Second Floor Walls Are Up

Happy autumn, everyone!  Another season changes without much change, but we carry on.  The good news for us is that the fires are largely under control, and the outside air is once again breathable.

I have put up the walls on the second floor of the art deco house.  The process for the curved wall was identical to the one I used on the first floor, so I won’t bore you with the details.  The only difference was that, on the first floor, both ends of the curved wall butted up against a perpendicular wall.  On the second floor, the back wall flows into the curved wall, and there is nothing on the front end of the wall.  It simply ends where the removable panel will be.  To make it more stable, I drilled a hole in my roof and sank a 1/8” x 1/8” post to give the mat board something to attach to.  Here you can see things being glued into place.  Not everything is being glued down in this photo (obviously), but all the pieces are there to make sure everything lines up correctly.  I used some foam core half circles glued to a paper cup to help shape the top of the curved wall as things dried.  

The interior of what will be the bedroom and hall has been papered.  I discovered a very odd thing when printing the wallpaper this time.  Generally, I use high-quality matte presentation paper when printing my wallpaper, because it usually gives a sharper and richer print quality.  To my surprise this time, the print-out was decidedly grayer and more muted than the test piece I had printed on plain paper.  No matter how I fiddled with the settings, the only way to get the color I wanted was to print on plain paper.  Odd, but a good reminder to test things and remember that the paper you use, as well as your print settings, can affect the outcome of home printing.

Before adding the left wall, I made another door, very similar to and using the same process I used for the front door.  For this door, I put in only one diamond pane.  Since it looks into the bedroom/bathroom area, I thought the door should provide a bit more privacy.  😊 

You probably noticed that the desk is still there.  In accordance with many of your recommendations, I have been letting it sit to decide if I can live with it.  I think I can, actually.  The only thing is, I will have to make the chair for it myself.  Standard 1:24 chairs will make the extra height a little too obvious.

I have been making some accessories for it.  

The non-working lamp is made from wire, a bit of wood dowel, and a couple of beads.  The larger bead is metal, and I was unable to cut it down, so I filed it (and filed it and filed it) to get a less rounded shape.  

The cover of the journal is made from mulberry paper with a coat of Mod Podge.  I really do like the leather-like look that it gives; I used it years ago on the steam punk books I made for the tower room of the Fairfield.  The small Ephraim-Faience-style vase is a squat bead painted and decorated with some paper flowers, all given a coat of satin varnish.  The little leather books were a gift in a swap a few years ago, and are small enough to fit the shelf.  (Yay!)

Speaking of swaps, I blogged about the swap items I sent back in August.  A couple of weeks ago, I received my own swap gifts.  They are from the very talented Melissa of My Dollhouse Passion.  She is a polymer clay artist (and has a store on Etsy), and you can imagine how excited I was to be her recipient, since my own skills with polymer clay are sadly lacking.  She sent a turkey, a gourd, an incredible little salad, and a yummy traditional fry-up.  

The gourd and fry-up are already in the Fairfield, and the salad is making that mac-and-cheese lunch in the Merrimack a bit healthier.  😊 

She also sent a goblet (which will get painted), a canning jar (which will get filled before going into the pantry of the Fairfield), and a lovely picture frame.  I love how delicate it is; many frames are so thick they don’t look quite right in half scale.  A week or so ago, my better half returned from a trip to the local Daiso with several packets of nail art stickers, one set of which reminded me instantly of pressed flowers.  

I had to make them into a little bit of art work for that frame, and it’s now hanging happily in the bedroom of the bungalow.  

Last but not least, Melissa sent me a plant stand and a vintage chair.  

The chair is absolutely perfect in the living room of the Fairfield.  

You may not be able to tell from this picture, but the trim of the chair exactly matches the burgundy thread used in the rug.  All together, a wonderful swap gift. 

On the non-miniature but still crafting front, we realized that October 31 falls on a Saturday this year, so decided to turn our regular game day into a Halloween party.  Back at the start of shelter-in-place, my company was still using WebEx, which has no virtual background feature.  Since my office and craft room share space, I bought a room divider very similar to this to hide the messy craft desk.  I loved it because it was easy to set up, and I got to dress it up a bit with books and fake plants.  I don’t really need to use it for work anymore (we’ve switched to Teams, which does have virtual backgrounds), but it can still come in handy on occasion.  Our meetings with friends and family are on Zoom, and Zoom doesn’t do well with virtual backgrounds when there are two people in frame.  (One or the other of us has a tendency to disappear.)  My plan is to decorate it like crazy for the party, but my challenge is to make all the decorations myself, using only things from my stash and free patterns and directions I can find online.  I’ve been crocheting, knitting and crafting for, well, decades now, so I have a pretty substantial stash, and the beauty of this project is that it also reduces that stash some.  Since friends read this blog, I’ll have to wait until after Halloween to show you how I did.  🎃  Stay tuned.  

Take care and stay safe!

 

 

A Floor and More

Hard to believe we are into September now.  The days do pass quickly when they are all so alike.  On the one hand, fall seems to have come too quickly.  On the other hand, I am more than ready for this year to be over.  

Now that the second floor of the art deco house is on, it was time to lay the flooring.  For the bedroom floor, I had decided on parquet.  It was common in art deco homes, and it would mirror the tilework on the first floor, while the wood would be a bit warmer than the marble.  I was originally going to order wood tiles from the same vendor where I got the “mar-like” tiles, but his Etsy site is currently down due to supplier problems (probably related to Covid-19).  His half-scale page on his main site shows “Under Construction,” so even figuring out what I wanted to order would be difficult.  Also, it would have cost around $25.00 plus shipping from the UK to get the tiles I needed, so I decided to make my own. 

I still have lots of the lovely wood veneer Carrie sent me.  I selected two sheets (I think they are pine; they are very light with a nice, close grain), and stained one Minwax Fruitwood and one Minwax Special Walnut.  The Fruitwood was a shade lighter than the Golden Oak I have, and one coat was sufficient for the depth of color I wanted.  The Special Walnut took two coats to get a nice, rich color.  I used 0000 steel wool on both to make them as smooth as possible.

Then I went into my Silhouette Studio.  I just have the basic software, but that is good enough for me.  I started by inserting a square shape.  I had trouble getting it to exactly .5 x .5 inches.  It wanted to stay just slightly under that, but I decided that slightly smaller is better for half scale anyway.  Silhouette Studio has the same copy, paste, snap-to-grid, and group features that I am used to in Office, so it was easy to create a row of duplicate squares, group them, and copy the row down until I had a nice block of squares ready to cut. 

I used my deep cut blade and two passes.  It took around 20 minutes to cut each block of squares, and it didn’t completely cut through the veneer.  However, it was easy to finish the job with my utility knife.  I ended up with two colors of beautifully even tiles, quite similar in thickness to the Mar-like tiles I used on the first floor.

 With my piles of tiles, I got started laying my floor.  

This floor was much easier to lay than the first floor.  For one thing, I will only have one open edge, so there was no need to calculate how best to align the tiles for two clean edges.  Second, it was, of course, a much smaller space to cover. And third, special cuts were a breeze with my utility knife.  There was no scoring/hacking/chipping/cursing this time. 😊 To my surprise, I got the whole floor laid in one afternoon!  

After it was laid, I went over it again with steel wool, then gave it three coats of shellac, with more steel wool after each coat had dried.  I will not be cross-stitching a rug for this room.  I never do for bedrooms, because the bed just covers up most of it anyway.  I have picked this rug, printed on velvet paper, because I wanted a burgundy to go with the little throw pillows on the bed.  I wish I could invert the design and have the background beige and the design in dark burgundy, so that it would really pop, but I don’t have the software to do that.

I had also started the bedroom desk a while ago.  This was my inspiration desk. 

I loved the beautiful, simple art deco design, and the curved footprint would fit so nicely in the curved alcove.  I got some real cherry strip wood for the shelves and desktop. I knew that curved drawers were probably out of the question with half scale, so my intention was to use cherry veneer over a framework of whatever I could make work.  Unfortunately, the left-over cherry veneer from the Sagamore Hill Library roombox was just a bit too thick.  I really liked the wood scrapbook paper I had purchased on Amazon several years ago, but it’s no longer available and didn’t come in cherry anyway.  After hunting on the Internet, I found this site:  https://www.realwoodpaper.com/  I ordered two sample packs, one in .010 thickness and one in .016 thickness.   The paper is absolutely wonderful—just what I needed!  To my surprise, the slightly thicker paper is what I ended up using on the project.

This was my first try. 

I say “first” because, although I think it’s a fairly good match for the original, its scale and proportions are not quite right.  Here you can see it next to the vanity. 

It’s a bit too tall.  When I was designing it, I wanted a decent shelf height.  The shelves, the way they are, are already too low for my half-scale books.  If the desk were any shorter, I thought the shelves would be too cramped.  When I compare it to the original now, though, I see that the original shelves are not very high.  I am pondering my options.  I do love this version, but I can also see where I could improve.  And you know me and do-overs! 😉 Stay tuned.  (Fabulous art deco frame from a kit by Jane Harrop.)

Hope everyone is able to staying safe and enjoying a chance to work on your minis (or your hobby of choice).  Take care and thanks for stopping by!