A Bluestocking Knits

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 6: Fittings and Finishing Details

This was surprisingly nerve-wracking, and I put it off for ages, it seemed.

The MDF base that came with the kit is here held in the right-angle of my big gluing jig by the two large yellow clamps, the four walls of the box are wrapped around the (now also glued-in-place) floor at the bottom and the removable "ceiling" at the top and held snugly with extra-large rubber bands while the whole box is also pushed into the right-angle of the jig, there is a piece of wax paper between the base and the underside of the shop box in case of glue overflow, and the five handy craft clamps aren't actually clamping anything (because they are too short to go around the box) but are pushed up snugly against the slightly-warped front piece in hopes that the glue will grab hold firmly enough to counteract the bowing -- which they did!

I wasn't entirely delighted with this -- which is regular acrylic craft paint on the Plexiglas, using a 10/0 spotter brush -- but it took me so many attempts, hunched over it with my nose literally an inch from the Plexiglass, that I decided this is good enough.  It doesn't look quite like the lovely font I chose, though in all fairness, if you don't know what font it was supposed to be, you might not think anything is "wrong".  Part of the difficulty was that after I had come up with the idea of printing out the template in reverse and taping it to the outside of the window so that I could paint it on the inside, the relative thickness of the Plexiglas was actually distracting, in that I was painting on one side while looking at the template on the other side, which is kind of like trying to put on make-up in a funhouse mirror, where nothing is quite where you think it is!  Oh, well -- by the time I did the version above, I had painted it and wiped it off so many times that I couldn't bear the thought of having to do it again.  "It'll never be noticed on a galloping horse," Laura told me comfortingly!

I had long had the idea to have long rods around the top of the side and rear walls to display carpets on, like many real-life carpet shops do.  It is very difficult, though, to find ready-made 1:12 scale curtain rods that are longer than six inches or so, and I wanted mine at least seven, so in the end, I made some myself.

These are actually 1:12 doorknobs, using the knob as the finial and the plate as a base for the "bracket," which is of course really just a brass eye from the hardware store, bent slightly to open it up -- I want to be able to remove the rods easily, as I suspect that the only way to get a petit-point carpet to hang on a rod is to actually sew it on, and if I ever want to switch out the displayed carpets, which I doubtless will, I would need to be able to get the rod out and back in easily, from overhead.

The doorknobs looked very neatly in-scale, but the problem was how to get them to stick to the end of the rod!  I had a solid 3/32" brass rod that was the perfect size visually -- and then luckily, as I was poking through the display of "precision metals" at the hardware store, I found 3/32" tubing, and the shaft of the doorknob fit almost exactly into the tubing! so I also bought a package of 1/16" tubing (a rod would have been better, more solid, but they were out of stock).  The 1/16" tubing fit perfectly inside the 3/32" one -- I cut the larger tubing to the size I wanted my display rod, and cut the smaller tubing to the same length less the length of the doorknob shaft that would fit on each end.  Running the smaller tubing inside the larger one not only gave the larger one more strength, but the just-short-enough length gave the super-glue more surface to grab on to, to hold the knob/finial in place.

I was frugal and got three rods out of two lengths of tubing, using two pieces of the smaller inside one piece of the larger, and vice versa, for the two side rods.  The one in the photo actually has a seam in it -- with an extra dab of super-glue on the seams inside the barrel, just in case -- but it's barely visible, and once it has a carpet hanging from it, I suspect it won't be at all.

Gluing in the trims at the tops and bottoms of the interior walls was also fraught with the possibility of mishap, as Jeeves would say, and I was both annoyed and relieved on occasion to find that the pieces I'd glued in crookedly popped off easily enough that I could just sand off the bits of dried glue on the trim and try again more firmly.  I was more than a little deflated to see that after all the care I thought I was taking on the umpteenth try, I still left a huge gap between the baseboard and the floor on one wall, now alas quite permanent.  Oh well, lesson learned.  Thanks to Brae's tutorial for filling in the cracks with paint, though, I managed to get fairly "seamless" connections between the mitered corners, and between the trim and the I-hope-charmingly wobbly walls.

I'm still experimenting with some last-minute fixtures -- I really wanted a light switch and thought of making one in very thin balsa or bass, and then wondered how on earth I'd punch small-enough and neat-enough holes in it, and while I pondered this, I printed out some size tests, using an image of 1920s plates I found on Ebay, which I printed on good paper and glued to a slightly-smaller scrap of watercolor paper, and smooshed the edges down with a burnishing tool so that the cut edge wouldn't show.  When I stuck one on the wall, I thought, "well, that doesn't look half bad, actually" so I've left it there for the time being --

(Except that it's a bit crooked, I see! but it's just museum putty, so I can fix that!)  It's completely flat, of course, as I haven't found anything tiny enough to use for the actual switches.  I really like the grotty-brass look, though, which is a complete illusion!

While I was looking for antique switch plates, I also came across floor registers, so I did one of those as well -- I used the smallest burnishing tool to push down the "empty" parts to make it look like there is space underneath.  I'm not quite sure that this works yet, but it's just a background detail, so I can leave it for a while (I do have a friend with a 3D printer, so that might be worth a try ...!).

"Pleasure It is to Hear, Iwis, the Birdès Sing"

The moment I saw this Sue Bakker petitpoint chart, I wanted to stitch it.  I love its Arts & Crafts naïveté, the profusion of flowers and leaves against the simple rope border, the softly-faded colors -- it just speaks to me.  Bakker says it can be a wall-hanging or a carpet, but it didn't seem quite right to me to put it on the floor -- not so much the idea of walking on it, I think, but that you just get a different perspective when a piece is on the floor than when it is on the wall -- so wall-hanging it would be.

For me, Bakker's charts have become a matter not of "are there going to be challenges?" but "what are the challenges going to be, and where the dickens are they?"  The Anchor 676 on the chart does not appear on current Anchor color cards, and it was only by happenstance that I came across a website that offered the substitution "A676 = DMC 452".  But Bakker calls it "green" -- it appears on the birds' wings -- whereas what I found in my hand was this --

which takes a very considerable leap of the imagination to call "green" -- oh, well.  I tweaked a few things here and there, rearranging the colors on the birds and using a lighter shade of the dark blue for the background.  I like the really deep border on the original, but didn't do quite as many rows on mine, as it's already a bit larger-than-life for 1:12 scale and I didn't want to push my luck.

Never mind -- I love the design, and those swirly leaves in the top corners give me a thrill every time I look at them.  Morris used birds quite often in his designs.  Here is a detail from the popular "Strawberry Thief" pattern --

which is certainly a cousin of Bakker's design.

