DIY Dollhouse – Week 2

You may have noticed I have changed the title to “Week” instead of “Day” this is because my time slot for doing this dollhouse is while watching the boys having their night-time baths. Since my two sons (Mr 2 and Mr 4) cant bath together without fighting and splashing they have their baths separate, so that gives me about 1 hour each night.

So I have decided I will spend the week making items and taking pics along the way. And then at the end of the week will add a post with all the updates from that week. I need this finished for the Hamilton Craft and Sewing fair, so to ensure I have it done by then I will need to get one room done each week. So that will be my goal.

So this week I have been working on bag “B” which relates to the first floor room on the left, which is a conservatory. I started off by going through the bag and identifying all the items against the list in the instructions. As these are in Chinese I have created a new list of all the B items, and will provide this to everyone that purchased these houses from Dollworld. Its not really needed, it wasn’t that hard to work out what item was what. But I did find myself referring back to it now and then as I started created the items.

First items to be made are the plant box with trellis and the little table. The trellis box was easy enough. Just start by laying out all the pieces so you know where they go. Once you have the trellis pattern sorted you can start gluing the pieces down. Its all simple enough, just follow the steps in the instructions.

The next piece is the small table. The very skinny legs make it a bit harder to work with. I tried a few different methods to glue the legs, but in the end having the table upside-down with the legs in the air was the easiest method, just use lots of items around it to ensure the legs stay straight. And tip – make sure the legs are as close to the outside as possible to ensure there is room to add the shelves underneath.

You certainly need to take each step slowly and allow time for the drying of the glue between steps. Try and move to the next step before the glue is dry will only result in the piece coming apart. If you are planning to do a lot of items I would suggest you have all of them going at once so some are drying while you are working on others.

So here is my finished table. its not going to win any awards for straightness LOL, but I think it came out pretty good.

After that you will start going through the book working on each part. There is not really much tips I need to add about all the different parts, other than a reminder to allow the glue to dry between steps, it really does help.

And also the felt is extremely hard to glue with the craft glue. It will glue, but it takes a long time to set, and it wont hold temporarily in any way. So trying to glue the little flowers in pink felt was pretty much impossible. So I ended up using a little bit of orange cardboard from bag “E” to do my flowers, these were much easier to glue and I think look quite nice. Some items like the round brown vase can have a piece of string tied around it while the glue sets, but otherwise you might find a bit of super glue or some double sided sticky tape easier to work with when working with the felt – like the birdhouse roof.

So here are all my pieces so far. Aren’t they all so adorable