit.

I'm off to the City of London dollshouse festival tomorrow so I will keep my eyes open for anything that might work well for the Willowcrest.

Now I have a deadline

So it's been over a year since this house was unpacked. In the meantime I haven't been completely inactive with dollshousing.  I've put together this Real Good Toys porch kit and modified it to fit my oldest house.

and I did a scratch build 'fantasy shed' project for a group display by my dollshouse club.

 But now I have a deadline.  My dollshouse club summer outing, which is normally to a shop in the area, will this year be coming to my house to see my collection. Eeek! So I have until early July to finish (or hide) all my ongoing projects.

The Willowcrest, while largely finished, has never had the interiors completely sorted out.  Issues like dolls and furniture not fixed down yet has led to scenes such as this, with mayhem and empty shelves.

Meanwhile for several years I've been chucking things into a box labelled 'Willowcrest' that I thought might find a place in the quilting/knitting shops.  The first job was to unpack the box, when it became apparent that I would need another Willowcrest to fit everything in.

This triggered another bout of procrastination as I didn't know where to start.

So I have started small, nibbling away at small projects.

I put together three Model Villages kits for display stands.

Then I filled up the lefthand display stand with fabric and used it to help fill up one of the empty display units in the quilting shop.  This  unit got fixed into the right hand corner as you look in the back.  The display of lavender products on the top shelf is from a long ago online workshop. The bag is one I handsewed years ago using a tiny Log Cabin foundation pattern.

I had collected various laser cut wooden signs, so I gave them a paint job and fixed them in.

I had previously set up the righthand shop window display for the knitting shop, so it just needed a bit of repair to fix things down again.  But the lefthand matching display for the quilting shop had been empty for years.

I decided I needed to break off a couple of shelves to make more room for display items, then I looked through my collected stock to choose/adapt items to fill the shelves.

That looks better.

The cat decided she had better investigate this large box that I was spending so much time with.

I will keep plugging away. I've still got empty shelves to fill and more decoration to add.  I did cut out a number of paper 'quilts' and added them to the inside of the porch above the entrance. That's what real quilt shops are like, colour and pattern everywhere.

Two and a half year old dust bunnies

[introductory explanation pasted in from my other dollshouse blog, in case you only read this one]

It feels very strange to be clicking 'new post' on this blog after such a long hiatus. If you follow my main blog, you know that moving house took us a heck of a lot longer than I ever expected. Meanwhile my dollshouses, including the Willowcrest, went into self-storage, then into professional removers' storage while we were renting, then came up on a big truck a few months after we bought our new house, and since then they have been filling up our utility room and kicking around in the basement.

I've been trying to create a room in the cellar for the dollshouses since January, but at first I was trying to buy secondhand kitchen cabinets on eBay with no luck at all.  I gave up on that in July when I spotted a 40% off sale at a big DIY store. I was able to buy the cabinets I wanted, and flatpacked so that we could bring them home in the car without having to hire a van. I used the money I saved towards buying worktops, and the fitter who installed our real kitchen came and installed the cabinets last weekend.  Since then I've been painting the rest of the room, and today I finally started unwrapping dollshouses.

At first I couldn't even remember which house was in this box!

But once I got down to the bubblewrap, I realised it was the Willowcrest.

There it is! And to my embarrassment, it's incredibly dusty with two and a half year old dust. Obviously I didn't take the time to clean it off before I packed it back in 2013.  Ooops!  I've given it a bit of a brush with a soft paintbrush, but will need to get the hoover (vacuum) out eventually when I get time.

Top floor workshop wasn't too bad, just had to right some chairs, put the ironing board back in place, and stick down a few accessories

Oh, oh. We seem to have a drunk woman trashing the knitting shop.

Bathroom was fine, most of the stuff was stuck down.

Workshop was a bit trashed, too many loose items.  I've sorted it out a bit but it needs more attention.

On display on the counter

I've also spent several hours going through boxes of kits, dolls, purchases and accessories, and found many things that were intended for the Willowcrest.  So once I get my workshop set up, I definitely need to give the house some attention and try to finish everything.

Nice to see it again!

I'm not dead yet... :) Visit to 'Small Stories: At home in a dollshouse" at the Museum of Childhood

.... although you might have wondered considering how few posts there have been lately.  That's because I still haven't got my dollshouses unpacked and my new dollshouse room set up now that we've moved.  I'm waiting on our erratic kitchen fitter as I've asked him to source me some secondhand kitchen base units and come and fit them under some countertop in the cellar to be my dollshouse display.  I haven't heard from him yet this year so I assume he's either forgotten or not yet come across suitable cabinets.

So I haven't been doing much dollshousing because everything including my tools and paints is still in a box.