I made the hanging rod from a slender dowel that came in a package from the crafts store -- it isn't bass wood, that I can tell, but something with a lovely color and grain, which came out beautifully with a bit of beeswax and linseed oil finish.  The finial is a filigree bead attached with a sewing pin that has an unusually ovoid head -- they come in the shirts that David likes from Penney's! -- and once assembled, I painted the finials with gold paint to tone the bead down a little and make the silvery pin match.  The hanging loops are silk ribbon.

I actually finished the stitching on this quite some months ago, and dithered for a very long time about how to finish the edges, as my usual carpet edgings seemed just ... carpet-y.  I was tempted to just fold the edges over and tack them down at the back, and then impulsively decided to do the same thing I did with my first petit-point cushion, and couch a length of perle cotton around the edge.  The color doesn't "match," but sort of "co-ordinates," and it was on hand.  Despite that, I'm very pleased with the way it all turned out.

The title of this post is the first line of a song from 1530 or thereabouts -- I know the poem from Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" and it seemed quite appropriate here, with all of the little birdies!

My hope for the 1:12 carpet shop was to attach the carpets to the display rods in such a way that they would hang as realistically as possible but still be removable if I later wanted to use a particular carpet in another setting.  (Because of course when you want a miniature carpet, you get one from the miniature carpet shop ....)  Luckily for me, what I had thought would probably work did, and on the first try.

One of the members on the Petitpointers list proposed a Sue Bakker Challenge recently, to work a design by her, since there is such an abundance published in miniatures magazines and so fairly readily available -- and they are charming! -- so it is really more of a Celebration or Appreciation than a Challenge, but there it is!  I chose this one since it was new to me.  Bakker clearly has an affection for William Morris's style, as it is one of her many Morris or Morris-esque designs.  This chart is from a long-ago Miniature Needlework Society newsletter, based on a carpet by John Henry Dearle who designed for Morris & Co., and is called "Carnation".  I worked mine on 28-count Monaco linen with two strands of DMC floss, some blended, and I lightened one strand of each color except for the mid-pink to get a slightly "faded" look (the contrast between 523 "Shell Pink Light" and the next-lighter shade was a little too much for the effect I wanted).

Despite Bakker's repeated admonitions to work petit point carpets in half-cross stitch to prevent distortion of the canvas from the tension of the stitches, I've come to suspect that -- for me, at any rate -- I have pretty much the same amount of tweak (that is, the finished-but-unblocked piece being a parallelogram instead of a rectangle) whether I use half-cross or continental stitch, and so here I used continental.  It takes more thread, certainly, because of the longer, diagonal leg of each continental stitch on the back of the work as compared to the straight leg of half-cross, but on this kind of canvas at least, I find it so much easier to secure the beginnings and ends of threads under continental stitch that I feel more pleased with my work both while I'm stitching and afterwards, and that is all the persuasion I need.  Different fibers and different canvases may require different stitches, though, certainly!

And so to hang this carpet on its display rod, I just whip-stitched around the rod and through a few rows of canvas on the back of the carpet.  I had thought that I would use invisible thread, and I actually went to my thread box to get it, but I dislike hand-sewing with the stuff so much that I came away with a neutral grey thread instead.  It took less securing to hold together than I expected, which is good news!  I cut a much-longer length of thread than I would need, so that I could leave the loops loose enough to move the rod out of the way in order to see what I was doing, which was very helpful.  I also made the stitches into the canvas fairly short, so that with luck the carpet wouldn't droop or sag -- here the stitches in the canvas are two strands tall, where the rod covers about twice that.  Since this particular rod is on a side wall of the room box, I started and stopped the whip stitches about 1/2" (15mm) from the edge so that they wouldn't show when viewed end-on.

The main uncertainties were that the carpet would be too heavy for the rod (which is fairly flexible), and/or that its weight would cause the whip stitches to slip towards the underside of the rod and make an unrealistic-looking inwards "dent" at the top of the carpet.  But neither has proved to be the case, and the carpet is hanging fairly successfully, I think!

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 5: Hardware and Weathering

The hardware I chose for the carpet shop doors is one of the rather-standard knob-and-plate sets and sort-of-matching two-sided letter slot available from most miniatures sources, under various brand names but clearly the same.  They weren't really ideal, looking late-Victorian where I was hoping for something more Georgian, or at least early-Victorian, but there it is, needs must -- it was more efficient to order all from one place, and I was certainly happier with the rounder knobs, which are more in keeping with the period of the shop than the far more common modern-looking ones with sharp angles.  I did manage to find a shop bell that I liked! 

They were, however, all very clean and shiny straight out of the box, so then I had to go about aging them.  It will probably be clear to experts that I don't have much idea of what I'm doing here, but after reading their blogs, I knew in theory what needed to be done!  I am lucky enough to have a real vintage bell to use as a model --

so I painted all of my hardware black, then dabbed on a bit of green and a bit of brown, until it looked about right.

(Like traitors' heads on spikes!)

I've also finished the permanent signage.  I had the dickens of a time with the shop name, not trusting my skills at this scale to free-hand letters -- though in my more desperate moments I did consider it.  I find it difficult to believe that there aren't 5/8 inch stencils to be had, but there aren't, unless you want to pay for custom stencils, which are far beyond my budget.  I couldn't even find stick-on letters.  I tried cutting some out of paper, which sort of worked but usually ended up with my snipping off a serif here and there, etc.  Print-your-own waterslide decals were, alas, a dismal failure, with only the number on the door being worth keeping and I'm not even delighted with that.  The "FINE CARPETS" one actually stretched as it was coming out from underneath the backing -- too much water? not enough water?  I don't know.  These decals are repositionable for a few moments after you lay them, which is very helpful, believe me, but I discovered to my dismay that if you touch the image while you are doing this (despite the sealer applied after printing), some of it will most likely come off on your finger.  As the decal dries, the ink sets, but the door number decal especially was so small that I couldn't reposition it without touching the ink.  And even if they had worked, I wanted the shop name sign to be gold, and I would have had to paint over them.

While I was dithering and experimenting with the carpet-shop sign, I had the idea to do this on the upper façade --

-- in the manner of old shops that have permanent signage painted over when a new business moves in -- which was actually pretty successful.

I was hoping to superscript the S in "Tho^s." the 18th-century way, but I couldn't find the same font in two different sizes, nor even, to my astonishment, upper-case and lower, so this was what I ended up with.  These are stickers from the scrapbook aisle at Michaels.  The letters are textured, which wasn't ideal -- painted, they remind me of the no-slip texture on ladder steps and shower floors -- but they are a good size, and they add a certain whatsit to that rather boring façade.  I just made up the name, but it sounds charmingly old-fashioned!  (You can see that I got the idea to do this after I'd aged the piece a bit, which I had to do over again after painting over the letters!  More practice, I guess.)

