Kitchen Table - Another Quick Furniture Project

Here's another quick furniture project for you to try. This would make a good, sturdy kitchen table for a child's play dollhouse. It would also be in scale for a more refined miniature collector's dollhouse - especially if you were to add some toll painting or paint it and age it a little.

The only tricky part is cutting out the seven degree angle on the spacers. One way to do this is to take a scrap piece of plywood and draw a line horizontally across the piece of plywood. (Use a piece of scrap about 4" long by about 3" wide.) Try to center it about 1.5" in from the edges.

Next, draw a seven degree line at least 1.5" long - with 1" protruding above the horizontal line and the other half protruding below the line. Draw this intersecting line close to the right edge of the plywood if you are a right-handed person. Draw the line to close to the left-hand side if you are a lefty. Now, glue a small board along the edge of the horizontal line just up to where the seven degree mark intersects with the line. You have created a sort of miter guide for yourself. If you've left enough wood on the bottom edge of this "guide", you can clamp it to your workbench or tabletop so that you have greater control as you hold the pieces in place and saw them.

You can now cut your spacers to a 2" x 1/2" dimension. (Use 1/8" thick wood for the spacers, please.) Set the first spacer down so that the bottom touches where the two lines intersect. Use a razor or modeling saw. (X-acto makes pretty good ones). Line up the razor saw blade with the intersecting line and carefully cut the angle into the first spacer. Turn the spacer over sideways (not top to bottom) and repeat this cut so that you end up with a trapezoid like you see in the picture above. Repeat these steps to make the next three spacers.

The table legs are relatively easy to cut - especially if you have a small table saw. If not, you may be able to get some pre-cut wood at your local hobby store that is 1/4" x 1/4" dimensions. If so, then you only need to cut the leg pieces to 2.5" lengths. The table top is 3/32" wood, and should be a simple circle 4" in diameter.

Place a piece of wax paper on your desk or table top and glue one spacer to two of the legs. Repeat this procedure with one more spacer and the other two legs. Allow the spacer and the table legs to sit flat against the wax paper. If you have some clamps, you may use them to gently pull the pieces together for maximum adhesion. Allow these two sets of legs to dry overnight so that they are good and solid.

Day two, put one of the assembled leg pieces on its head so that the spacer is touching the wax paper and the legs protrude up. Add glue to one end of the remaining two angled spacers. Place them in position just like the already glued spacers are arranged. You will want the spacers to the inside of the square you are forming with the table legs protruding slightly from each corner.

If you wish, you can build a small gluing jig for yourself to help hold the pieces in alignment. Start with a piece of wood 2" square glued to a piece of heavy cardboard or plywood. Then glue some of the left-over quarter-inch wood pieces so that they form a square 1/4" wider all the way around this 2" square. The inside dimensions of this second "square" will be 2.5". To provide support for the table legs, you can take some cardboard and fold it into a box that is 3" square by 2.5" tall. If glued correctly, the table legs should just touch the corners at the top of this little "box."

Allow the table legs and spacers to dry for a day or two. Once it's good and solid, take the assembly and carefully place it face down on a piece of 100 grit sandpaper. Use a circular motion to remove the corners of the table legs that will be protruding above the spacers. Check frequently to make sure you're not sanding one side more than the others. A good trick here is to hold the piece, and make four or five circular sweeps on the sandpaper, then turn the piece 1/4 turn, and sand again. Repeat this process, making sure you do the same number of sanding strokes on each side and using the same amount of pressure when you sand.

Once you've flattened the tops of the table legs, you can then glue the table top to the legs and spacers. Draw a faint X on the bottom side of the table with a pencil, making four equal quadrants of the table top. Se the table top face down and then glue the leg assembly to the top. Make sure each table leg touches one of the lines you have drawn. When all of the leg corners are touching one of the lines, you know your table top is perfectly centered on the table legs.

