Pictures one

I decided to have a nice week working my way methodically through the house finding pictures for each room.  I began with the apartment sitting room.  

I decided it needed a large slim landscape picture above the sideboard.  The left wall is too busy to need pictures.  The right hand wall could have a group of pictures or a long slim landscape mirror above the sofa.  I think lots of pictures in a small room is a bit overpowering and you feel as if you are in a gallery so I settled on a mirror for this space...... a future make.

These are the ones I had culled over time and I liked them all equally.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

A word about copyright before we continue.  As a rough guide you should try to contact the owner of a piece and ask their permission to use it.  At the very least it is good manners to acknowledge the source.  In cases like this where ownership is not known and not findable the use of the image (or text etc) falls under the 'fair dealing' section.  The morass of copyright laws is a legal minefield but, commonsensically, if you are using things as we do in our projects and sharing with a few friends and without any monetary gain or mass production you will be safe.   Clearly there could be occasions when the artist might  challenge your use of their work if they see it and, equally clearly, you should remove it and apologise.  😊  Sadly in mini world there is a lot of 'commercial' copying of artisans work and we don't want to feel we are adding to that.

‘Fair dealing’ is a legal term used to establish whether a use of copyright material is lawful or whether it infringes copyright. There is no statutory definition of fair dealing - it will always be a matter of fact, degree and impression in each case. The question to be asked is: how would a fair-minded and honest person have dealt with the work?

Factors that have been identified by the courts as relevant in determining whether a particular dealing with a work is fair include:

• does using the work affect the market for the original work? If a use of a work acts as a substitute for it, causing the owner to lose revenue, then it is not likely to be fair
• is the amount of the work taken reasonable and appropriate? Was it necessary to use the amount that was taken? Usually only part of a work may be used

The relative importance of any one factor will vary according to the case in hand and the type of dealing in question.

From:  Exceptions to copyright Gov.uk  (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright)

This is UK copyright law.  I have no idea how 'international' it is.

Back to the picture.  I pretty much knew that the least interesting one, number 2, was going to be the one as its proportions were correct - shame; however I decided to  print and try all the others in situ just in case they looked OK and then discovered I was actually left with a choice of two; neither of which was number 2. Much fiddling about with numbers five and six ensued to find the optimum size.  The final (well for now) choice was made.

Next, the choices for hanging it were an Ikea click frame, an Ikea white wood frame or made to look like those stretched mounted canvas prints you can buy.  As it would be three feet by three feet in real world the answer was obvious.....

It was printed on some good quality copy paper and cut out with a generous allowance for wrapping over the wooden frame.  I cut and glued the wooden frame the same size as the print.  This was made from the wretched window frame wood that I am struggling with - you nearly escaped a mention of the windows this week. 😁

The print was then glued to the frame, trimming it to fit neatly.

frame being made, print ready to go

put together, showing the reverse with four tiny blobs of tacky wax for hanging it

I had experimented on a practice piece by coating it with some matt Mod Podge to give it some sort of 'surface' glaze and texture, but it muddied the colours a little and took the sharpness out of the detail.  Being a fusspot I decided to leave it unglazed (for now).

Et Voila - a picture in room number one.  After all my finger wagging last week about hanging pictures properly I think this needs dropping a little to pull the sideboard group together better.

Waiting for some more bits of dressing, a mirror and a human.

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PS:  Yes I did manage to knock over the candle/buddha tray.... sand and stones everywhere.  Thank heavens for the  first reference photo it saved me looking for more joss sticks which I set off doing because I was convinced there was more than three.

I intended to have all the pictures done this week but between a vendor faffing about (I was trying to match two frames I already have) and a lot of time spent with the family mini (my grandson) this has become an ongoing saga.  Look out for next Saturday's epistle.

Dormer windows

I kind of sorted out the no-wallpaper problem, rather than just white paint the lot.  I quite literally had three small pieces of the green paper left over which got patched and joined together with a panel each side of the window and a piece beneath.  The hairiest part of that job was having such a large pattern which needed matching over very minimal pieces of paper, absolutely no room for error.  

I did this before Anna kindly offered to mail me a couple of sheets all the way from Australia.  [Thank you, Anna]  Not that she didn't comment and email me as soon as the post went up but the posts run close to what I am doing but I am often a little ahead of them in actual work. At least my having already fudged it saved me from  having to make another decision of how best to go about it.  I seem to be floundering a bit in that department right now.

