Icewolf

Wood stain is one of the best ways to do it if you want a brown wood colour on them. There is also enamel paint that you use for aircraft modelling that has a shiny finish to it. I have used clear nail varnish on my miniatures, but I don't know how long term that will be in regards to 'not yellowing' as I only did it last year. I think your best best would have been to use wood stain before you glue them together, but you'd have to be careful wit the amount of glue you put on them so they aren't 'gluey' when the glue dries.

Finding 24th scale miniatures really seems to be difficult at the moment. The website where I normally get them from always seems to be out of stock of the things I want and has been for a long time, and other websites which I usually order from are very limited, too. Some seem to sell the houses and shops but nothing else. I prefer furniture in kit form so that I can decorate it as I want to without ruining the original finish, and kits which aren't too expensive, too. I am looking for shops outside the UK because I seem to have run out of places in the UK to try. Cost is a big concern because there is the added issue of shipping so I can't order kits which are more than a few dollars, and I would like to be able to get as many kits as I can since it would cut down on shipping costs. Any suggestions would be great.

It has been a while since I've worked on anything to do with dollshouses. This is mainly due to not really having the room to work on my 12th scale projects, so I am going to turn my attention to working on half scale and quarter scale projects instead. I live in the UK, so I have never built nor will I likely have the oppertunity to work on any Greenleaf houses. Most of the houses I have bought have been the small Dollshouse Emporium ones which they manufactured for their creative competion pieces, but I never had the chance to build them to enter them. I prefer small houses to large ones because they allow me to be more creative as there are lots of different styles of miniatures that you can use. I do have an old Lundby house which I bought off e-bay for a project involving Sylvanian Families which I am updating. (Hopefully, I'll be able to do more of that next summer when I've organised our flat a bit.) One of my favourite UK companies to buy dollshouses from is Petite Properties as they speacilise in quarter scale and other small scales. They are more ideal for my living condictions at the moment and I have built three of their houses and I have an half-scale tudor cottage which I hope to resume work on over the winter months. I do other crafts, mainly cross stitching and sewing projects which I will feature in this blog from time to time.

I've never really been interested in the traditional Georgian or Victorian dolls house. (Most of the large dollshouses that you get in the UK are based on that). Instead, I find themed projects much more interesting. So, I would say Bag End in miniature, or James Herriot's Skeldale House vet surgery, or a Natural History muesum filled with dinosaurs and other curiosities. The latter would be expensive not just because of the size of the building required (it would have to be huge!) but because most of the pieces would be one off minitures and artisan made. I also quite like Tudor castles and if I could get one, it would probably the one which is most realtic for me to make as there are quite few makers of furinature and I can make some of the tapersties, etc, myself. The problem is just getting the right building.

If I was going to do this, then I'd probably use the paper mache method because you have to think about how heavy it is going to be once it's dry. Clay would probably be too heavy if the project's large. You can shape the paper mache as you put layers on it which is useful if you wanted to give your project a rounded appearance like a tree. I used tissue paper in one of my projects (it was to do the base of a quarter scale house.) and I chose it because it was easy for me to scupt when it was wet! It does take a while to build up the layers though and you need to make sure that you don't put too many layers while the mixture is still wet as it needs to dry. If there's too many wet layers put on at once it won't dry properly. I don't know what it's like using a heavier type of paper, but it's quite inexpensive to do it that way.

Don't feel bad that the fixtures are missing as it gives you a chance to be creative with the house. I like the rounded windows so it could become a fairy house, or somthing similiar.

Quite a lovely house and a lot of detail. The furniture looks quite sturdy as well. One of the problems with the Lundy I had as a child was that some of the nicer pieces of furniture such as the dining table and chairs were so delicate that they were too easily broken. My Lundy also sometimes played host to my brother's Star Wars figures too and at one point I had some ewoks that lived in there. (A bit funny seeing ewoks living in a house with modern appliances, etc when they lived in trees in the film.)

Pinterest is one site that bugs me more than any other because of the amount of plagerism that goes on there. Google isn't good either because when you're looking for ideas and do an image search on google, most of the images that come up are those that are on pinterest. It's such a big problem. (Sometimes folks might repost images because they like it, but they should say that they didn't take the photo or artwork.) The main problem with pinterest though is not the necessarily plagerism, but the fact that it often obscures the original source of the image. Google should block pinterest from coming up in their image search to combat it - if no one knows where an image originally came from, then people can't give proper credit even if they want to and it makes people feel that it's OK to use stuff that's not theirs. (I don't use Instagram because you can't post on to site from a pc - it's got to be an android device like a phone and even then it's fiddly so I don't know how bad the problem is on there.)