The shop name has had a long journey, full of wrong turns and potholes, but like many such journeys, arrived at its destination happily.

This is the Folkart 59796 alphabet stencil, painted with Martha Stewart Craft Paint in Metallic Gold -- a handsome alphabet, to be sure, if smaller than I wanted.  (I noticed after this photo that the F was clearly below the line, so I painted it out and re-did it.)  I scanned the stencil then cropped the letters I needed and spaced them out in a rectangle the same size as the shop-front inset, so that I wouldn't have to do it on the fly -- a bit of a bother, but worth it to save the stress!  I was not successful in merely dabbing paint over the stencil, so I painted through the stencil, as it were, onto the surface.  I had to do one letter at a time, then let it dry, then do the next one, since I didn't want to cut the letters completely separate.  The result wasn't what I'd pictured in my imagination -- which was certainly bigger letters, as well as neater -- but the sign was "up," at least.  It's possible that some of the clumsiness of execution was due to the brush I used.  It's a poor workman who blames his tools, of course, but this was my brush --

and no amount of wetting and coaxing would get the tip any finer, so I vowed that if I ever did this again (wh. at the moment was doubtful, but I said the same thing about childbirth the first time) I would buy a better brush from an artists' supply store.

This was just not what I had in my mind's eye, though, and so after a few days of thinking about it, I painted it over and tried something different -- first, pricking around the edges of a printed letter, through the paper and slightly into the painted wood, and then filling in the outline with a very-fine-tipped gold pen, which I tried out on a piece of scrap wood I'd been using to practice weathering techniques.  This worked fairly well -- the pinpricks are still visible from close-up, but not so much at a distance -- but then I remembered the old elementary-school trick of homemade "carbon paper" -- I printed out the letters I wanted, rubbed a no.2 pencil thoroughly over the back, then traced around the letters with a fine-tip ballpoint pen, which left a faint imprint of the graphite on the wood.

I then carefully painted inside the lines -- with a new 10/0 spotter brush, the smallest I could find -- and voilà! a very pleasing shop sign.

Even with an unstaged and badly-lit photo, this was miles better!

As for the interior walls, my use of Paperclay to make faux plaster interior walls was, unfortunately, a pretty dismal failure.  I don't think it's the Paperclay's fault, as lots of miniaturists use it, and some very expert ones too -- perhaps it was the age, flexibility, and/or utter dryness of the MDF walls, as they either absorbed the moisture from the drying clay or, as the clay shrank -- which I knew it was going to do -- it pulled the MDF along with it.  Regardless of the reasons, the effect was obvious --

At the top is the Plexiglas "ceiling" which is still straight -- the next one down is the thicker back wall, then the two side walls at the bottom.  Even the thicker rear wall wasn't sturdy enough to resist the warping.  No end of resting under weights had any permanent effect -- after I saw how the first one bowed, I even clamped the freshly-Paperclayed ones to a very firm surface to keep them from warping in the first place, but the warping was actually very gradual, and was clearly worse after a week.  (They have also warped even more since I took this photo.)  Very dismayed, I left the whole thing alone for quite a long time -- David busily coming up with ideas such as bracing the walls outside with brass rods -- but eventually we both came to the inescapable conclusion that, since the rear and side walls were plain as plain could be bar the glued-on corner brackets on the back wall, the most logical thing to do was to simply cut some new walls out of plywood and start again.  It was actually ridiculously easy to pry off the brackets, and I simply re-glued them to the new rear wall.

I really wanted the plaster effect, so I used spackling compound on the new ones, partly because I was now wary of the Paperclay and partly because David had a nearly-new tub of the stuff so I didn't have to buy anything.

Despite all of these grandmother's-footsteps accomplishments and setbacks, what made me most nervous was the painted "aging".  The members of the Greenleaf miniatures forum were gently encouraging and helpful, though, so I did some practicing on a piece of scrap wood, then just dove in.  ("You can always paint it over and start again," said a number of people, which, though the prospect was daunting, was certainly true in my case, as I had used only a fraction of the lovely green Behr Marquee sample pot -- "Chelsea Green" -- I got from Home Depot!)

The technique I ended up using was basically dry-brushing, starting with a "faded" bit of the base color (mixed with white craft paint), then some black and some brown, just sort of "dusted" on where it seemed there would be the most aged and/or dirty places on a real wall.  I did rub it off in some places and do it over.  There are also some spots that I sanded lightly with an emery board to look chipped or flaked off -- there are some wonderful tutorials, especially from model railroaders, for simulating flaking paint, but the sanding worked well enough for a "slightly run-down but not dilapidated shop".

What Not to Do: If you change the orientation of a door, don't forget to age the door jamb on the new opening side, not the old one!  Duh!

The "Private" sign is a faux-enameled one from a selection of Victorian sign images that I found online, printed on watercolor paper and loaded with artists' medium, in the same way that I made tiles for the No.16 kitchen.  I made it slightly bigger than the real sign, as it just looked better that way on my door.

I will try next time to get the lower parts of the walls a bit more uniformly grungy -- now, how often do you get to say that, really?! -- as it looks a bit spotty to me, but I'm satisfied enough with this to move on to the next step!

The windows aren't glued in yet, as I've found that they fit in the frames very snugly just by friction and I suspect that I might want to have the access for a while longer! but I have since this photo glued in the Plexiglas.

And, after all of this, it was time for ...

This was surprisingly nerve-wracking, and I put it off for ages, but the Time Has Come.  The base that came with the kit is here held in the right-angle of the big gluing jig by the two large clamps, the four walls of the box are wrapped around the (now also glued in place) floor at the bottom and the removable "ceiling" at the top and held snugly with extra-large rubber bands (which I had bought for a catapult experiment at day camp a few weeks ago, and worked perfectly for this as well!) and the whole box is also pushed into the right-angle of the jig, there is a piece of wax paper between the base and the underside of the shop box in case of glue overflow, and the five handy craft clamps aren't actually clamping anything (because they are too short to go around the box) but are pushed up snugly against the slightly-warped front piece in hopes that the glue will grab hold firmly enough to counteract the bowing.

Chippendale Desk in 1:12

I haven't done anything with my carpet shop for nearly a month, after clearing off my "work space" -- which is the dining-room table -- for Julia's apparently-annual birthday tea.  (Not that I'm complaining about that, mind you.  I had the tea part all organized with a prep schedule, everything made ahead except the scones, so didn't feel at all overwhelmed and in fact quite enjoyed it, and the guests did too.  The only part that wasn't organized, to my annoyance at myself, was tidying up beforehand.)  Anyway, I've pulled out much of the shop from its various storage/hiding places, and realize that I'm quite far along towards completing it.

