You'll Never See This One at the State Fair...

I would love to show this house at the Iowa State Fair, but it is too wide to qualify. I designed it back in the late 1970's, and had thought about marketing the design. Unfortunately, Greenleaf introduced a cheaper front-opening dollhouse about a year after I started working on this one.

The building itself is made out of Gatorfoam, which makes the house VERY light and easy to move. Instead of using nails, I used dowels that I sharpened on a pencil sharpener and then pushed them into the house in the places where fastening needed to occur. Ceilings were a breeze, since I left them all white, and the Gatorfoam comes in a pleasing white finish.

The main open area on the front is enclosed by two, sliding panes of glass. This significantly reduces the amount of dust that makes its way into the house. We have a Greenleaf house, too, which one of my daughters begged me to do for her. I never installed any cover to the front, and the dust is really a problem.

So, whether you buy a manufactured dollhouse or build your own, one simple piece of advice - ENCLOSE IT to keep the dust out. You'll appreciate this little piece of advice much more over time...

More of Grampa's Office

Here's grampa's office. The scene through the door in the rear was a photograph of the actual office through the window in that door.

I made the old-fashioned comptometer on the desk, which was a painstaking process. I took a batch of pins, and cut them at precisely stairstepped lengths to create the keyboard. Then hand-filed the round faces of each pin head so they were flat. Then I painted them. I also made the manual typewriter, which is hidden in the background. I carved the hat (hanging on the halltree) from a piece of pine wood.

Sharing Memories

When my younger daughter was in high school, she came up with the idea of recreating her grandfather's fruithouse in miniature. She found a wooden apple crate and asked me to work with her to turn it into grampa's office.

She did all the fruits and vegetables. She also painted the walls, which was a dry-brush effect we developed to simulate the compressed wood walls that covered the fruithouse walls.

I helped with the overall construction, built the hand cart and banana room cooler door. I "aged" the cart using the mixture of India ink and rubbing alcohol. I dabbed this mixture away in places that would have had high levels of rubbing. Where the dirt and grime would have settled, I let the mixture puddle a little extra.

Yes, You Can Use Your Computer for Rugs

Casey from http://caseymini.blogspot.com/ sent me a note and asked if I have thought about using pictures printed from my computer to produce a rug. The answer was, "Yes!"


I took a digital picture of a southwestern rug and then transferred it into my PC. I then enhanced the picture for colors and all those wonderful things you can do with the photo editing software. Then I printed it out on photo paper.


Once I had printed it on photo paper, I then sprayed three coats of semi-gloss workable fixative, which I had picked up at Michaels. The fixative does two things - it seals the inks into the picture so that they won't smear. Two, the fixative I used adds protection against ultra violet rays, which are a key cause of colors fading in fabrics or in printed materials.


Once I took those protective steps, I then went back to the tried and true tissue paper and Deft process. I liked the rug well enough that I made them for all of the members of our miniature club for our gift exchange.

By the way, I DID try to print off a beautiful Victorian rug design onto cloth using the T-shirt transfer printing materials for inkjet printers. It didn't even begin to do justice to the depth of color and beauty of the carpet I saw on the Web. I even had contacted the rug merchant to request permission from him to recreate his carpet in miniature for my dollhouse bedroom. That whole effort was a bust, unfortunately!

Creating a Believable Persian Rug

Years ago, I read somewhere about how to make a miniature Persian rug. The instructions said, "Start with a magazine page or advertisement of a Persian rug." I found a good photograph of one from a Southern Living magazine and used it for my Scrooge! roombox, pictured above.

It's simple to make the rug, actually. You'll need the picture, of course, plus a can of semi-gloss Deft spray varnish, one ply of a facial tissue, some grosgrain ribbon and a little bit of glue. Trim the photo to the exact dimensions of the carpet. Next, lay it down on a surface that can be heavily doused with Deft varnish. Spray it once to seal the picture. Let it dry.

Most facial tissues are two ply. If you tease it apart, you'll get a very thin piece of tissue paper. Most likely, it will have a bad crease through the middle. You'll need to steam iron it carefully to flatten the tissue.

Once your tissue is prepped, go back and heavily spray the Persian rug again with the Deft. Carefully lay the tissue down onto the rug and pat it gently into place. Do your utmost best to make sure any little wrinkles are smoothed out. Now spray it again until the entire surface is heavily soaked with the Deft. If any bubbles form beneath the tissue, use a pin to pop these out and make sure you see no white tissue that is standing up from the surface of the rug.

Let it dry. You'll now have a much softer tone quality to the picture of the carpet. Take a piece of grosgrain ribbon and cut it the length of the end of the carpet. Then trim the edge off one side of the entire length of the grosgrain ribbon and fray the ribbon by removing the threads. You'll now have a beautiful piece of fringe. (This technique works on draperies, too!) Glue the fringe to your rug, and you now have your Persian rug.

How to Strain Family Relations

As part of the design of the current dollhouse I'm finishing, I decided to put a stained glass window above the front door on the second floor landing. I fiddled with various media, and then talked with my brother-in-law, Paul, who has done some beautiful stained glass windows.

Paul will be the first to tell you, "I'm a patient guy!" But his tongue is squarely in his cheek when he tells you this. Nevertheless, I had seen his meticulous work, and thought, "Let's go for it!" Being up for an occasional challenge, he thought so, too.

So, I designed the window at right. To give you an idea of the diminutive scale, though, the three red circles in the middle of the window are each about the size of a pencil eraser - less than a quarter inch in size.

Paul dutifully created the window for me, and as he handed it to me, his only comment was, "Don't EVER ask me to do another one for you!" He had multiple pieces of glass that he had ALMOST ground down to fit into these positions, only to have them shatter against the grinder or fly out of his grasp and shatter against the floor or wall.

It makes for a great story. Plus, it is a lovely, totally unique, very real, miniature stained glass window that our family will treasure for as long as we have the dollhouse.

Curtains and Lace

I'm frustrated! It's such a hassle trying to find fine lace and cloth for the curtains and bedding in my new dollhouse. When I recently shopped for lace and cloth, the fabric store here disappointed me. When I did my last dollhouse's curtains and bed, I don't recall having this problem!

As you can see from the photo, I built a rather intricate pelmet for the study window. I don't want to install an out of scale fabric that detracts from the "reality" of the scene, but I may have no choice!