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The Ingalls family in half scale

October 9, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Ever since completing my half scale Little House in the Big Woods cabin, I’ve been looking around for some dolls to put inside. Normally I’m not a doll person, but this house is modeled after the (fictional) Ingalls’ family’s house and I wanted a (fictional) Ingalls family to put inside. Since my cabin is 1:24 scale and 1:12 dolls are much more common, that made the task of finding my perfect family even tougher.

Then I came across Prairie Crocus Studio on Etsy — a fortuitous store name for my Little House on the Prairie-inspired project. Laurie sells patterns for dolls and pioneer-style clothing, which would have been perfect if I was any good at sewing. Which I’m not. I contacted her and asked if she could do a custom order, reducing her usual 1:12 dolls to 1:24 and clothing them for me, and she said yes!

A couple of months later, the dolls are finished and she’s shipping them to me tomorrow. Here are the pictures she sent me while she was working on them. Pa is about 3 inches tall, which would be 6 feet in real life.

Cute and creepy without hair! Ma’s eyes maybe should have been brown, but I wasn’t sure and couldn’t find a reference in the books. I knew that Pa, Laura, and Mary all had blue eyes.

What a difference clothes and hair make. I asked for a blue dress for Mary and a red dress for Laura since that’s what they always wore in the books. The clothes are not removable. Pa’s beard turned out perfect!

After seeing the finished dolls, I asked Laurie if she could braid the girls’ hair. She did, and I think it looks great. I might add some embroidery floss “hair ribbons” to the ends.

I can’t wait to get them into the cabin. Now I just need to find an appropriately sized baby Carrie.

A bathroom emergency (electrically speaking)

September 10, 2013 / / 6 Comments

It may be the smallest room, but I left the Rowhouse’s bathroom for last. Partly because I had to get the stairs in first to pull the wire for the stairwell light through the bathroom wall, but also because I’m just not a fan of miniature bathrooms. My poor neglected Rosedale has two empty bathrooms keeping it from being completely finished, and my other recent houses don’t even have bathrooms. I just don’t like wasting a room on it, especially since the pickings are slim in half scale.

But I decided early on that the Rowhouse would have one, mainly so I could use the spa-like tub I’ve had in my stash for years (it won’t fit in the Rosedale’s tiny bathrooms!) I bought a tile sheet that’s probably meant for 1:12 scale but works okay in half scale. Each tile is half an inch square, which would make it 12×12 tile in real life.

I separated the white tiles from the border at the top and the orange tiles at the bottom so I could use the white ones for the bathroom floor, and the orange ones for a surround around the room. The tile sheet is actually shiny cardstock embossed with lines that separate the tiles. So it’s not quite as stiff as a vinyl tile sheet would be.

Because the bathroom floor had some tapewire and wires running across it, I lay down a piece of cardstock to make it more or less flat before gluing down the tiles.

The white part of the tile sheet is only six tiles long, so I ended up with a seam.

I glued in the big piece, then put the smaller piece in place and shoved it up against the wall to get a good idea of where to cut.

Beautiful! Oh, if only it stayed this nice. Keep reading. :/

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Rowhouse kitchen countertop

September 2, 2013 / / 4 Comments

As part of my bash of SDK Miniatures’ modern kitchen kit I decided not to use the countertop backsplash that came with the kit and instead go with a more modern-looking tile backsplash on the wall. (I watch a lot of House Hunters… all the nice kitchens have tile backsplashes now!)

The backsplash is made from two strips of wood, and without these the counter doesn’t hang over the front edge of the cabinets. I got a skinny piece of stripwood to make up for this, the same width as the backsplash pieces.

On the left, my cabinets are butting up against the cabinets with the oven etc., so I couldn’t have an overhang there.

I sanded down that piece of the countertop so it’s flush with the edge of the cabinets.

When I glued the two base cabinets together, I ended up with an L that’s not quite square. I’m not sure how I did that… I initially placed them in the room to glue them but the room itself isn’t square, so I ended up just gluing them together at what I thought was a 90-degree angle. But apparently not, because my two counter pieces didn’t meet up like they should.

I filled in that gap with wood filler before painting.

I’ve painted granite-like countertops for the Fairfield and the Rosedale, and it’s always a crapshoot. I go in without much of a plan and heap on a bunch of different colors and the counter goes through a prolonged ugly phase before the colors suddenly pop into place. That was my experience this time, too.

I started with a brown base coat, then some smears of the Tuscan Beige I used on the cabinets. I used a toothbrush initially, wiping off most of the paint off the brush and then haphazardly sponging it onto the counter.

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