A Bluestocking Knits

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.

Miniatures Monday

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try stenciling on the breakfast room walls in Hardy House, and found one in an all-over pattern that looked as though it could have been from the 1920s or 30s, maybe even 40s, so just right for what I'm doing with the house.  I knew ahead of time that I would have to cut the stencil to get it to fit around the door and window frames, so it required some planning to do the larger swatches first, then trim off strips for above the doors and window, and so on, in increasingly-smaller segments.  It didn't work quite as easily as I might have liked, as while I "dry-fitted" the stencil around the various obstructions, I didn't double-check the width of the back wall itself, and ended up having to decide between wider-spaced columns or a partial column in the back left corner!

But I think it's busy enough that while noticeable it doesn't really leap out at you, and once the furniture and pictures are in place, those distract the eye a bit too.

The stencil is an ArtMinds one -- that sort of leafy/feathery swag might be useful later, too.  My stenciling technique is far from polished, I know, and on top of that it was fairly awkward reaching into the room without being able to brace my hand much, or sometimes even see beyond it!  I can understand even better now why people say it's much easier to paint etc. before you even build, but of course I don't have that option here.  I was hoping that the stencil color would be a bit lighter, and therefore more subtle, but I didn't have the skill to daub more gently, nor certainly the confidence to thin the paint at all.  Still, I do like the way it turned out on the whole, so there is that.

(Haven't decided whether I should try to sand off the daubs that got onto the woodwork, or to paint over them with a similar "wood" color ...)

I haven't yet found a fabric I like for curtains, so that is still on the to-do list.  Maybe just a solid color (blue?), or faux damask, as there is a lot of pattern in the room now!  I think it also needs some more paintings on the wall, certainly one just beyond the door that leads to the kitchen-to-be, on the left here.

Two kits from Nancy Enge -- travel journals and echeverias, very pleasing to look at even in kit form --

I was noodling around with the US9 steel hook and some no.10 cotton, and came up with this improvised rug in double-crochet.  I was marvelously impressed with the "mock invisible join" developed by Mrs. Micawber, which took me some time to wrap my head around, as it were -- reading the instructions first was like blah-blah-blah-blah for me, but once I actually started to do it, it began to make sense, and indeed worked beautifully.  It didn't, however, work -- or possibly more accurately, I don't know how to make it work -- on the faggoting rounds, so I began looking around for yet another alternative, and ended up using a "no-chain starting double crochet" as detailed at by Hannah at Not Your Average Crochet.  It seems to me that if you didn't see the join there at the top of the outer two rounds, the places where I earlier worked the NSDC would be almost undetectable.

My current miniature carpet, this from a Berlin-work chart that is apparently floating around Pinterest like the Flying Dutchman, with no actual source.  It is dated 1903, in Russian.  It has a charmingly improvisational air to it that somehow works really well with that imperious diagonal -- the moment I saw the chart, I was besotted with it, and it jumped the queue over a number of other projects!

Assembling the Carpet Shop, Step 1: Dry Fitting

Here is the carpet-shop-to-be -- Houseworks' "Two-Window Shop" from their "Street of Shops" series -- dry-fitted with masking tape to make sure that everything goes neatly where it should.  To be honest, there is really very little to do with this kit building-wise, as each of the four walls is already assembled and all I need to do is slide the edge of one into the slot on another, and it's done.

The plexiglass for the windows is separate, so that you can paint the frame and mullions first, then glue in the "glass" -- the door is already mostly assembled, with the top of the frame held only by cellophane tape (long-dried in this case), so that again the plexiglass can be removed before painting the door frame.  No need for masking, hurrah!

The kit interior is also nicely done

There is a very pleasing attention to detail here -- the door frame has a neatly-mitered edge around the "glass", and there are fine reveals around the door and windows.

The interior door does not come with the kit -- I had picked it up from the giveaways table at one of the meetings months ago, as it happens, thinking it would be good to have on hand.

The millwork is very handsome.  The door angles look odd only because it is slightly ajar in this photo! -- the plaque on the false front is, however, noticeably crooked and glued down tight.  But this is really the only flaw I see in this particular kit.

(I'm not really wild about the false front, as it happens, so am not sure yet what I'm going to do with it.)

The plexiglass roof/ceiling fits snugly into the wall assembly -- a nice touch.  The glue is a bit loose on the wall trim here, after some 30+ years in a box.

This door really wants one of those brass letter slots at the bottom, doesn't it!

I didn't know it until now, but there is a place in Pennsylvania called "Street of Shops," a collection of "Victorian" store fronts into a sort of indoor mall -- Houseworks is an American company, I find, so I suppose these particular builds could be American or English to suit the particular owner. They looked immediately English to my eye, sort of Portobello Road, possibly because there isn't nearly as much Georgian/early-Victorian left in America as there is in Britain!  Well, perhaps I'll be a bit more ambiguous about the location of my shops than I first expected ...

Gendje Runner No.7

This is the Gendje Runner, no.7 in Meik and Ian McNaughton's Making Miniature Oriental Rugs & Carpets.  I worked much of this while I was staying at my mom's this past month.

The chart was originally designed for wool, but I've converted the shades, and "faded" them slightly, to DMC floss as I am still happy "playing around" with fibers and gauges.  I used 28-count Monaco instead of the original 24-count canvas, mostly because I've got rather a lot of the Monaco!

This is a pleasing, fairly straightforward chart, and makes a handsome little carpet.  The McNaughtons clearly have orderly minds, as the designs are well-thought-out and tidy, and while the carpets have a more restrained feel than, say, Frank Cooper's charts, giving probably more the "flavor" as it were of Oriental carpets than the reality, the McNaughtons have done an excellent job in scaling down a wide variety of carpet designs and styles into simplified and quite manageable 1:12 scale pieces for new and new-ish petitpointers.

This piece did tweak a bit as I stitched, and then while I was exploring online to find out if the Gendje runners were generally fringed or not, I came across an old example that had seen better days and in fact had a mend on one corner, noticeably a different shade of blue, and so I decided to let the crookedness go where it would, and make a less-than-new carpet -- hence the "mend" --

Gendje carpets are from the town of Gəncə or Ganja, now in Azerbaijan, in the southern Caucasus.  The diagonal lines filled here with boteh, the teardrop-shaped motif on which paisley is based, are typical of the long and narrow Gendje "runners."  The McNaughtons give a date of "late-19th century" for this particular type of carpet.

I have been joking, to myself and others, for some time now -- "oh, ha-ha-ha!" -- that I need to make a carpet shop room-box to have a place for all of the miniature carpets I make.  This has been manifesting itself in occasional thoughts of buying a shop front kit and turning it around at the back of a room box, to be the view from inside the carpet shop, which I thought an amusing twist on the usual room-box "shop".  Then at my minis group meeting in June, one of the ladies said, "So I've got a friend who's had some Dura-Craft house kits in her garage since the 1980s, does anybody want them?"  Another member said she was, that she'd put one together and then give it to her favorite charity for raffling off at the next fund-raiser, and I, with a small gulp (having heard about the sheer size of some of the Dura-Craft houses!), said I'd take the other one.  As it turned out, the charity lady decided that she already has enough on her workbench -- so both of the kits arrived at my house while I was away at my mom's --

Yes, those are grown-ups for scale in the photos.  Hmm -- could I make the San Franciscan into a sort of boho shop?!  The mind began to whirl ...

And at the very same meeting (while I was away, remember), another of the ladies said she'd inherited the full set of Houseworks' "Street of Shops" room-box kits -- three separate "shops" that fit side-by-side in any combination or order -- also sitting in sealed boxes for umpteen years, and since she'd heard me joking about a carpet shop, would I like them?! 

So my previously-whirring mind is now in fact boggling, not only at the generosity of miniaturists with their knowledge and "spare" stuff, but with the possibilities ....

"S" -- and a 10th Update

Here is the "S" for my ABChallenge -- a miniature fall-front secretary.  Somebody was giving this away at my miniatures group a while back -- "it needs a bit of TLC," she admitted, as the lid was broken where the pin hinges were, but I managed to get enough wood-filler in that I could make it hold together again.  It doesn't really want to lie flat when open, but maybe I can either weight it down with something or just leave it closed.  Susan D and I had been exchanging e-mails around that time about making miniature books, so I did these blocks --

They are a bit wobbly along the tops and bottoms, but I put the best one in the middle, so that with the doors closed, most of the wobbliness is hidden!

And the rest of my "10th of the month" miniatures update --

A very sweet enameled tea pot that was originally a bracelet charm, but surely is meant to be on a tea tray somewhere!

Someone was giving this away, too, at another minis meeting a few months ago -- I could hardly resist "Railroad Depot Bench," could I!

