A Little Time Out: Books and a Rug

Took a few days this past week/weekend to go stay with my mom, who recently had knee replacement surgery.  She is awesome and doing very, very well.  (I know she reads this blog sometimes, so shout out to Mom!  Hope you feel better and better every day!)  While that meant I couldn’t work on big (relatively speaking) items, I took along two projects that travel well:  miniature books and a rug.

That bookcase is going to be a challenge to fill, and there will be another, smaller bookcase along the left-hand wall.  Because I’m really trying to be a stickler for authenticity, I’ve been looking at close-up photos of the bookshelves and trying to figure out some of the book titles.  As much as possible, I am including those titles on my shelves.  These include:  Camps in the Rockies, History of the United States, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Piers Plowman, Zadoc Pine, The Great Lone Land, California and Oregon Trail, the Campaign of Waterloo, Albert Nyanza – Great Basin of the Nile, From the Congo to the Niger and the Nile, Works of Alexander Hamilton, and the Writings of John Burroughs.  I also have a few books I think ought to be there (and maybe are):  Some Heroes of Travel, The Roughriders, The Dark Continent, and, of course, African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt. 

And then there are the generic, printable, vintage book covers that I’ll be using to fill the remaining shelves.  Update:  Oh, joy!  I just found this:  http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/media/Files/Articles/ReadingWriting/2008-inventory.pdf.  This will really help me find volumes to fill the shelves. 

Making the books is a tedious process, because I make the covers as though I am making real miniature books, which means I print the covers on paper and wrap them around card stock coverboards, roughly following the process here:  https://www.deviantart.com/maylar/art/Micro-Book-Tutorial-135409683.  I am not, for these, including actual pages from the books, or I’d finish sometime around 2025.  For the book interiors, I am simply using some mat board and some balsa wood, depending on the desired thickness of the books.  I do find this process makes the books look more realistic.  Compare the books I made to printies of a shelf of books wrapped around a block of bass wood (upper left shelf, bottom shelf); the blocks will not be used in the final room box.  You can definitely see which of my books have the generic printie covers as well, so I may end up replacing those, although they don’t look as bad from a distance.

Anyway, after a couple of afternoons of work, I had made 25 books, which filled up . . . 2½ shelves, and smaller shelves at that.  There is a lot left to fill.  *sigh*  But making books is a good project to work on when I am taking a break or working out how to build my next piece of furniture.

I also got more work done on a rug.  It is being cross-stitched on 36-count Evenweave.  Rugs generally take around four months to make, and I am slowly getting there on this one.

This is the Kurdish Kilim rug from Susan McBaine’s Miniature Needlepoint Rugs for Dollhouses, published by Dover.  It has a lot of nice charts, and is available through Amazon or as an e-download directly from Dover Publications.  I had originally bought it because it has a zebra skin rug chart!  This rug will go in front of the fireplace.  Not an exact match, but I think close enough to work.