After the table has dried, you can sand the legs the same way you did them at the top, gently working them across the sandpaper to flatten them. Be very gentle with your sanding at this point - one leg too short can cause a tippy table! You can now finish your table with stain and varnish, paint it to match your kitchen decor, or antique it however you wish!

Hope this works for you. Let me know if you encounter any problems!

Does It Look "Real?"

Take one dollhouse, a couple photos of a city park area, some photo editing software, and voila! You have a somewhat convincing picture of a Victorian house on a lovely estate.

In a slide show where this image will be on the screen for about two to three seconds at the most, I'm hopeful that the viewers won't notice the various edits I made in putting this together.

For instance, the flowering crab trees are a copy and paste of the same tree, flipped and enhanced a little. (The front one on the right is doubled up, in fact.) I cloned the windows on the right-hand side of the house. They were narrowed versions of the windows in the bay window that I copied and pasted. If the overall photo doesn't come across as convincing, well, I at least had fun playing with the software and learning how to use it!

For those of you who are curious about what software I used, it was Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006. It was considerably less expensive than some of the fancy professional editing software packages that I've seen. I occasionally use it to clean up the color in some of my dollhouse photos that I use in this blog.

Which Is More Important: Looking Real? Or Being Fun?

I'm working on a slide show at the moment that is intended to capture the "realness" of miniatures. The photo at left is one of the pictures for that show.

Just this week, I was delighted to see that my daughter has framed and hung her collection of photos that she made of some of our dollhouse rooms. She has dedicated a wall outside of one of the bedrooms to this collection.

She shot this series of photos for a class she was taking at the time at the local community college. Her classmates were curious about how she had been given access to an old Victorian house. Once she admitted that the photos were of scale rooms, several said that something seemed just a bit odd about the rooms, but they couldn't put their finger on why they seemed "different."

I love the challenge of doing my utmost best to make scale miniatures. When something small looks absolutely real, there's something very charming about it. I feel like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputian's.

There is a faction of miniaturists, though, who would turn up their noses at anything that isn't absolutely perfect. For the collectors of fine miniatures, I can understand their thinking. Our hobby has a bigger base, though, than just the high-end collectors. Much of its origins was as playthings for smaller hands and bodies, and children played with these things for the sheer job of it.  I hope we never forget that our hobby should be first and foremost all about having fun.

Even though it's probably my least favorite dollhouse of the three that I have made, the one at right is the one that truly got lots of play from my daughter. Even though she's a grown woman, she occasionally will stop and make some decorating changes, or she rearranges a few things to suit her tastes at the moment.

There's a fourth dollhouse that I made and never show on this blog. It was very small - only two rooms to it. I made it for a TV commercial that I did years ago. The girls played with it and to a great degree destroyed most of the fancy stuff I had done on it. Again, it was a well-loved piece that the girls thoroughly enjoyed playing with. After I finished the one above and it began to get all of the loving attention from my daughter, I got rid of the little, beat-up house.  It had grown dusty out in the garage and it was covered with cobwebs. It was a disposable toy house. I hope the ones I'm building now will not end up in a trash heap - at least not for an extended number of years after I'm gone.

So, to answer my own question at the beginning of this blog - what's most important to me? My answer is simple: Enjoying this hobby and sharing it with others! And if what I make looks real, all the better!

Easy to Build Furniture

It's been too long since I posted anything on my blog. I've been up to my eyeballs with work, and haven't had any time to write! So sorry. I'm still crazed with work, but I just HAD to put something out on my blog. I value your readership - all 150 of you!

I got to thinking that some of you might appreciate some ideas for some simple furniture pieces that shouldn't be too hard to produce. At the left is just such a project. 

I encourage you to click on the image and take a screen print of the drawing. Paste it into a Word document and then print it out. You may have to adjust the size of the picture. I marked the width of the back of the chair; so you should have an idea of how much to blow up or reduce the chair on your own computer. I made this storage chair for our Christmas gift exchange in our miniature club many years ago. It has no fancy joinery, and the only tricky thing is to make sure you drill so that you can insert pins into the chair seat.

