Jump to content

Icewolf

Gold Member
  • Posts

    53
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

10 Good

About Icewolf

Previous Fields

  • Dollhouse Building Experience
    Two

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.)
  8. 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.)
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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!)
  15. 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.
×
×
  • Create New...