As I didn't have any grey paper at all I did my best to mix a grey as close as I could get to the one in the room - it really needed a slight touch of blue but, as I keep saying, the inside of a roof flap really isn't an area which gets looked at.  It just needs to give a good impression of being finished.  I keep telling myself that.

The decorated sloping walls also have a small dado rail trim between the paint and the 'colour' as it might do in real life.

On to the windows

I prefer to cut all my trims with a saw and mitre block, even the thin ones.  My husband can go through them with a knife in a couple of passes - me?....  I find it nigh on impossible to use a knife through wood.

If you are cutting very thin trims like these you need to boost it up from the floor of the mitre block.  Generally you would add a piece of thick(ish) wood.  I didn't have any so a sacrificial eraser was used and it did just fine.

I use. 0.5mm clear acrylic for the windows and this can be cut with scissors but I find it seems to squidge all over the place between the blades so  I cut it with a very sharp, new blade, Xacto knife.  I also resort to overkill in terms of preparation.  Having once actually sliced a small piece off the end of my thumb I am super-wary of knives.

I make a template for the window (in this case I could use it to cut three windows this size).  I fasten this to my cutting mat with tacky wax (double sided sticky tape will do).  I lay the acrylic over the template and then I even tape that down with masking tape.  Both my hands are now free to focus entirely on holding a steel ruler in place and cutting along its edge.  I don't have to try and stop stuff slipping around at the same time.

This acrylic was a leftover from previous exploits and didn't have any protective film on it.  It was super-dirty and even a bit scratched.  I have better on order.  It is sensible to gently soap and water wash it before  you use it as any really gloppy finger marks or whatever can be a pain to remove once it has been transformed into a 1/12th Georgian window pane. 

This is terrific glue for putting in windows but doesn't come cheap.  That said it has lasted me through several builds.  It does dry clear so if you are a bit messy with glue it won'r ruin your glazing. It also gives you some working time to get things positioned correctly.  It is water based for easy clean up and does a great job of sticking acrylic to a painted surface.

I don't know about you but every time I come to a glue I haven't used in a while I have to go tunneling for the glue down a teeny little hole.  This is my weapon of choice and is just dropped in my handy-on-my-desk box.  It saves a lot of bodging with pins, needles, toothpicks, dental picks, fine tweezers and a gazillion other things I used before I 'invented' this.  It even comes with its own handle, what's not to like.  

So.....  a very small amount of glue round the edges of the 'glass' and press it into place. In this case, on the lower half of the back of the window frames.

all four sides eventually had glue

It was then just a case of adding trims to make the bottom (inside) half of a sash window.  there will be architrave trims round this when they arrive. plus roller blinds to tweak it up a little and conceal even more dubious finishes.

I may have thoroughly shot myself in the foot with my latest dopey idea to 'improve the basic build.  Painting 27 sticks, cutting 264 smaller pieces very accurately, cutting two pieces of glazing for every window rather than one and then assembling this lot to make 16 'mock' sash windows is most probably very pointless.  As you all know once you set off on one of these paths there is no going back.  

Clearly that wasn't challenging enough, so I decided authentic windows needed those little nubs on the frame to stop them thumping down or up.  These require spot on measuring and judicious carving and sanding of just the right amount of stick to shape them and...... hey.......  I only have 64 of these to make.

Here is the before and after photo of the outside.

before

after

before

after

Yes, I know it is not earth-shatteringly amazing but it feeds the soul of a slightly bonkers mini-enthusiast.

The fourth Wall

I am pretty much all finished with the construction and decorating of each room.  I have a few locks, alarms and (mock) electrical outlets of various sorts to add in, otherwise the rooms are done; so it is on to the fourth wall.

I suspect there may be extremely well-organised and finely tuned planning type folk who do any work on the inside of the wall before it even gets attached to the house.  This is not for me I'm afraid.  I want the whole outside of the house done first.  I am sure it is a sort of psychological thing of working on a (real-to-me) completed building.  The exterior finishes might then 'suffer' if they were laid down to allow work to be done flat on the table when doing the inside.  I also want the doors and roof on fairly quickly to reduce the amount of dust collecting inside the house.  My two main fourth walls, therefore (for me), have to be tackled in situ, which means working on a vertical plane.

The big debate

There are various schools of thought when it comes to finishing the fourth wall of an English-style dollshouse.  

1. Some feel it is best simply painted in a muted colour and left alone so that it doesn't detract from the finished rooms when you open the doors.  This seems a very reasonable stance to me and makes for an easy finish to the project.