I had one of these as a child, minus the the garage/stable. It's a lovely house and I had a lot of fun with it. I no longer have it now unfortunately. If you don't want to go for Lundy furniture, you can always get Sylvanian Families instead. Their furniature will fit quite nicely. 12th scale is way too big for the house as I found out when I decided to renovate it once. The fact that everything I looked at was too big for it puzzled me at first. It was only later when I found out about the scales. ELF miniatures used to do modern 16th scale furiature, but as you can't seem to get new houses in that scale unless you make them yourself they've stopped making them, which is a shame.

I would consider it a project inspired by the franchise, rather than fan fiction, unless you use the pieces to tell a story. I've known some people create a photo comic using their miniatures. One of the most impressive houses I've ever come across is this https://madshobbithole.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/my-hand-made-hobbit-hole-bag-end-from-lord-of-the-rings/ As a Tolkien fan, I've wanted to make something like this myself but I don't have the tools to cut the wood, etc... I've always found making a fan inspired dollshouse to be more engaging than just making a dollshouse. It's also quite natural for people to want to create their own versions of the books and films they love.

I have a couple. The first was when we moved home and I placed an order on a website which the owner mangled up and sent it to my old address. That was annoying and the owner of the website wasn't sorry about it. The second was a Sylvanian Families canal boat I bought of e-bay. I assume that her daughter hadn't liked the fact that her mother was selling it because when it arrived it was broken - it looked like someone had stamped on it and the box wasn't damaged so there was no way that it had been broken in transit - the boat was broken before the seller sent it. There wasn't any way that I could repair it, either. It was a nightmare getting a refund because the seller was really rude about it and thought that we wouldn't mind losing the money! We got half the money back in the end (the loss came from the postage of sending it back to the seller.) I only hope that she didn't try selling the thing to anyone else. I've not bothered buying houses and miniatures off e-bay since because it was too stressful, espeacailly considering the rudeness of the seller and her attempt to cheat us.

It's great. I did something like this a few years ago with a roombox I had. I had some black card and used that to cover the walls, ceiling and floor. (I'd acutally bought the roombox for another project so wanted to keep it as it was.) I love the pumpkin house.

I've been busy painting the hallway over the past few weeks. (It needed it, badly). It's slow going though as I have pain in my joints and get stiff if I over do things. It's almost done now but I've not been able to finish it due to the weather. It's been raining most of the week and I've not been able to move things outside that are in the way.

They had a lucky escape! And it's nice to see that Rupert has a good home now (and hopefully the rest will have, too!)

I don't really collect much at the moment because there isn't a lot of room to keep things where I live now, but I have a few sci-fi and fantasy figures, lego (because it's easy to store it when I can't display it), rocks and minerals and fantasy ornaments. Now, I mainly focus on my cross stitch and other stitchy crafts because it's easier for me to have them aroud without them getting stepped on or broken. I don't like having to shut things away but I am trying to find ways of sorting it out so I don't have to.

I came across this craft last year when I (accidently) bought a christmas decoration kit from Hobbycraft without knowing what it was. (It was animal related, which is why I bought it.) I've yet to make them, though as the lack of step by step photos in the kit put me off it a wee bit and I thought I should start with something simpler, or at least with something that had proper instructions in it. Personally, I think that it would be great for folks to master this craft for their dolls houses, espeacially if you like to do fantasy characters (like the gnomes) and animals because you can't always find things like that easily for your projects, at least not in an inexpesnive way at least. There are lots of supplies on etsy and I hope to get a starter kit one day to have a go, but my other crafty projects seem to get in the way of it.

I have used craft acyrlics on my houses like deco art and test pots of normal emulsion paint. Those little pots can go a long way. I wouldn't use enamel paint because that's usually used for model cars and planes and it dries too shiny. Gloss I wouldn't use, either for the same reason. I don't think that you can go wrong with craft paints and test pots of emulsion.

I started this thread to show case my work and my project. I didn't specifically ask where people had got things from. When people don't accept that I don't want to buy things from a certain seller, but continue to tell me that I should, it gets annoying. Only give suggestions if asked, please. I had it before where people give me sales pitches for things I've not asked for. I respectfully ask the moderators/admins of this forum to delete posts placed after my initial posting. Thank you.

Yeah, but I prefer to buy from websites where I can just add what I want to a cart and pay by a non-paypal digital method. It's less fuss for me that way. They need to make their website more modern/customer friendly (and it would be more efficient for them too, because they won't have to keep answering e-mails all the time over inquiries.) The company I've chosen to buy the stuff from also have pictures of the product by what you're ordering whereas they just have a list with no pictures. I don't really understand why people have to try and change my mind over where I order things from when I've already decided.

