Crafty

Show and Tell this week  is of something we've made "or would like to" -- not being a particularly crafty person, at least not like some of the amazingly productive bloggers out there, I had to think a lot about this.  The things that I make are usually either knitted, which have already been shown here, or eaten, like dinner, which can be creative but isn't what you'd call "crafty."  And then I realized that the qualification would save me --

I have for umpteen years had a fascination for dollhouses, possibly inspired by Mary Norton's The Borrowers series, and certainly by Queen Mary's Doll House and Colleen Moore's "Fairy Castle".  The dream to have one of my own has always been that, mostly a dream, until, after having two daughters, I thought about making a dollhouse for each of them.  A year or so ago, I bought a mousepad that looks like a Persian carpet, and looking at it every day made me remember my dream and start planning to make it a reality. 

This year, Laura will be seven, a good age I think for a dollhouse of her own.  The book is The New Dolls' House Do-It-Yourself Book by the picturesqely-named Venus Dodge, and it is open to the picture of the house we'll build for Laura, David doing the shell and some furniture and I the painting and details of decoration.  My idea is to give her a fairly simple setting for each room -- kitchen, living room, and bedroom -- with plenty of space for adding things that she herself chooses.  And while the Queen Mary and Colleen Moore houses are wonderful, they are not the kind of thing that a child would really be allowed to play with, and so I want to make a house more like Tasha Tudor's dollhouse, perhaps, or like something out of Beatrix Potter, that is more fantastical, not dependent on a particularly rigid scale or literalness.  Animals may end up living alongside people, who knows?

Well, now that I've announced it, I'd better get started, hadn't I!

Comments

[Elizabeth]

It is a dangerous thing to be bitten by the dollhouse bug. Addictive, expensive and fun. I'm currently laying down hardwood on our latest (2nd) house. We made it from a kit (labourious enough -really!) but we make everything we can ourselves. Must post about this again soon. Thanks for the reminder.