Another Dollhouse Attempt

If you've been following this blog for awhile, you know that quite awhile ago I found a dollhouse kit at a resale shop and started trying to put it together. I failed. The directions were in English, but were microscopically written and made no sense to me. So, I gave up.

Just recently, I had considered throwing the kit away, since I'm positive I have lost some of the pieces. Then I was given this half finished dollhouse.



It didn't come with any extra pieces, but I'm hoping the kit I already have will help me finish this house. This shouldn't be as difficult, since the hard part of the construction is done already.

So, here we go again...

The Principal's Pirates

My boss brought her set of pirate bendy dolls to school this week. I made these for her 3 or 4 years ago, but I never took any pictures of them. So, today's recess was an opportunity for a photo shoot.









Clicking on the label "Bendy Dolls" under this post or on the sidebar, will take you to many other bendy doll related posts, including patterns and instructions for making them.

The Tennyson Dollhouse (Part 1)

I realize that I did not really NEED another hobby, but it was hard to resist when I found this dollhouse kit at the Haven Hospice resale shop a couple days ago. The kit was fully intact, in it's original box for only $24. I had always wanted a nice dollhouse that I could decorate for myself, not for the children ( I would rather have a real victorian house to work on, but the miniature version will do for now).



I was particularly happy when I got the kit home and looked it up on the internet.

The Tennyson Dollhouse Kit

$24 was quite a deal!

I have never tried to assemble anything with so many parts before, though. The first day that I took all the pieces out of the box to look at them, I was so intimidated, I just put them all away again.

A day later, and a little braver, I took everything out again and followed the first few sets of directions on the very lengthy instruction sheet. This is going to take awhile.



Each piece has to be carefully removed from a sheet of plywood, in the same way that that paper dolls are removed from a sheet of card stock. The wood has to be sanded, because there are rough splintery edges, and then painted.



The next step was to glue the pre-sized plastic sheets over each window opening.



You might be able to see in that last picture that I've been having some trouble with the outer layer of wood, on the rough side of each piece, peeling or chipping. I believe that this is mostly because the kit is old. Some of the pieces even show signs of a small amount of water damage.

While I'm only on the very beginning stage of assembly, I'm already thinking about how I want to decorate the interior when it's done. I have several pieces of dollhouse furniture that I've picked up at resale stores over the years and saved for the dollhouse I wanted to have someday.



I've also been exploring the internet for free dollhouse decorating projects.

Here is a link to a site with free printable projects for dollhouses:

A large variety of free mini printables


If you fall in love with this design and would like a similar dollhouse kit that does not cost so much that you have to mortgage your real house to get it, I found one on Etsy that costs less than the Tennyson, but looks very much the same.

Victorian Gingerbread Dollhouse on Etsy

The Bendy Dolls Go Camping

We have been driving around with the tent in the car for over a week now, but the weather won't cooperate with our desire to go camping. This weekend, we had everything packed and ready to go, except the food. I had just finished filling the cooler with ice, when the thunder began. Then, DH went out to the car and found out one of the tires had gone flat, so instead of going camping, DH took the car to Sears to get the tire fixed ( it had a nail in it), while it poured down rain.
I was upset for awhile about not getting to go camping, but then Blaze and I started working on a camping scene in miniature.

First, we set up our campfire. The fire pit is a circle of strong cardboard with small stones glued around the edge and 4 twigs glued together to form the base of our "fire".



The other twigs that form the rest of the "fire" are glued together, but they are not glued to the base layer. That way, they can be lifted up to place a flameless, plastic votive candle inside, so the fire will look like it's burning. Finally, red, yellow, and orange wool roving is glued on top, to look like flames.



I then sewed two little bendy doll sized sleeping bags (I've been told I need to make more) and matching pillows, out of wool felt.



Blaze, of course, had to start a pillow fight with the tiny pillows.



The last thing I made this weekend was a doll-sized backpack, also out of wool felt.







If this next picture is printed out as a full page photo, the patterns should be the correct size.









Since Blaze had been promised a chance to cook hotdogs for himself if we went camping, he got to cook hotdogs for all of us for dinner last night.

Unplugged Challenge: Tiny

The theme of this week's Unplugged Challenge on Unplug Your Kids is "tiny", so Blaze and I made things for his bendy dolls. He built a log cabin out of his set of Lincoln Logs and I made a picnic set out of wooden dowels and wooden balls.







The cups are made from a 5/8 of an inch oak dowel, cut into 3/4 of an inch sections and then drilled part way through . The cup handles are made by drilling a hole in the center of the dowel and then cutting off slices. I then sanded off one side until it was the proper shape and glued the handle onto the cup with strong glue.



The submarine sandwich is made from the same oak dowel, cut length-wise. The sandwich filling is round and triangular shapes cut out of wool felt. Then it was all glued together.

Doll Party on the Pirate Ship

Joy at the blog So You Know How We're an Art Family posted a very imaginative tiny dinner party her daughter had set up and asked if other people would join her today (Friday) posting pictures of their children's animal/doll/blanket dinner.

Blaze was excited about this idea and chose what dolls he wanted to come to a party on the pirate ship.

This has become a truly motley crew!





Sorry the picture quality is so bad. It was taken using the computer. I have ordered a new camera, so that DH and I can each have one. It is supposed to show up today, so I am anxiously awaiting the UPS truck right now.