It says on their website that Stacey does 24th scale, but I've never seen them on sale anywhere in that size, only 12th scale. I also had difficulty finding the mortor that they do, too. Romney seem to have all the things I want apart from the rough stone. I'm not a fan of buying stuff off e-bay either because the last time I tired ordering off there I had issues with paypal. I have the quarter scale Pumpkin Cottage, but I didn't want a repeat of it in a larger scale, otherwise I would have gone with that one.

I do recommend painting them before you put them together, both inside and out, but I find the houses themselves quite easy to work with - the difficulty comes when you put the furniature together because that is quite fiddly and it's easy to lose or break them. Some I bought from one brand was so thin that they broke as I was putting them together, but I've not had that problem with Petite Properties because they make theirs thicker. Jane Harrop also does some nice kits too, and they're made out of balsa wood.

(As I finally have a digital camara, I can share the progress of the project with you all!) Cobweb Cottage (I'm going to keep the name for it, because it reflects the subject matter!) is my first proper 24th scale dolls house - to be honest, I prefer to think of it as a miniature house, because it's unlikely that it will ever have an official occupant - dolls aren't really my thing and finding 24th scale figures is quite challenging as there aren't that many of them around. I say that it is my first proper one because I had one previously which was one of those ugly, cheap plywood things that doesn't quite fit together properly. I had planned on turning it into a haunted house and even started buying small items for it - in the end, though, I just abandoned the project but kept the accessories to be used in a different project. Cobweb Cottage is by Petite Properties - I have done some of their houses before, mainly working in quarter scale (to date, I have Candlewick House, the Yuletide Shop and Pumpkin Cottage (the last one is my favourite, of course, because of the wonderful detail on it and I enjoyed working on it immensely.) I love the aesthetics of Tudor houses, both in the real world, and in miniature, so when I saw Cobweb Cottage and how inexpensive it is compared to 12th scale Tudor houses, I just had to have it! Of course, my birthday is coming up, so it really is a birthday present. Although there is a lot of parts for the kit, I found it quite easy to identify the parts and separated them into groups so that when it comes to fitting them together later I will find it easy to find them. I have test built it and it seems easy to put together. One of the problems I've found with 12th scale houses is that in larger houses the parts are big and heavy and I have difficulty getting them to fit together properly. (For this reason, I prefer to work with small 12th scale buildings like the competition pieces that DHE manufactured in its heyday.) With Cobweb Cottage, I find I don't have that problem at all and once I've completed the painting stage of it, I don't think I'll have any problems at all putting it together. So far, I've started to paint the beams, house carcass (the latter will have to be continued once I've got some more white paint!) and some small lollipop sticks I bought by accident for another project. (I thought that they were the full size ones, but they aren't - I have used them in other projects, but as I bought two packs of a thousand, there's still loads to use up and although they weren't suitable for the project I initially bought them for, they have proven to be useful else where. I suspect that it will take a while before I've used them all up!) To decorate the house, I'm going to just use paint, the lollipop sticks and 24th scale stone from Romney Miniatures. I've looked everywhere for 'real' tiles and stone work for the house as I prefer to use 'real' materials rather than using paper. (Paper always has a flat appearance to me and I don't really like it to be honest. If I can find something more 'real' then I'll use that instead.) I've decided on the random paving for the ground floor (as it looks more realistic when you consider the haphazard way Tudor buildings were built - I've been in one and the floorboards are of different thicknesses and widths. Because of this, I don't think that you have to be 'neat and perfect' when making Tudor and country cottages - the less neat it is, the more realistic it will look.) For the roof, I will be using the grey roof tiles and the grey ridge tiles. There house also came with two fireplaces and I shall be using brick strips on that. (I had been inclined to use random rough stone to cover that as I like the look better, but they don't produce it so I shall have to compromise with it.) (This is the progress I have so far, because I've not been able to get the tiles and bricks for it yet as our dog needed an operation and this month I decided to treat myself to 'new' books and some girly stuff which I haven't had a chance to in a while. Hopefully, I'll be able to order them next month, sometime. I am also going to get some more thin balsa wood for internal beams.)

Try looking at Petite Properties website if you're interested in quarter scale. Their houses aren't that pricey - some of them are only £15. (I'm not sure what the postage costs are like, to the US, though.) I can't advise on wallpaper, though as I don't use it for that scale - I usually use craft paints and thin strips of balsa wood to decorate it. Their furniture isn't that badly priced, either, but you have to make the kits up and paint them yourself.

Thanks, but I really do need some articles with pictures, so I can see how the techniques are applied and such. Please bear in mind, too that some products I might not be able to get hold of with being in the UK, so I need more information.

I'm looking for some articles about aging effects for the exterior of dolls houses. I'm currently working on a 24th scale Petite Properties Tudor style house and would like to make to make the outside and interior walls and ceilings look old and dirty, as I plan on making it into a witchy/fantasy cottage.