It went together fairly easily, though the back piece was slightly chipped on one corner -- I wanted it to look old anyway, so that was no problem.  The only worrisome moment was when the back piece, which is a very thin piece that you glue the battens on, apparently sucked out all of the moisture from the glue, and because it is so thin it didn't have much surface area along the bottom edge to stick to the cross-piece at the bottom, and promptly warped out to the back so much that I could easily have stuck my finger into the gap.  But I found some pieces of scrap wood in the garage that fit almost exactly on either side of the back, and clamped them together and left them to sit overnight, and luckily it was almost as good as new in the morning.

The instructions said that maroon was the traditional color, but I didn't really like the rather orangey look of the one craft paint I found actually called "Maroon," and so I used "Red Barn" instead.  I obviously need some practice getting a smooth coat of the clear finish on.

It's now roughed up a bit, with some scratches and wearing-off of paint -- even, I'm sorry to say --

some graffiti. 

But of course it will make an interesting and amusing bit of "junk" in the attic!

I have also been slowly painting the dollhouse itself.  The room on the left is going to be mother's sewing room, and I've removed the wallpaper -- which I liked but was peeling off a little too much -- and painted it with FolkArt's Milk Paint in a really charming "Churned Butter" palest yellow.  The library in this picture had just had the first coat of Milk Paint in "Jamestown Blue," which here looks alarmingly seedy but after a second coat is extremely pretty.  To be honest, I really hate the copper-colored fireplace hoods, and as I was priming this room -- two coats, to try and cover up that very 70s-looking kelly green -- I thought, "oh, the heck with it" and painted over the hood as well.  We'll see.  It looks kind of truncated now, but maybe I can disguise that with a mirror or something!

The breakfast room downstairs, after removing the faux wallpaper and sanding off the remnants of glue -- glue stick, I suspect, and not easy to get off, as the paper fuzz was very recalcitrant.

It's funny, in my callow youth I probably wouldn't have given this color a second glance, thinking most neutrals a waste of time, but now I find this one really beautiful -- it's Martha Stewart's "Lake Fog," a sort of beige or sand with a hint of grey in it.

(No, I'm not masking off the woodwork.  It's really hard at 1:12 scale, trying to get a piece of masking tape to stick on the edge of a piece of baseboard that's protruding only 3/32 of an inch.  I found that it was actually less stressful to just do without, and run a fine brush along the edge very slowly.  There certainly are some wobbles, but on the whole it is working pretty well.)

In the Breakfast Room

When I saw the "Retro" dining table kit on Jane Harrop's website, I couldn't resist it, so I counted up the money from my Christmas stocking and splurged.  I really liked the set anyway, but when I found out that the table is only 4"/10cm long, I knew it would probably be perfect -- you can see how small the room is!

Now that it is all a month or so behind me, I am beginning to forget how much of a bother the chairs were to put together, and instead to just appreciate their ingenuity and beauty.  The kit pieces are laser-cut, so you must sand off the scorch marks, and despite heeding Harrop's warning to be especially careful with the side pieces -- because the horizontal part goes across the grain and is therefore very vulnerable -- I managed to snap two of the eight before I even got to the gluing stage.  One went back together almost invisibly, at least! 

There are also very few points where the pieces actually come into contact with each other -- just at the ends of the three stretchers -- so the glued joints are also vulnerable.  I was using Aleene's Tacky Glue, so maybe it would have been a different matter with something else, I don't know.  They were definitely more sturdy the more stretchers were in place, which was helpful, but I even managed to knock one apart while finishing it -- I wanted to use the Tried & True I have, which was so successful on the Arts & Crafts bed, but requires that you finish it after assembly.

The cushions are some glossy papery stuff I'm not familiar with -- you glue one piece to the top and one on the underside of a piece of heavy card cut to shape (all provided in the kit) and then shape them to the required curve while the glue is still damp, to fit the stretchers in the seat.  I found that this worked perfectly to shape them! --

I learned along the way that these particular chairs are based on Erik Buch's "49" design from the 1950s -- I guess a minor Danish-modern designer, as he doesn't even have an article in the Danish Wikipedia, let alone the English one.  Here is a photo of the 49 chair from the Erik Buch company --

There are some interesting pictures here of a 49 chair with the seat removed, so that you can see how the seat "floats" -- other photos of restored chairs are here and here.

Harrop's 1:12 version is ingenious in miniaturizing the essence of the chair and table, just with the caveat above that the kits (certainly the chairs, the table is much easier) are probably best for someone with some kit-building experience.  I do wish that the seats were a tiny bit bigger, so that you could get more of the "floating" effect, but it's certainly good the way it is!  I did put the back rest up a little higher than in the instructions, which looked to me more like the originals.

(I used Loctite gel glue for the cushions, by the way, as the back is held on essentially by friction, since you can't use much glue or it will show.  By this point my chairs had a linseed/beeswax finish, and regular glue probably wouldn't have held.) 

The table was a breeze after the chairs!

The piece underneath can actually be a table leaf if you like.  I was sorely tempted to do so, but trying it out before gluing, the larger size would have been just a little too impractical in the small room, and so that piece is now a reinforcement, its original purpose anyway.  The grain lines look a little darker in the above photo than they are in real life, where they are quite beautiful.

It's funny because usually the things I like best are really old, but Danish Modern does get my heart pounding! and so I'm delighted to have found these kits.  I didn't plan it, but they also look really good on the Karagashli carpet I worked a few years ago -- I really like the golden wood against the green, and the styles, despite being both a century and a continent apart, are unexpectedly harmonious!

Q for Quilt

For my first 1:12 scale quilt, I decided on an Amish-style one instead of the jewel-box, as the pieces are bigger (!) and thus I felt on more solid ground.  I'm drawn to Amish quilts anyway, the richness of colors and the simplicity -- they have a kind of peacefulness to them.  There are a lot of patterns I like but I chose Diamond in a Square, for its relative simplicity yet with the subtle liveliness of the diamond's angles.  Interestingly, the Diamond in a Square pattern (sometimes called Center Diamond) originated in the 1930s, among the Lancaster County Amish.  It seems so timeless that I assumed it had been around forever.  There are some variations that can be made -- the corner squares on the narrow borders can be omitted, one or both, or the narrow border around the center diamond -- but of course the basic elements are the same.

I found an image on Pinterest which I then couldn't track down --

which seemed to me quite unusual with the tan/beige, but was very appealing, so I started with that and just played around with different colors in Kona Cotton, which I really like for its quality and the richness and wide variety of its colors.  I ended up getting these --

which are from the bottom, Parchment, Laurel, Hibiscus, Teal Blue, and Garnet.

For the assembly I was going to just wing it (she said blithely), but when I was looking around for old quilts for color ideas, I also came across the Diamond in a Square mini-quilt tutorial at Purl Soho, which turned out to be a very helpful starting point.  Not having much quilting experience myself, it was a bit of a revelation that I didn't need to cut all of the pieces beforehand, which turned out to make it much easier and less stressful to adjust the next piece here or there if it needed it.

I decided to press all of the seams open, figuring that that would distribute the thickness more evenly, which I suspect at this small scale might be obvious.  I didn't use any batting at all, thinking it might make the quilt too stiff to drape properly -- I've heard that some miniaturists use fabric cut from an old T-shirt, though, so I'll keep that in mind.  The binding is just folded over from the back and stitched down by hand on the front, mitering the corners.

Yes, the last corner is really wobbly!  I didn't notice until after I'd finished -- so that's the end that gets tucked in!

I was really grateful for both the quality of the Kona Cotton, which took a bit of a beating getting sewn and resewn more than a couple of times on some of the pieces but still looks great, and also for the Purl Soho tutorial and the advice I read somewhere (last summer when I was making the sling bag) that people will never know how long it took you to sew something but they will see how much care you took sewing it, which on occasion must be translated as "yes, pick out the wonky seams, you will be glad you did," which is entirely correct, for just look at the results --

Any quilter reading this will no doubt notice that I haven't actually quilted this yet, and I think I will leave that for the time being.  Obviously it won't get much wear-and-tear in the dollhouse, so there shouldn't be a problem with things shifting around, or the seam allowances bunching up.  My hand-stitching is still a bit rough, so I think it prudent to wait until I've had a bit more experience in keeping the stitches both small and even!

Well, after this success, of course I had to hurry up and make the rest of the bedlinens, so I stitched up a set of sheets ...

... four pillows, and cases.  The pillows themselves are sewn from plain bleached muslin stuffed with one fluffed-up cotton ball each, and the sheets and cases are from a partly-worn-out sheet, the rest of which has that lovely old-sheet softness.  The fabric proved to be awfully ravelly, but the cases do look good.

Next time I will try and get the scale a bit better -- this house isn't particularly "realistic" as dollhouses go, but I'd like to have things not too "dolly" here -- but really I'm quite pleased with the quilt, and very happy with the colors and the way they play together.  Plus "quilt" starts with Q, so there's my ABChallenge!

G

It Knits a Village

Three cheers for the ladies of Cloughmills Crochet Club in Co. Antrim! who have recreated their village in crocheted and knitted miniature.  This looks like it was a lot of fun!