Here are the instructions:
1. Cut out all of the parts from 3/32/" thick cherry or bass wood. Sand the pieces smooth.
2. Trial fit the parts to make sure they fit properly.
3. Glue the back to the base piece.
4. Glue the sides onto the base and back. (If you intend to stain the piece, be careful to wipe away any excess glue right away with a damp cloth.)
5. Glue the spacers onto INSIDE of the sides. Make sure there's at least a quarter inch of clearance between the back of the spacers and the back of the chair.
6. Trial fit the front onto the chair. Sand any excess wood at the base or sides that protrude from the bottom or from the sides. Then glue it into place.
7. Use some sandpaper or emery board to round the front and back top edge of the seat.
8. Set the seat into place. Put a business card between the chair seat and the chair back so that there's a small gap. Now drill a pin-sized hole on each side of the chair where it's marked with an X in the diagram. (If you don't trust the diagram, you can set the seat in, then take a try square and line it up with the protruding seat to have a sense of where to place the pin. 
9. Once you have drilled your hole into the chair sides and the seat, snip about 1/4" of the sharp end of a straight pin and gently push it into the hold you have drilled. If the pin is too long, you can pull it out slightly, snip a little off and push it in again. You want the pin to be flush with the surface of the chair sides.
10. Stain and varnish the chair or you may have fun tole painting it!

Hope this works well for you. If not, you know where to reach me! Enjoy!

Tools for Making Holes

As a miniaturist, you will often have a need to put a hole into something - a board, a wall, furniture, or a piece of matte board - there are thousands of reasons for needing to add holes. There are many ways of getting those holes punched, too. I have a leather punch and a paper punch, but I rarely use them for my miniature making. The ones you see above, plus one low tech and one high speed tool, are the hole-makers of my hobby.

Sometimes, the simplest tool for making a tiny hole is a push pin or a T-pin. You can usually puncture a piece of matte board or make a starter hole for where you want to drill with either of these "tools." They're also less painful to work with than plain straight pins, which can make your fingers sore if you press hard on their ends.

Of course, having a cordless electric drill is almost mandatory for any home owner. It's also a valuable tool for miniaturists who want to build dollhouses or room boxes. I use screws to assemble my room boxes. I think the screws hold the wood together better than nails, and there's less likelihood of my nailing crookedly and breaking part of the wood out from the side of the box. You can use even delicate, 1/16" drill bits in a cordless drill. Once you begin to get much smaller than that, it's time to move on to the pin vises. The tinier the drill bit gets, the easier it is to break. The sheer weight of the cordless drill and the leverage that it can easily apply to a bit is just too much for a tiny, 1/32" drill!

I show four pin vises in the above picture. The two on the left are swivel top drills. The two on the right are "fixed" tops. The prettiest one is probably the one with the wooden handle. It's also the least handy for me. Here's why. The swivel top allows you to apply downward pressure on your drill bit by pressing on the top of the drill. Since the drill swivels, you can hold it in place on the swivel and turn the drill with your other hand. Or, you can hold the swivel portion of the drill by your pinky finger and still turn the drill with your index finger and thumb. You have considerably more control over the work when you do this. The fixed top drills are, well, awkward. I suppose one can argue that the wooden handled drill above gives greater leverage than the other smaller drills, but the key to using a drill is to let the drill bit do the work for you - not your hand pressure!

By the way, the plastic egg-looking item in the top, right-hand corner of the big picture is a set of miniature drill bits that I purchased years ago. I've broken or lost at least half of them. When you get down to micro-sized drill bits, they are delicate. If you get them a little ways into the wood and then carelessly allow the drill to move at a slight angle instead of straight on at the hole you're drilling, well, you probably will have added a snapped off piece of drill-bit to your project!