This is the House of Miniatures Chippendale Desk ("ca.1750-1790"), kit no.40017, which despite the "$5" written on the box was on the giveaway table at one of my miniatures group's meetings some time ago.  I knew that I wanted a desk for the carpet shop, so I was delighted to see it there.

But this little piece proved to be puzzle upon puzzle upon puzzle, in both its background and the putting-together.

Wait a minute, two bags of hinges?  After some pondering, and an unrelated inspection of the parts list, I realized that the second bag in fact does not belong here, as the screws on the parts list illustration are clearly round-headed, where these are flat. It is possible that a previous owner decided that the round-headed screws were too bulky-looking and hoped to substitute a spare set with flat-headed screws -- quite likely, in fact, as I thought the same thing when trying to decide which to use! -- or they just migrated inadvertently into another box -- also quite likely, as I have seen the workrooms of dedicated miniaturists, tidy but very full.

Wait a minute -- again -- in the photo on the box the slant front is attached coving-side out, and on the little "historical fact" note, the slant front is attached coving-side in.  The writing surface in both of these illustrations also clearly has no galumphing hinges on it either.  But the instructions tell you to start off by carving out (yourself) tiny notches for the hinges....

By the time I got this far, I had seen Maria Nikolajeva's post on the desk, and then I found a post about one that Brae had done, and after reading the post a couple of times thought "wait a minute -- hers has pins instead of hinges!"  The page for this kit at the (unofficial) House of Miniatures webpage says that there were two versions of the slant-front desk, one 1976-1979ish without pigeon-holes inside and a few years later one from 1979 on with them, but it seems that there were two versions of the earlier one as well, one with hinges and one with pins.  It looks like the pinned version of the earlier desk has no coving on the slant-front, either.

Well, this research was all very curious and interesting, but much of it was, really, my putting off doing the hinges, about which I had no choice because there they were.  So I just dove in.

There was not any end-grain sealer to be had at the local hardware store, and I didn't want to keep running around to different stores (as I had just done looking for stencils ...), so on the advice of a number of woodworking sites, I made my own, out of 9 parts water to 1 part white glue, in an old jam jar.

(Which provided me with a bonus "V" for the ABChallenge --

"adj. 1. another term for vermicular [like a worm in form or movement; vermiform]."  Which leads me, word geek that I am, to wonder, in both admiration and mystification, why on earth we need three words in the same language for "like a worm in form or movement"?!)

I cut the hinge slots myself, with David's direction, after practicing on a piece of scrap wood.  The person who had the kit before me had penciled in two of the four placement marks and stopped there, 20+ years ago -- fair enough, it was a pain.

To give you an idea of scale, those are David's fingers (casting a shadow) at upper left!  He is making the pilot holes here -- you attach the hinges before anything else, then take them off again and put the desk together and finish it, then reattach the hinges in the established locations.

He carefully filed off the tips of the screws, so that they would be short enough not to poke through the desk front.

After that, it was a walk in the park, really.  I did everything myself except trim the screws and make the pilot holes -- I did the holes in these drawer fronts with a pin vise! -- so I'm rather pleased with myself.

The piece is stained with one coat of General Finishes Black Cherry, and finished with two coats of Ceramcoat gloss varnish.  I added in some aging along the way, smearing a bit of glue that was on my finger onto the top of the desk as a sort of water stain, and lightly sanding off some of the stain along the top edges of the drawers where there would be more wear over time.  I also used the metal ferrule from an old pencil to stamp some glue on the desk top, just beyond the right-hand hinge, hoping that it would look like some careless person had left a coffee mug on it, but unfortunately (!) maybe it wasn't enough glue, as the stain seeped underneath, nearly disguising it entirely.  (Ironic, of course, that when you want to leave a cup ring on a piece of furniture, it doesn't work!)

So now that the rather nerve-wracking bit of doing the hinges is long over, I'm very pleased with this, and happy to see that the chair I wanted looks just as good as I had hoped, an antique desk with a modern office-type chair!  Later, I will make some IKEA-era cubbies/organizers for the paperwork that I'm sure will have accumulated in an old carpet shop ....

Floored

I was on a bit of a roll, and so I put together both of these floors recently -- the lighter one is for the tea-room-to-be and the darker one for the corner shop.  I had stained the floor I made for the carpet shop, and was delighted with the results, but for these I thought I'd just use the craft sticks in their natural state, with only the linseed and beeswax finish.  Since I'd wanted a dark floor for the carpet shop, I had chosen the bags of sticks by which had the most dark ones in it, and of course there were quite a lot left, so I decided to make one floor with the lightest sticks and the other with the darkest ones.

Who would have thought there would be so much beauty in a humble craft stick!  The ones I chose seemed to me to have a bit of "character" to them -- knots here or there, perhaps a warped edge, grains going this way or that and sometimes both at once, one in the tea shop even has something that looks just like a water stain!  I added a bit of "wear and tear" to the dark floor, repeatedly dropping David's work keys on it from my shoulder height, and a couple of scratches from some tool or other that I had on hand, but I didn't do anything to the light one at all.

These two floors are made in the same way as the first one, with a piece of 1/8" plywood as a "subfloor" marked with lines 1 1/4" apart where the joists would be in reality.  I trimmed and dry-fitted all of the sticks at once, so that I could move any that seemed to "clash" -- too much dark or light in one area, grain lines all going in the same direction, etc. -- then glued them on a few courses at a time, clamping and letting them dry overnight before moving on to the next few courses.  Each floor has three coats of Tried & True finish, with a moderate amount of buffing with a dry cloth in between.  The recommendation on the label is two coats, but some of the sticks on the carpet shop floor seemed noticeably drier than others, or more absorbent, and so I did a third coat to get it looking more even, and did the same this time with the other two floors.  (There is a bit of gunk between many of the boards on all three floors, which might be dust from the preparatory sanding that didn't come off on the tack cloth, or might be bits of coagulated beeswax, or both.  It looked more unpleasant after I tried to pick it out, so I've just left it.)

Here are photos of the finished floors with some sticks in their natural state, so that you can see the effect of the finish.  Apparently, linseed oil adds a noticeably golden tone to wood -- the lighter sticks originally were a very pale gold and now are a lovely sort of wheaty-gold, and the dark sticks, which were a rather ashy brown to start, now have a beautiful rich amber-gold color.  They are both rather changeable in different lights or from different angles, and the digital camera makes this even more apparent, as I'm sure you can tell from the variety in these photos!  It's rather like watching the sky on a breezy spring day, now bright, now cloudy, always changing.