2. Others feel the fourth wall should look exactly as it would if it were actually a fixed wall in the house.  It is therefore completely decorated and trimmed and dressed and even furnished by attaching furniture to the wall or making a small platform for it, also attached to the wall.  Generally these folk, treating it literally as the  fourth wall of their room, will complete this area at the same time as doing the other three walls.  One room at a time.   This seems a very reasonable stance to me and makes for an easy finish to the project.

3. I never have any idea of which way to go.  On every project I have honed my procrastination skills in respect of the fourth wall and just entirely ignored it until I have to deal with it.  I have then gone on to compromise and try to find a middle ground where the walls get decorated and the windows dressed and I leave it at that.  Any furniture standing against that wall simply stands in the house.  That takes some thinking about as you don't want to see the backs of most things or obscure the view, but there is usually some sort of wriggle round it if you choose the item carefully. 

I am very happy with this level of distraction that the decorated 'doors' create when viewing the open house and it does mean that the windows look finished when seen from the outside.  That will do nicely for me.  This seems a very reasonable stance to me and makes for an easy finish to the project.

Feel free to go with any of these three or your own mix, there is no right or better way to finish the fourth wall.



Let's start with the dormer

When you start any work of any kind, it is wise to sort out every little thing you are going to need before you begin.  In this case two kinds of trim, two kinds of paint, wallpaper, two kinds of glue and a bunch of different tools such as scissors, saw, mitre block, brushes, rules, pencil, eraser and probably more.  This is a vital step - you will understand why later.

I find it impossible to work on a roof flap in situ - the height of the house means I would be working on a step-stool and everything would be upside down: I, therefore, removed the roof from the main house and flipped it over to work on.

I was nervy about doing this as I didn't want to damage the finished work on the outside.  Luckily it seemed to be OK and everything was lying neatly in place underneath

Here comes another 'don't skip this' step.  Make a (very scribbled) plan of what you intend to do.  This helps in a few ways.  Firstly the orientation has been flipped and your left is now your right, so it is important to be clear which colour paint or wallpaper goes in which place.  You want to think about any trims you might want to add and how they will interact with the edges of the room and trims you have in there.  They must be clear of those edges or the roof won't close properly.  In my case I also needed know where I wanted the white paint to go and I like to avoid drawing all over the actual piece and marking up with pencil.  It often bleeds into glue or paint if you leave it behind and it is sometimes hard to rub out.  I like to have the measurements all worked out on my diagram and then use masking tape to outline the various spaces.  I don't want to be continually working out what goes where as I go along; so, the rough sketch with measurements keeps me on task.

Eventually I want to improve all the windows in my build and try and make them look like sash windows.  I will need to add a lot of trims (starting with the dormer) and I always like this sort of thing to be ready to go when I need them so, although I only need a few for the dormer, I may as well paint the lot.  There are a couple of pieces of dado rail here too that I will be using.

Another handy tip..... buy the very best quality trims you can find/afford.  I get some very good quality wood ones from J & A Supplies when I am at a show, but I can't see them on his website.  I didn't do this with these trims (1/8th inch x 1/8th inch square).  I wanted so many I bought a ton of cheap ones from Hobby's.  They immediately want to bend as soon as paint touches them [painting all four sides pretty much mitigates this] and they are not super smooth to begin with and the wood produces quite a lot of nubs when wet.  All this will be manageable but better quality can save you some blood sweat and tears.

Here is my quick way of painting these -

Dab some generous dobs of paint along one edge.....

....... rub it along the wood gently, keep dobbing and rubbing all the sides and work your way along the trim roughly a third at a a time.  Leave them to dry.

I did the maths and I painted 27 trims x 19.5 inches x 4 sides x 2 coats and that's about 350 feet of fiddling with paint.   Don't be deterred it is a pretty pleasant mindless task and they only took a little over two hours..

Dormers are notoriously badly made - it is not my assembly skills - more the maker's design/cutting.  The worst of this particular one is the bottom of the window which luckily is a sort of overhang and looks fine from the outside but from the inside there is a decided gap.

I covered this with a piece of (already painted) leftover simple coving.  The configuration doesn't make a lot of sense in real life world but will suffice for this roof flap which is never really scrutinised and merely gets lifted up out of the way.

Each side of the roof has the wallpaper areas outlined with masking tape so the rest can all be painted white.  The centre room will be all white as it is the kitchen, so there are only two small wallpaper additions needed.

