Unbirthday Socks

I made these for a friend and mailed them as a surprise birthday-and-a-half present, six months after her real birthday. They're Spud and Chloe "Fine", 80% wool and 20% silk, and I used about a skein and a quarter, as she has rather long feet. Apparently she likes them.

A New Sign for the Cottage

I've really been having fun with my dollar store paints on wood lately. This week I whipped up a new sign for the cottage on a board I pulled out of someone's trash pile. (We'll install it this coming weekend.)

I googled "sign painter alphabet" to find some samples of text that had the feeling I wanted. I didn't get entire alphabets, but I found enough to allow me to get the flavour I was trying for

I didn't worry too much about calculating the spacing (um, can you tell?), but since this is supposed to look like what it is (somebody's homemade cottage sign), I was quite satisfied with the result. If anybody ever wants to pay me for this sort of thing, I'll use a ruler.

A Decorative Wooden Sign for the Farmers' Market Garden

This is not quite Tole painting, but it has a similar vibe. The writing is my own. I didn't want a very formal look, so I just freehanded it; I didn't even give myself lines to follow.

The dove and the idea for the post decoration are taken mainly from a book called Country Painting Projects by Emma Hunk, which I picked up at a a secondhand shop. The sunflower started of as her idea, but turned instead into an original, based on a sunflower I once worked into a needlepoint pillow (based in turn on a real flower). The apples are my own.

I made it out of leftover bits of wood from the basement  (the post is the end bit that I cut off a banister rail in order to move it to a shorter staircase) that I cut, sanded and screwed together with spare wood screws. I even hack-sawed off the points where they poked through the back, so as not to injure anyone.

The paint is just dollar-store acrylic, but I find it mixes nicely into new colours. I expect it will last about three summers (we should take it inside over the winter). After that, I suspect the elements will take their toll on it.

I'm in the process of making six standing posts to match. Each one will have one of our market "values" written on it: Nourishment, Integrity, Inclusivity, Celebration, Education, Growth. I've already done four. They're fun to make!

Photo by Sandra Brunner

A Few Dollhouse Improvements

My brother, who has always had an interest in miniature modelling, gave me some suggestions for the dollhouse. And of course, every sister listens to her brother! Therefore, I've added some pale green paint  to the decorative spindles on the gingerbread trim, and pasted some free printable brick-pattern wallpaper to the foundation wall. You can see this better in the image below.

I do intend to do some more work on the green paint on the front of the house. I over-antiqued it when I was repainting the band of trim at the top of the brick section.

The welcome mat came from a collection of furniture I recently bought via Craiglist (or was it Kijiji?) from a very nice woman who lives only a few blocks away from me. The furniture belonged to her mother, who built a 1967 dollhouse. You can see more of it below.

Here is a rather impressive stove that my brother kindly assembled for me out of a kit. He was very good at putting together model airplanes as a child, and has successfully transferred that skill to the world of dollhouse miniatures. In particular, he did a great job with a decal of black curlicues that had to be applied to the chrome-coloured base.

The door of that stove opens, and I can fit the cookie tray that you see on the table inside. So the dolls are all kitted out for baking. (If you know me, you will not be surprised I see this as a priority.) You may note that the stovepipe vents to an imaginary chimney.

When my young niece saw the stove in place, her comment was "That looks great!!!"

Among the other new furnishings are the cheese grater, the toaster (with working lever!), the knife and the nice little German pots on the stove and hanging on the wall, which are metal. You may not be able to see it, but on the stove top there's a little spatula and a sweet frying pan that contains two eggs, sunnyside up.

In the front room, you'll easily spot the new china cabinet, a fine table with four chairs, a fireplace and a tiny ceramic pitcher on top of it, plus a Sterling silver tea tray (really!) There's also a bowl of flowers on the corner table, as well as a few other oddments in the cabinet that you probably can't identify.

The wooden furniture is made by a company called Shackman, and may have been bought at the great Manhattan toy mecca F.A.O. Schwartz in the 1960s. My friend Susan with the big dollhouse collection tells me the fireplace is Petite Princess, which was also sold at F.A.O. Schwartz. She has lots and lots of it, including the very same fireplace.

There were lots more treats in the little collection I bought, including an entire bathroom suite and a small doll family, but I'll wait until another time to write about them.

The Dollhouse Kit Assembled

My 11-year-old niece is mad at me. What's the point of her old aunt (me) building a dollhouse if I'm not going to give it to her (the niece) to play with? Hard to explain that it is for her, really, but it may take me 20 years to "finish" it. Twenty years seems an impossibly long time when you're eleven going on twelve.

But for the moment, I'm done with construction... apart from a few paint touch-ups and a little bit of judicious gluing and wood-filling, that is. I've decided to leave out the shutters, the downspout and the staircase, as I don't like the way they look. On the other hand, I've added quite a bit of detail the kit didn't specify... particularly extra bits to strengthen potential weak spots.

The box label that promised "easy assembly" lied. It was a full work week for someone with a house full of tools, a lot of determination and a fair supply of DIY know-how. But I must say, the design is ingenious, and produces a pretty opulent effect for something that's almost entirely made of cheap, thin plywood and glue. (Lots of glue.)

Oh, and roughly 400 redwood shakes, which had to be glued on by hand, one by one. I had a momentary panic when I ran out of glue (this being a holiday weekend with nary a hardware store in sight), but a kind neighbour family helped me out. This is why it`s good to share banana bread when you have extra.

I've already collected a few bits and pieces of furniture, but doesn't this bedroom have the gloomy look of the summer home after everyone's packed up to leave at the end of the season? That 20 years of extras would include things like quilts and pillows, pictures on the walls...

...perhaps some brushes and combs for the dressing room...

...a stove in the kitchen (that's coming, actually!) The washtub needs to be hung on the wall. I could do with a few more jam jars too. I made myself a prototype for about 15 cents. More to come.

That cat plate on the little chest of drawers needs to be mounted on the wall. And what about some rugs and a curio shelf? Not to mention seasonal items like a Christmas tree. A loaf of bread would be nice with the tea, too, now that I think of it.

But for the moment, I`m feeling quite pleased with myself, despite the odd plywood sliver working its way back out of my poor fingers. This is my first try at a project like this, and although I wish I could apply some of the lessons I learned along the way (too late!), there`s nothing I feel too bad about to kill the satisfaction of looking at this pretty, sturdy little dollhouse and knowing I put it together myself (with a little help from my brother when my hands got too blistered to cut the last few sticks of trim).

And for now, back to my regular work as a writer instead of a doll contractor.

Dollhouse Madness... It Begins.

Okay, so when I needlepointed that dollhouse rug for that friend of mine who collects antique dollhouses, she  thanked me by giving me a 1980s-era kit for a 1/12th-scale dollhouse that she had picked up somewhere along the way. It's been propped up against a bookshelf in a corner of my office for some months now. Every once in a while I've been looking idly through the listings on Kijiji or Craigslist in case I happen to see any cheap dollhouse furniture.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted an ad that turned out to be from a lovely young woman who was giving up her childhood toys, and for a modest sum I picked up enough little pieces of wooden furniture to more than fill up this little kit house (which is a Dura-Craft "Lafayette" model, in case you're wondering). So a few days ago, I opened the box and started to work on it.

It's not quite as easy as you might think by looking at the box label. Clearly this is what the original owners thought too, because they assembled just the first few bits before packing it all in, one supposes, in despair. There's quite a lot of cutting and measuring involved. And sanding. And I've discovered that a liberal application of wood filler can mask a thousand ills. And I realize that to do it right, I would need an airbrush, a jeweller's saw and some micro-drill bits.

I expect the kitchen is destined to be my favourite room.

I splurged on a few bits of wallpaper and floor coverings at The Little Dollhouse Company (where it would be quite easy to drop a thousand dollars without thinking twice). But I also used some scrapbooking paper my mom gave me, and a lot of spare paint and glue and tools I already had around the (human-sized) house.

Really, the fun for me will be making little things to go inside, like rugs, quilts and cushions. And when I saw that the specialty shop charges $15 each for "full" jam and pickle jars, I picked up eight tiny glass bottles for $1 at the local dollar store, and I look forward to filling them with tiny "preserves". A stopper and label will be easy. I'm guessing that for about $5 I can make more miniature preserve jars than you can shake a stick at.

How do you like the oak floor (my single biggest expense so far!)

As you can see from this mini-tour, it's tiny by house standards (although enormous by tchotchke standards). It will have a dining room and kitchen on the main floor, with a sort of two-part attic bedroom upstairs. The imaginary family presumably has an outhouse. Jonathan is worried how they'll stay warm with half the house open on one side, and I told him it has an imaginary fourth wall... there's a long and noble tradition of those, after all.

I think I've done about half the building. We have a long weekend coming up, so perhaps I can get the basic thing put together within the week. Or maybe not... we'll see how it goes.

Yellow Cotton Baby Sweater

This is a gift for Quinn, the new baby girl next door but one. As I believe I've mentioned before, I like to make baby clothes in other colours than pink or blue. I also tend to give slightly larger-than-needed sizes, knowing they'll be grown into. It's a terrible thing to spend the time and effort to knit something that never gets worn because it's outgrown before it's finished!

The pattern is "Homecoming Layette #615" by Dana Gibbons, published under the label; "Friends of Cabin Fever", which I bought as a paper copy at Purple Purl in Toronto. I really like the (Canadian) Cabin Fever patterns, because they tend to focus on producing a useful garment with the least fuss. The pattern (which is published on Ravelry and Patternfish) also includes a hat and blanket, but face it, I'm lazy (and I also ran out of yarn!)

I find it interesting to compare my version to the others posted on Ravelry; my very loose stitches give the lace section a very different look from other people's. I think I may like theirs better, but – ah well...