I know these particular sticks are a bit wide for 1:12 scale -- the package says 3/4" but they are actually about 1/16" less than that, which would be 8 1/4" in real life, on the wider end of the Regency period's "between 18 and 23cm [7-9 in.]" -- but, really, they are so very pretty that I for one certainly will acknowledge any quibbles about scale and then admit that I just couldn't help myself!

The edges aren't trimmed yet, nor that diagonal section for the corner shop, which I will do when the room boxes are closer to final fitting.

The piece of petit point is an experiment -- I wanted it to look as though it were a badly-damaged antique carpet or fragment thereof that has has the damaged bits trimmed off and a new binding put on the trimmed edges -- there is even a jog on one edge where the rows are uneven.  Part of it, as you can see, was stitched with one thread of floss, while the rest is stitched with two, to simulate a worn area.  This is partly successful, I think -- probably the line between worn and less-worn should have been blurred a bit, as it seems just a little too sharp to me.  I also worked it in a hoop instead of a frame, so that it would go ahead and skew if it wanted to!  I'm tempted to age it with a coffee bath, but haven't done that yet.  The original chart is the Kuba no.9 -- converted from Appleton crewel wools to DMC floss, and worked on 28-count Monaco linen -- from Making Miniature Oriental Rugs & Carpets by Meik and Ian McNaughton (in fact, the one at the top on the cover), which is said to be "an early design" from the Kuba region in Azerbaijan, ca.1800.

A Fitting Start

While I'm waiting for other things to happen with the carpet shop, I decided to start prepping the other two, using odd moments here and there to sand or patch instead of knitting, or perhaps writing the dozen or so letters I owe.  Anyway, I was tempted to re-title this post "Fits and Starts" -- I'm afraid that I'm not as impressed with these two Street of Shops kits as I was with the first one, as they are rather indifferently cut, and in places very sloppily put together.  It's clear, too, that these two either a much-later addition to the line or a different designer altogether, or perhaps both, as they are noticeably less finished-looking.  The fluting on the columns in the two-window shop are narrow and rounded, quite elegant, where these are wide and flat, simply grooves cut into the board, and in some cases not very well.

Pieces that were glued on straight have come loose, while the kit languished in its box, and pieces that were glued poorly, alas, are immovable.

So I have been doing a lot of filling and sanding, which would have annoyed me no end if I had actually shelled out money for this, but it was a hand-me-down -- and a generous one, to be sure -- so I'm calling it training for future scratch-builds and repairs, and (really) keeping my grumbling to a minimum.

The bay is on so crookedly that I glued a piece of strip wood in the gap to fill it.  The crookedness also means that the pre-cut Plexiglas doesn't fit -- luckily, too big, not too small.  You can see from the shadow on the side window's protective cover how bowed it is in order to fit, and the other side is even tighter so I didn't even try, for fear of breaking it.

The inside of this bay window also needed a piece of stripwood to cover up the very large jog between the lower wall and the flat shelf inside the window.  I still have a bit more sanding to do to get it smooth.

We are already calling this "subsidence -- from the bombing" in honor of Mrs. Wilberforce at the beginning of "The Ladykillers".  ("It's no use trying.  None of the pictures will hang straight ..." she says, regretfully but resigned.)

What on earth --? 

But this will be a charming little shop -- the windows are very appealing!  I love the generosity of the corner door.  And as you can see, I've already had a go at the other shop's window lettering -- yes, as much as I resisted the cliché of a 1:12 tea room, it did not want to be anything else, so tea room it will be!  I like the font and the arrangement of the lettering, but the results are more than a bit wobbly in person, so I will probably wash it off and try again after a bit more practice.

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 4: Painting

Or more properly, "Painting and More Sanding".

I decided to use Behr Marquee paint, which a number of experienced members of the Greenleaf community recommend, and got three sample pots, in "Chelsea Green" for the front of the shop, "Radiant Silver" inside, and "Summer Storm" on the "backstage" parts (for all three of the shops).  I definitely wanted green, having seen photos of a 12:1 carpet shop (alas, no longer in business) that charmed me greatly, and for the inside I thought that a good neutral, not too dark but not too light, would look good with all of the differently-colored carpets.

The moisture in the paint raised quite a lot of grain on the wood, requiring more sanding than I expected, especially around edges, and this was a bit of a drag as I don't particularly like sanding -- but there it is.  One does what one must.

I confess that I had some grumbles about water-based house paint as I went along.  I grew up with oil-based paints, so despite the environmental and health benefits of water-based -- not to mention clean-up, never my favorite part! -- the consistency and performance of it always falls somewhat short in my mind.  I wasn't particularly impressed by the results on the MDF walls here, though that certainly may owe much to my brushing technique as well, but more than that, the MDF simply looks almost mirror-smooth, far smoother than plaster walls.  I started looking into alternatives -- papering the walls and painting over the paper, just to get some texture? spackling compound? -- and decided to try Paperclay, which a number of miniaturists have used with success.

This stuff definitely has a learning curve!  It's pretty basic in theory, but the fine details take a while to accomplish well.  In this sort of application, basically, you roll out a ball of clay, spread some glue thinly on the MDF, lay the "sheet" of Paperclay on top of the glue and smooth it, then either trim it (if on an edge) or feather it (if it will meet up with the next piece of rolled clay), and repeat as necessary.  You smooth the joins as best you can, usually with a bit of water on your fingers, which not only helps the two pieces of rolled clay adhere to each other, but makes it easier to smooth the join.  It is still ridiculously easy to have quite noticeable hills and valleys once you are "finished" smoothing it -- and then you let it dry, during which the Paperclay frequently contracts slightly (this is what the glue base is for, to help adhere the clay to the wood and as much as possible keep it from shrinking).  The contracting can also make the Paperclay crack -- caveat Paperclay-layer.

Unfortunately, the contraction can also make the base material curve, which it did noticeably with the MDF here.  David guesses that the MDF is more vulnerable to bowing than plywood, which many dollhouses (kits and scratch-built) are made of, and may be why other mini-builders have had good results.  And so my three "plastered" walls have spent quite a lot of time lately under David's lead diving weights and a (very heavy!) four-arm silver candelabra that David put on our wedding registry for a lark.

This will need some patching!

The front of the shop is also clearly bowed a bit, and I'm pretty sure that unlike the Paperclayed walls, this one actually came out of the box that way -- I thought it was just my eyes (!), but against a straighter edge, you can tell, right at the door frame in the middle here.