As I said the inside edges were pretty gappy.......

.........  but a coat of paint improved them greatly

I always make a template for any wallpaper even ones that seem to be simple rectangles (they never are).  The wallpaper itself is not particularly cheap or easy to find so best to get it right first time.  This template is just a piece of ordinary A4 printer paper.

After painting I had two areas like this waiting to be papered.

Here comes a bit of an aside.   Way back when, I bought an A1 portfolio very cheaply from eBay which stores my wallpaper beautifully; no rolling and then trying to flatten it, no knocked up edges or grubbiness.  I commend it to you.

This is where tragedy struck and my following my first instruction would have been useful.  I don't have any green wallpaper big enough to cover the space.  Yes, I have checked here there and everywhere on line and no one has it.  It was on its way out of Dolls House Emporium when I bought it on sale several years ago.  A couple of other folk had it but they don't any longer.

 As for the grey paper I don't have a shred of it.  There is absolutely no hope of getting this one as I bought years ago from some Etsy maker (in New Zealand I think!) who made to order and was also 'winding up'.  I did waste a lot of time 'just checking' though.

I have a white flap with two unpainted areas waiting to be covered.  I could just paint them white and get on with it but I had already measured and drawn up a plan and painted and cut dado rails and masked and carefully painted, all with a view to papering... .... all of which was a complete waste of time and brain power if I just ended up with a white flap.

So the current state of play is me walking away and controlling the urge to rant or cry and eventually coming up with a not very great solution.  Come back next time if you can stand the excitement of watching paint dry.

    

Last (but one!) lap on the lighting

I am very proud of me:  I actually did what I said and finished putting in the last of my lights today.  I seem to have saved up one ceiling light, four table lamps and one standard lamp.

Here's a quick review of putting in a ceiling light - they are the easiest ones to do.  Just make sure you know exactly where you want it in the room and measure carefully or even better make a template.  If I want one in an 'odd' place I make a template of the floor - sounds 'posh' - all I mean is cut a piece of paper to fit the floor.  I, then, position furniture on it and mark where I would the ceiling light to go.  This is useful for a light over a dining table for example.  I then take the template upstairs to the floor above and make sure it is lined up with the front edges and  the side edges of the room below and make a mark through the paper where I want to drill the hole for the light.

If you have room in your tool storage area this is a convenient way to keep your drill bits

Always cut off any straggly exposed wires, they are a pain to thread through holes

It is much easier with a fairly rigid piece of wire.

I normally apply a little superglue (it must be the gel version) with a cocktail stick to the back of the light fitting; this is short cutting it.  I also usually remove the sticky tabs lights that come with most lights and put the glue on the rim  I don't like how they stick out from the ceiling and they don't have very strong glue on them.  This one was very thin, didn't show,  so I just left it in place

Pull wires through gently and get it in position preferably in one go.  Make sure if there is a wire exit hole on your light it is at the back so it can't be seen.  A helper here is handy - press and hold in place until the glue 'takes'.

Every time I mess about with a light I test it just to check it is OK

This is easily done by stripping the wires again and holding on each terminal of a 9 volt battery

If you want even more detailed explanations of putting in lights - showing grooves in the floors etc just click on the 'Lighting' label on the left and there is probably a ton of stuff there.  I think I did a video too so just go over to You-tube if you want.  There is a link for that too.

So the ceiling light is done, now over to the lamps.

A while ago I asked the Brilliant Kath at Delph Miniatures if she could let me have some of her plug sockets that she uses for her electrical appliances as I wanted to drill a hole through them so I could take wires from lamps through the wall behind so making it look as though the lamp is plugged in.  She not only did that but also drilled the holes for me.  They are even drilled at an angle - sloping - so the cord lies realistically down the wall.  She went on to make them for general sale - so you can get them if you want them.  Here's the link to that page on her site.  Delph Miniatures

Here's how they go in.

the socket with a hole

wire threaded though

hole drilled in wall and socket in place

other side of wall

eh voila - one plugged in lamp

Here are my finished lamps.

Stand back and admire, because when I re-dress the rooms not one of them will actually be seen!!!  This is when we know mini people are completely nuts.

So what was all the fuss about.  In less than a couple of hours including a tea break, they were done and dusted.  I think I have broken my duck now on 'not working on Dalton' and I can't wait to tackle the actual putting in the leccy tomorrow: