The Walls Are Going Up

It was a three-day weekend for me this past weekend, so I got a lot done mini-wise.  First of all, I finally got all my swaps done, and they are on their way to the swap organizer.  Yay!  So nice to have that off my to-do list.  Second, I got the first-floor walls (the ones that get glued down anyway) primed, sanded and up.

I didn't take pictures of all the clamping and weighting as I glued them in, but I did take pictures of doing the curved wall.

For that wall, I used 1/16"-thick matboard.  To prep it for curving, I scored it vertically at roughly 1/8" intervals for its entire width.  The scoring went fairly deep, but not all the way through the matboard.  Before I started, I had marked it at 2" intervals to ensure that I wasn't going too crooked with my scoring.  I also took a break from scoring every so often and gently worked on opening up the "ribs" I had made so that they would curve properly.  When it was completely scored and opened, I wrapped it around a bottle of Aleene's glue to train it.  Once I had it curving the way I wanted it to, I cut out the window.  I discovered when doing the mock-up that it was much harder to get my wall to curve properly once I had removed that large section for the window, so it's curve, then cut.  Here it is fully scored with the window partially cut out.

I then wrapped it around the curved section of the floor and glued it down.  The piece above the window got a bit wibbly as I was fixing it in place, so I cut a temporary half disk and wedged it in to encourage the proper curvature.

Next I cut and curled medium-weight cardstock (again, training it around an Aleene's bottle), removed the window section, and glued it in place.  You can see I needed to trim a little bit around the top after gluing.  The good thing is that gluing the cardstock to the matboard strengthened the upper curve, and I no longer need my temporary ceiling form.

It's reassuring that the foam-core mock-up fits on top. 😊

 

My intention is to skim coat the exterior with spackle, sand a bit and then paint, to give it more of a stucco texture.  I don't want the exterior too rough, but I also don’t want it to look like wood.  I may put my ceiling form back in place while doing this.

Before gluing in the walls, I cut a groove for my floor lamp, the one non-ceiling fixture I intend to have.  No more tape wire—round wire all the way!  The lamp is made from a kit by Jane Harrop.  She had provided a wood strip for the pole; I replaced it with hollow metal tubing so that I could run a grain-of-rice bulb through it.  I tried several options for the shades:

  

The first is the original shade that came with the kit.  Fine, but blah.  The second was a similar shade with fringe.  Um, no.  I then found some patterns for stained glass shades online.  Most of the ones labeled Art Deco looked more Prairie to me, but art deco did have some of its roots in the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.  I tried coloring in the dragon-fly lamp by hand; that didn't work too well, and I wasn't thrilled with its look in the room.  I used Word's shapes to color in more geometric lamp shades.  On the first one I tried for a gold-and-silver look.  It didn't look all that gold when printed out, and I didn't like how narrow the top was.  I modified the design a bit and replaced the "gold" with mauve. I think that's the one I'll go with.  Currently, it's just printed on paper, but I'll be printing it out on vellum for a more translucent look.

Finally, I tried out some options for the walls.  These are some scrapbook papers:  The one on the fireplace wall has a pearl-like embossed finish that I thought looked very art deco with its concentric diamonds. I also like the mauve metallic color, but it might too much for the entire room.

I do like the mauve in the piano alcove.

I looked for art deco wallpaper borders and found this fabulous one that apparently was a Bradbury & Bradbury product, although I can no longer find it on their Web site.  (P.S. for 1:12 scalers:  For those who don't already know it, Bradbury & Bradbury sells many of its wallpapers in miniature, which I think is a marvelous idea.  I wish more wallpaper designers did, and I wish B&B offered theirs in half scale.)  (Ooh, that reminds me of another aside:  Have any of you been following the House Beautiful "Dollhouse Beautiful" challenge, annoying though it may be at times?  Did anyone notice that one of the designers apparently got Kohler to make bathroom fixtures in 1:12 scale just for her?  Whaaaat?  How do the rest of us get that?)

Getting back to the border, it wasn't the right colorway, anyway, so I created my own version using shapes in Word.  This allows me to use whatever colors I want and tweak them at my whim.  I think this design could work in conjunction with one or both of the wallpapers above.  What do you think?  Ideas? Suggestions?  (And, yes, those of you who encouraged me to keep the purple chair fabric, or at least wait before making any decisions—I'm very glad I did. 😊)

Enjoy the week and all the mini time you can get!  Your comments are always welcome and appreciated!