So the Paperclay is a middling success, though surely I must ascribe some of the points-off to my application.  There is certainly quite a knack to getting the stuff smooth, and I haven't got it yet.  Even rolling over the whole thing after all of the clay has been applied (like pie crust!) doesn't smooth out the lumpier bumps -- this is right after doing so on the third wall --

I wanted a slightly irregular surface, not a lumpy one! 

It was clear from the start that quite a lot of sanding would be in order! and indeed there was.  It seems more than a bit wasteful to spend a goodish chunk of money on Paperclay and then sand fully half of it off, so all things considered, while I like the look, and I think that look works better for the "age" of these shops than simply painted MDF, for the next one I will try some kind of filler instead, that at least won't shrink.

The weights did help a bit -- the walls are still noticeably bowed when you look at them from the bottom or the top edges, but I am telling myself that with the fittings and carpets in the shop, it won't be as obvious....

Someone on the Petitpointers list remarked -- and she is a Master Artisan, so quite accomplished -- that she ought to write a book called What Not To Do, and I had to admit that I have sometimes been tempted to split off my miniatures hobby into a separate blog, which in my darker moments would in fact be called "What Not To Do".

What Not To Do: Don't just assume, if a door has been separated for whatever reason from its frame, that you know which is the top and which is the bottom.  Double-check, especially, if you will be making holes for hardware or other bits and bobs.  I had already admired the bevel on the front door of this shop, and naively assumed that the bevel was on both sides.  I also forgot that in the dry-fitting some weeks ago, right out of the box, the temporarily-taped piece was at the top, so when I asked David to drill a hole in the bottom of the front door for the mail slot, I just handed him the loose piece, since it was at the bottom the way I was holding it at the moment.  It wasn't until I was putting the first coat of paint on the door that I realized I was painting an unbeveled door.  (My first thought was that I'd just have to live with it bevel-in, because if I turned it bevel-out the mail slot was at the top, obviously impractical for 1:12 mailmen! and then -- reading the blogs of expert bashers is having yet another effect! -- I thought, "Wait, can we flip the door so that it opens the other way?" and David, my expert-in-residence, said, "Um, sure!")

And so there has been a lot of painting chez Bluestocking, then sanding, painting again, sanding again (using a palm sander on the Paperclay, a huge help in smoothing it out), touching up splodges, &c. &c. &c.

A test-run for potential lettering.  I am still wavering between Dilshad, the Persian name meaning "joyful" or "happy heart", and Golbahar, which means "like a rose in spring".  Both appealing in meaning, though I lean to the former for meaning and to the latter for euphoniousness (at least to a non-Persian-speaker).  Golbahar fits better in the space, and the visual weight is balanced more evenly with that of "Fine Carpets," but do I want to be that ruthlessly practical?!

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 2: Sanding

Step two of assembling my hand-me-down Houseworks "Two-Window Shop" is sanding and repairing gaps etc. before the painting can begin.

The trim on the façade was clearly crooked, the only large flaw in the kit's out-of-the-box state.  I'm not really wild about the façade anyway, but there is a fairly substantial slot for it in the top of the assembly, and I'm not sure if once in place it doesn't add some strength to the box, so I don't want to just not use it.  Wow, that was a lot of negatives in one sentence! well, they add up to positive = I think I should use the façade, but I'm tempted to just turn it around so that the extra trim doesn't show anyway.  But I decided to use this as a learning experience, in removing unwanted pieces of trim.  (Somebody asked me if I'm going to bash these shops at all, and I had to confess that I am inexperienced enough that I don't feel particularly confident in doing so, other than adding the internal door, although with some imagination wonderful things can be done with a purchased kit -- this one from Brae at Otterine's Miniatures is just one example of her work, not to mention the bashes other people come up with!).

David suggested an X-acto knife for removing that crooked piece, so I spent quite a lot of time carefully wedging the blade underneath, pushing and sliding it a little further each time.

My arm got really tired after a quarter-hour of this, so David took over, and of course it popped right off like it knew it was beaten!  But this is why --

It had only three lines of glue holding it on!

This gap will want some filling, just to keep things sturdy.  I also need to sand a number of the vertical-to-horizontal joins that didn't get quite flat along the cornice inside, as you can see here.

The front door came only partly glued, so that you can slip out the piece of Plexiglass while you paint the door frame, and then glue the bottom rail in place.  The rail was taped into place by the manufacturer, fair enough, but that was thirty-plus years ago, and those of us who remember cellophane tape know that it took a lot less than thirty years for that stuff to just dry up and fall off, leaving a sticky residue behind.  I've sanded it smooth, so with luck it will paint over nicely.  David has already cut a hole for the mail-slot-to-be -- it is a little wonky, but I think that will also not show overmuch.

You can also see that I have made the first pass at "aging" the shop front -- bumping, nicking, oversanding in areas that would get a lot of wear, like the front door sill here.  I will add in more bumps etc. with each coat of paint.

I was delighted to be able to save this -- it is on the bottom of the internal door that I picked up from the giveaway table at one of my mini club meetings ages ago, thinking it might come in handy one day.  The door will sit with the bottom flush with the rest of the box, as conveniently my floor assembly is pretty much the same depth as the sill of the door, so I don't have to remove the latter.  The date might not be the same as that of the shop kit, but it is certainly of the same era.  It reminds me, on a much smaller scale of course -- both literally and figuratively -- of the carpenter's marks (see some images here!) and hidden dates that can be found on the timbers of older buildings.  I wish, in fact, that Houseworks had stamped the shops themselves.  I think I might put "EST. 1979" on the front of the carpet shop in honor!

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 3: Flooring

I started the flooring a bit "early," but I knew that I wanted to use more of my can of Tried & True linseed and beeswax finish, and it takes time to really cure, so I figured it would be wise to have it thoroughly dry, since I know I want to put petitpoint carpets on the floor!

I was pretty sure before I started that craft sticks would be my choice of material, offering a good balance between looks, ease, and affordability.  Many miniaturists use a single sheet of wood and score lines to simulate planks -- this is good if you want a uniform color and grain, and presumably it is very easy to apply as there is only one piece!  But I wanted that random look of an authentic not-high-end period floor, which would often have a considerable range of colors even of the same type of wood, and grains as well, in addition to the unevenness we often see now in period floors, due to warping of the individual planks and settling of the building itself.  You can get or cut very nice pieces of oak or walnut or whatever kind of wood for a 1:12 floor, really, and cut planks to the desired width and length, but craft sticks, other than trimming off the rounded ends, are ready-to-go.

David cut a "subfloor" of 1/8" plywood for me, which was exactly the right thickness when combined with the craft sticks to meet the sill of the internal door I am adding on the back wall.

The first step was finding out how wide to make the planks.  Before lumber mills, wood flooring planks were however wide the tree itself was, so could vary fairly widely even in the same room, but then as techniques improved, board widths became more standardized.  According to Buildingconservation.com, "in the late 18th century boards … became much narrower [than the Jacobean "up to 60cm wide" (over 23 in.!)], usually 15 to 20cm wide [about 5.9-7.8 in.]," but in the Regency period (1811-1837), "as England’s vast forests thinned out, wood became less plentiful and the width of the boards narrowed to between 18 and 23cm [7-9 in.]".  In America, however, because natural resources were more abundant, wide planks stayed common into the 19th century, with narrower planks -- because they were more expensive to produce -- more fashionable, and then as transportation as well as production became more efficient, the narrower planks became the standard for flooring.  Being 1" wide, the large craft sticks are really too wide for true scale -- that would be 12" planks -- but after much internal debate (including the option of laboriously cutting about a third or even a quarter of the width from each craft stick!), I decided to use the 1" sticks as-is.  My idea is that this particular shop is the least-renovated of the three on the street, so will be a bit run-down -- though I hope in an appealing way! -- and the other two will most likely have been "updated" to more fashionable narrow planking.  A more meticulous miniaturist would doubtless squirm a bit at the inaccurate scale, but with luck I hope that the carpet shop floor will just read "old" and not "anachronistically wide"!  The French oak boards in the room view here, for example, look extraordinarily wide though the description says they are a perfectly period-accurate 14 to 22cm, so my carpet shop boards will just actually be wide!

The direction of the floorboards also cost me an afternoon happily spent researching the construction of late-Georgian floors in England and America.  (This is actually one of the geeky things I love about miniatures and historical knitting -- the research into how and why things were done the way they were!)  I had originally pictured in my mind that the boards would run parallel to the side walls, meaning that the (imaginary, here) joists would run across the room -- I think this seemed "right" to me because it would make the room look deeper, in the same way that horizontal or vertical stripes on clothing affect the appearance of one's figure.  Although some of the apparently-categorical statements seemed to contradict each other, a number of the sources I found said that joists ran parallel to common walls, for two reasons that made very good sense to me now, i.e. expense and fire protection.  Describing a "typical upper floor from about 1880" in a terraced house, Marshall et al. in The Construction of Houses say, "[the] joists run side to side," the principle apparently being that the longer the joist, the more expensive, hence the joists would run across the narrower span, which in a terraced house would be from side to side (p.108), and “where issues of restraint and fire protection were not important, the joists would normally be found spanning the shortest distance across a room” (p.110, emphasis added).  “Joists should not be built into party walls to ensure fire protection, sound insulation, thermal insulation and also to help prevent air leakage” (p.120).

And how far apart were the joists in an 18th-century building?  Marshall et al. again: "Traditionally, joists were normally fixed at 400mm (16") centres [that is, from the center of one joist to the center of the next]. This is probably the most economic arrangement of the timbers…. However, building control was fairly lax until the development of Model Bye-laws [i.e. building regulations] in the first part of the twentieth century and it is not unusual to find joists at centres of 500mm or even 600mm [19 1/2 to 23 1/2 in.]” (p.108).  A rather magisterial paper entitled "The Structure of Georgian London Houses" says, "floors of normal spans in houses of second, third and fourth rates [houses were categorized by size and cost, in order to fix ground-rent rates and assess taxes], timber joists were laid with 12 inches between each joist (Bell, p.4).  I compromised a bit and drew pencil lines on my subfloor 1 1/4 in. apart (15" in full scale), so that I could place the butted ends of the planks on top of a "joist" and the joins would line up logically, the way a real floor would.

As it turned out, the craft sticks were exceptionally suitable for a well-used period floor, for upon opening the package, I found that I loved the slight warping and cupping and nicks, bumping, etc. on them, so I just chose mostly the darker ones, or those with interesting grains.  And then I had to trim off all of the rounded ends!

David had thought that after I cut and arranged the dozens of sticks together like puzzle pieces, I could simply spread a layer of glue over the subfloor and lay the planks all on at once, bar perhaps a first row that was already glued and dry to give me something to push the subsequent rows firmly against.  But as it turned out, it was more fiddly than expected because when just laid out unglued, the sticks didn't nestle up perfectly snugly, and so it wasn't easy sometimes to tell that a stick was actually too warped and needed a sliver trimmed off here or there.  The idea is that, say, a penny might be lost down a gap in the floorboards, not a dog or a small child! and so this meant that I could glue only two or three rows at a time, so as to check the fit as I went along.  But it took less than a week to lay the whole floor, even with lots of drying time, so this wasn't particularly onerous.

Craft sticks are apparently usually birch, much blonder than the usual oak or Baltic pine used for floors in the Georgian period, either in Britain or America.  I had something very dark in my mind's eye, though it seems that floors came in quite a few colors and types of wood, and of course the natural variations of wood mean that even different planks of the same type of wood could be noticeably different, especially with age.  (There is a photo of a beautiful hemlock floor in an article at Jane Austen's World, though alas with no source credit.)

Here is a lesson, should you need one, on the value of stirring stains before use.  I always find it such a bother, and then I have a wet-stain-covered stick afterwards which can't just be set down any-old-where.  The far left of this stick is bare (where I was holding it), and the next inch or so is a color test with my cloth dipped in the stain after swirling the sealed can around for some minutes.  It is an okay color, but not what I was hoping for.  The part on the right is from using this stick to then actually stir the stain and wipe off the excess with the piece of cloth I then used to apply the stain to the floor itself.  The instructions on the can to stir "before and during application" are thoroughly correct, I can now humbly attest -- I could feel the pigment collected like sediment at the bottom of the can, and it seemed to cling to the stick much more than it in fact incorporated into the oil medium, as the color was noticeably darker when wiped off of the stick than even when my cloth was dipped into the thoroughly-stirred can.  The stain is Zar's Oil-Based Interior Wood Stain in "Moorish Teak," the blackest brown I saw on the shelf in an oil-based stain.

Once they were actually butted up tightly next to each other, the craft sticks naturally took up less space than I had calculated, so there was a fraction of subfloor left that would just miss being covered by the baseboards -- maybe 5cm, less than a 1/4 inch.  I therefore had to glue on another row of sticks, leaving them hanging over the edge of the plywood, and when it was dry, David trimmed it off with his saw, and while he was there cut a notch out for the sill of the inner door.  (The floor is face-down in the above photograph, so that he could see where to trim.)