But I did pay a visit this week to London to the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green to visit the 'Small Stories: At home in a dollshouse' exhibition.  This is a free to enter display in the upstairs mezzanine which opened in December and will run until 6 September 2015.  This exhibition was publicised with articles in every dollshouse magazine I take, so it made me curious to go and see it even though in general I am not that keen on the out-of-scale world of antique dollshouses.

The moment I stepped through the museum doors I remembered what I don't like about it: screaming kids.  Everywhere.  Running around, screaming constantly, playing, it's one giant playground for bored small children with their accompanying adults trailing after them. And because the building is constructed like a small railway shed, with a doubleheight ceiling, all the noise is echoing as well.  But I gritted my teeth and headed upstairs to where the exhibition starts.

The website says there are 12 dollshouses in the exhibition.  Each one is protected in a glass box, with accompanying visual material such as portraits of people from the relevant period, engravings of period interiors, scraps of curtain fabric, vintage advertisements etc.  For each house, they have created backstories for certain dolls living in the house - the dolls get a named portrait next to the house, and a button with their picture next to it on the control panel in front of the glass case.  When you push their button, you hear an actor speaking their story as if they were real people living in the house.  After a few stories, I found I got a bit bored with this because the scripts are all about them worrying about their baby, or about people coming for dinner, and have no bearing on the dollshouse itself apart from perhaps mentioning some of their furniture or possessions.  Also there was a constant asteroid belt of small kids zooming up to wildly push the buttons and then running off again in orbit without waiting to hear anything. As you can't push any other buttons until the script finishes, this could be trying.  The button I did want to push was 'Light All' which would turn on all of any lights that had been placed inside.  For some houses, this was only one or two lights, in others most of the rooms were lit which was quite charming.  Each house has a small placard giving limited information about its history, with larger placards for each themed section talking about changing social history and the impact on housing.

Some of the houses are displayed closed, and you can only peep in the windows at what were mostly empty rooms.  But several splendid houses had their doors open including my favourite house, the Tate Baby House from 1760. I was really pleased to see it because in the past it has sometimes been displayed closed, but in this exhibition you can clearly see everything and view the fronts, one side, and the roof.  I've always thought that one day I would like to build a house that is reminiscent of the Tate House while keeping to smaller proportions. Because it is huge.

In addition to the houses, the museum has recreated two life-sized rooms from the dollshouses: a Victorian kitchen and a 60s living room, both in very simplified form and designed as children's playrooms with little dressing up costumes (all MIA when I was there).

I liked some of the little touches inside the dollshouses, like these delicate gauze roller blinds.

The exhibition runs chronologically, finishing with a weird plastic 'Kaleidoscope' house which doesn't look useful either as a plaything or a collectable, and a collection of roomboxes furnished by a mixed bag of artists.  Some of the roomboxes are very 'artistic' but others were more conventionally furnished.  This room by Liberty Art Fabrics Interiors was quite attractive.  I particularly like the books, each with a Liberty print dust jacket.

After finishing the exhibition, I went over to look at the many dollshouses on permanent display.  I liked this recent model of a patisserie shop, made special by being wedge-shaped rather than square.

And then I escaped back to the relative quiet of the traffic thundering down the busy road outside the museum.  Some of the houses were quite interesting - there was a huge one in stained wood which had its own elevator for example - and the furnished ones had lots to look at.  On the whole I enjoyed it, although I think it would have been nice to have found out more about the houses themselves and how they came to be at the museum, and how much of their contents is original etc. It was certainly a masterclass in the many different ways a dollshouse can be constructed and accessed.

An amazing Art Nouveau Willowcrest

Recently I met a lovely French lady named Dominique, and we were pleased to find that we both have Willowcrest houses. We traded blog addresses and when I went to look at her Willowcrest, I was totally blown away by her artistry and imagination.  Talk about keeping your light under a bushel, because she never mentioned how creative she was and that she had her own Etsy shop.

Her Willowcrest is barely recognisable, transformed with so much wonderful Art Nouveau detailing.  It's still a work in progress but her attention to detail as she completes little vignettes and displays is amazing.  Her main blog is Petit cabinet de curiosites, but there is also a great slide show of the house when it was at an earlier stage on her other blog here - just click on the 'play' arrow on the image to see 24 pictures of the interior.  I really love the balcony, and the stair case, and the sinuous wood detailing on doors and furniture.

Apologies that I haven't blogged in so long, but our house buying saga has dragged on and on.  Meanwhile my Willowcrest and my other houses have been in storage for a year now  :(    But it is looking like we will finally get the keys next month so hopefully by July our stuff will come back out of storage and I can start setting up my new dollshouse room.