In the meantime, if you want to see how we made the little toy stove the sailor up on top is using to cook, the post is here:
http://overthecrescentmoon.blogspot.com/2008/11/unplugged-challenge-kitchen.html

Our other doll related projects are listed on the side bar under the title "bendy dolls", even if not all of them are "bendy dolls".

Math Gnomes

These were the inspiration for this week's posts about peg dolls. I spent a couple evenings this week working on a set of math gnomes for Blaze, using the 2-3/8" wooden peg dolls. Then we read the first story from the following blog:

http://ebeth.typepad.com/serendipity/gnomes-and-gnumbers-a-mat.html

The math gnomes and the story were a big hit with Blaze! He had already worked on his regular math lesson in the Math-U-See workbook, but he didn't think of the gnomes as another math lesson, he thought of them as a game, as we tried to act out the story while I read.

When I explained to my oldest daughter, Ula, about how the math gnomes introduce all four math processes at once, she said something along the lines of, "Well, it will be a while before he gets to division", but this is not actually the case, because I gave Blaze 10 of the glass aquarium "jewels" that are used as the gnomes' treasure, and he was able to split them up equally between two tiny baskets, so he is already doing division.





Here's the first lesson Blaze did with the Math Gnomes:



He is enjoying this chapter of the Math-U-See Alpha book, as well. It is using a story, of sorts, to teach adding with 9. The story is that 9 very badly wants to be a 10, so every time another number is added to it, it turns on it's vacuum cleaner (children are encouraged to make a sucking noise at this point) and it sucks up one unit and turns into a 10. Each problem on the workbook page is acted out using blocks.

Tiny Wooden Babies

For the bendy doll's babies, I use the smallest size of the little wooden game piece people. For the most part, these are just wrapped in a "blanket" that is glued to the doll body. For example the babies from the set of cave people:





For the pirate baby, though, I drilled a hole through the upper body for arms and through the lower body for legs. I did not bother wrapping either the arm or leg pipe-stem cleaners with embroidery floss, since both would be covered with a little wool stuffing and the pajamas. I also drilled a hole in the top of the head, so I could glue in a single curl of mohair.





A wet felted baby bunting ( DH says it looks like a mummified toe) :





Note the rubber gloves. This was my important lesson from making that wet felted pouch the other day. After doing that without gloves on, my hands were so dry and peely for the next two days, that Blaze looked at them and told me I was getting old.






More little peg people tomorrow...

Game Piece Dolls

Last year, when we were renting a house, I had started doing some wooden toy making. It was something I was really enjoying and would like to continue doing, but now that we live in an apartment, I have fewer opportunities to use power tools and make messes with sanding dust.
I haven't made any bendy dolls in a while because I like mine to have sturdy wooden bodies and wooden feet that allow them to stand by themselves, but I have been doing more with the little game piece men that are sold in the unfinished wood area of the craft store.



These are very versatile and don't require any sanding. I have added arms to some of them by drilling a hole through the upper body and cutting a pipe stem cleaner in half, then wrapping it with embroidery floss, the same as for the bendy dolls, but this is not necessary.





This little daisy girl was made using a pattern in the book Feltcraft, by Petra Berger. This book is a great resource if you want to make small toys.



The boy with the acorn cap and the astronaut were made without any patterns. Making dolls this way can be as easy as just painting clothes on the game piece and drawing on a face.








This topic to be continued...

A pig on a sled/ what we are reading this week

The second part of the Little House on the Prairie bendy doll swap that I'm involved in, is making accessories to go with the dolls. I have always liked the illustration from the story Pa tells in Little House in the Big Woods, about he and his brothers sneaking off one Sunday to go sledding and running into a pig on the way down hill. The pig is sitting in his brother's lap on the sled in the picture, so I made a pink felt pig to sit on a sled that I found in the holiday craft section at Micheal's and painted.




We are very close to being done with the third book in the Little House series, On the Banks of Plum Creek. I've been reading two chapters a night aloud as a bedtime story, so I figure we'll be done by tomorrow night.

We'll also be reading books about the Pilgrims this week:





And some fun Thanksgiving books:








Cranberry Thanksgiving has the best cranberry bread recipe printed on the back cover!

Making a tepee for the bendy dolls

The pattern:

Print each of the following four pictures as a full page each.









Match the pages(A to A, B to B, C to C, and D to D) and tape them together. Cut out along the dark black line. This pattern shows only half of the tepee, so the pattern should be laid on the fold of some heavy cotton canvas. Pin to the cloth and cut out.

After I cut out the fabric I used the sewing machine to zigzag stitch around all the edges to keep it from unraveling. I then laid it out flat and used masking tape to mark where the stripes of paint would go (this insured straight lines).



Blaze did the painting of the stripes with two colors of acrylic paint.



After the paint was dry, I removed the tape and added decorative details with dark brown paint.

When that paint was dry, if was time to sew up the front of the tepee.

Next, I cut 7, eighteen inch lengths of 1/4 inch dowels.



Using strong glue, I attached the dowels to the inside of the tepee, leaving 6 inches between each dowel on at the bottom.



We let the glue dry overnight and then the tepee was ready to be played with.



One of the great things about this design, is when it's time to clean up, the tepee folds up so nicely and takes up almost no space.