Glued, trimmed, lightly sanded (it didn't need much, just some of the end-to-end joins that had lifted ever-so-slightly), and ready for staining, with a penny for scale.

This is the bare craft sticks -- still quite handsome.  Some other time, I might just leave the sticks their natural color.

After one coat of stain -- very nice, but I wanted it dark, so I put on another coat.

After the second coat of stain.  I had pictured the floor still-darker in my mind, but I decided to stay with this -- it does look a bit darker in real life.  I can see why people get so fascinated with wood in all of its incarnations -- each of these little boards is unique, some with more of a straight grain while others are curved, some almost speckly, and each takes the stain differently.  I'm really happy with the irregularities of the craft sticks too, the notched or bumped edges, some warping sideways while others cup, "chatter marks" from the saw -- I probably would have been delighted with more irregularities, but this is my first build, there's time!

And of course during the finishing process, I "aged" the floor, nicking and scratching and sanding a bit here and here -- between coats of the stain and of the finish -- to get the effect of an accumulation of wear.  I pretty much just attacked it with whatever came to hand -- the paint can opener, sandpaper, my keys, a penny that I stood on its edge and whacked with a hammer, etc.  Julia was aghast -- "that's so wrong!" -- but a moment later was attempting to scratch it with her fingernails.  (This of course had no effect, since it was already the second coat of Tried & True!)  I left a wet tea bag on it for a few hours, but even after just the stain, there was enough oil in the finish that the water just beaded and wiped right off! so I suppose if I really want a "water stain" I might need to leave it on for days, or perhaps fake it ahead of time with some glue, which would prevent the stain from having an effect (which is in fact what everyone warns about when you are putting kits together, not to get glue on the parts you are going to stain!).

The baseboard is just set in place at the moment -- gluing that in comes much later.  Next is to finish the sanding, and then start to paint ....

(I love the way that the fabric I tossed behind as a backdrop looks like drifted snow!)

Them's the Breaks

I said, "Well, them's the breaks" to Julia not long ago about something or other, and she said in disbelief, "What??"  So if you're curious, here is a bit about the history of the phrase.

Sadly, I have a more literal use for the phrase at the moment, since these two miniatures I debated with myself about and saved up my laundry-day nickels and dimes for arrived broken, in the sideboard's case with an alarming six pieces rattling loose in the box.  The seller ("No Returns") was quick enough to offer a partial refund, since I said I would repair them -- and so though I was not particularly pleased with the transaction, the pieces themselves are both still quite perfect for my intentions, so there it is.

This was clearly an old break, with glue blobs remaining on all surfaces.

After some research about repairing wooden miniatures (and full-sized wooden furniture), I decided to start with acetone to try and remove the old glue.  I masked off the rest of each piece, so as not to damage any more of the finish, and carefully dabbed acetone on the dried glue with a brush, and let it sit.  The glue dulled almost immediately, which is probably enough to disguise it -- ideally, the acetone softens the glue enough that it can be scraped off. Unfortunately, when I scratched at the leg piece with my thumbnail to see if it was working, a chunk of the old glue chipped right off, so I decided not to push my luck, and just glue the two pieces back together, because I can always position the table with the repair towards the back -- and certainly a few chairs around it will help distract attention.

This brought us to the problem of how to clamp it while the wood glue dried.  (I didn't want to risk superglue, not being sure that at this scale I could get the pieces lined up correctly in time.  Superglue is notoriously unforgiving.)  The straight part at the top of the leg was an ideal place for my little "clothes pin" clamps, but that curve at the underside makes it pretty much impossible to clamp it, either on the leg itself or on the whole piece.  David had bought for me a mini-vise with a rotating and tilting top, so he sat for a quarter of an hour or so, trying to get both pieces to line up securely (it looked like something out of Rube Goldberg, or a "Star Wars" medical droid!), but eventually we came to the realization that simpler was in this case better, and that plain old adhesive putty holds pretty well in lieu of a clamp --

 Alas, the wood glue did not stick at all, and I could see even as I was loosening the brass clamp that it hadn't worked.  So, superglue it was, after all.

I laid the table on my jig in much the same position as before, and practiced moving the broken piece into position a number of times, screwed up my courage, and jumped in.

(It isn't snowing in my breakfast room, alas -- I had to put a card just behind the table to get the camera to focus!)

The pieces went together quite smoothly -- or so it seemed -- but either they didn't, or the prep we had done chipped away enough of the old glue or the finish that the join was now wonky.  The repair is fairly noticeable, certainly to the camera and to my contact-lens-free eye.  It is, however, nice and sturdy.  I'm not sure yet whether I will try to file it a little smoother, or just leave it be.

This was actually my bigger worry -- so many joins! such slender pieces!  I took a lot of time to make sure I knew exactly which piece went where -- especially those two little side braces -- and to lay everything out carefully.  I started with those, as it seemed the most logical first step.  The support was inset just slightly on the bottom block of the spindle, and so it seemed prudent to put something underneath to keep it at the right height as I brought the two pieces together -- this was just the ticket! --

After that I realized that yes, it would be better to get the splintered tops of the posts glued into place next, seeing as how those seemed to me the most risky and I wanted better access.

The top shelf, of course, was inset a slightly different distance than the braces, so I hunted up some scraps of strip-wood and chose one to go under the shelf and hold it stable, and used another one as a straight edge to keep the two pieces of the spindle lined up.  This piece was my biggest worry, that I would mash the splintered edges irretrievably, but after I decided which piece went where, and in which direction, the two splintered ends meshed together quite smoothly, even more than once.  It was lucky, I think, that the break was relatively short, so that the splinters didn't have the opportunity to get bend or broken off.

The last step was fiddlier, since it involved glue in three separate places – top shelf, middle shelf, bottom brace – and the top shelf needed glue on three sides, but the pieces went in smoothly, and it was surprisingly simple to position the top shelf snugly first, then make sure that the middle of the turned post was butted tightly against the middle shelf, then the same with the bottom brace.

One of the spindle breaks had some of the finish chipped off before it even got to me, as you can see, but this is facing left, not head-on, as you look at the sideboard from the front, so I think I can get away with just softening it with some felt-tip pen in a matching color -- I don't want to push my luck, trying to fill it in!

So there it is -- I can't say "no harm done" about the purchase, more "sadder but wiser," but I am still really pleased with the pieces themselves.  The table is a lovely color and finish, and is I think a nice balance between economy and quality of scale, and I must say that I am really delighted with the sideboard, its handsome marble top and that gaudy Victorian more-is-more decoration that here I feel gets awfully close to the "ugly" tipping point but somehow doesn't quite spill over, and instead remains just cheerfully exuberant.