I really like the longer swivel-top pin vise above (and at left), because it comes with four different collets built into the shaft. For those of you who have not used a pin vise, the collet is a piece of metal with a hole in the center and slits on the sides. It expands slightly to allow you to push a drill bit down into the hole. Once you screw the top of the drill back over the collet, this tightens the collet snugly around the drill bit. Dremel tools and pin vises both use collets. You can see the extra collet in the back half of the drill at left. The collet you see has two different hole diameters to accommodate different bit sizes. I can turn remove this collet and replace it in the drill end of the pin vise to hold the drills.

The "low tech" tool I referred to at the beginning of this article is pretty rudimentary, but it works well for cutting holes! It's the X-acto or hobby knife! You can press the sharp point against a piece of wood or matte board and with a few turns of the blade, you have cut a conically shaped hole into the piece. And sometimes that is exactly what you need or want!

The one rule to remember with the Xacto knife is that it is extremely efficient at cutting. It can make a hole in you as fast or faster than it does in the wood or paper! Dropped from a workbench onto your foot, you can impale yourself. Always make sure you set it down on a flat surface away from the edge of the table and beyond where you might bump it with your hands while working on a project. Better yet, when you're done using it. Put it back in your tool box!

I can't finish this blog posting without noting the high speed tool that I use regularly in my miniature making. My Dremel tool is a constant companion at my workbench. It drills, it grinds, and it shapes. Wow! What a great tool!

So, there you have it - a variety of tools that can accomplish one simple task - making holes in your miniature things!

Making Your Own Baseboards

The walls in my barbershop room box were just too tall, leaving the edge of the wallpaper exposed at the bottom. I had to decide on adding some wainscoting or to make my baseboard a little taller than the commercially manufactured baseboard that I have. So, decided to make my own baseboard. I also made some of my own baseboards for Sara's dollhouse using this same method. I'm going to show (and describe) what I did to make this baseboard molding.

Let's start with the finished product (below). Please note the picture is missing one final detail that will be part of the baseboard - quarter round wood at the bottom of the baseboard. I will glue that in place when the room box is fully assembled and I'm ready to glue the wall permanently into the box. The baseboard I made is approximately one inch tall - taller than the baseboard you would normally buy at a miniature store. It's made from 3/32" basswood.

Safety reminder: If you want to do anything like this, please always remember to wear safety glasses or goggles to protect your eyes!

Here's what I did to make it:

1. I cut the 3/32" basswood into the 1" wide strips. Then I sanded the edge I ripped with my table saw.
   
2. Next, I set up my Dremel tool in the router base (see photo at right). You may also notice the plastic protector at the very top of my router. When I'm routing pieces like this, I flip this out of my way.
   
3. See the photo below for the round-over router bit I used. The bit barely peeks out from the edge of the fence so that it cuts a curve into the top of my board. I also allow the bottom edge of the blade to protrude about 1/32 to 3/64" above the router table. This can add another tiny line at the top of the rounded over piece of wood. The photo below is an extreme close-up showing you the Dremel bit I use for this process.
4. Once the fence and cutting bit are both set for the correct depth of cut, I'm then ready to begin to route the wood.
5. I usually find a piece of scrap wood at this point that is several inches long and not quite as tall as the piece of wood I'm cutting. I use the scrap wood to hold my piece of basswood against the fence of the router, and I use either my finger or another piece of scrap wood to hold the basswood down so that it touches (and remains firmly touching) the route table surface. (See photo below, which is an overhead view of how I hold the pieces of wood against the router table fence.) Once I have this "jig" in place, I begin feeding the basswood strip through the router. I don't hurry it. If the sound of the router begins to change significantly, I know I'm pushing too fast, and I slow it down.
6. Sometimes I will start with the fence set a little closer to the router bit so that the first pass through the Dremel router is a "rough" cut. I then move the fence back a tiny amount, exposing a hair more of the bit and run all of my pieces through the router again for the finish cut. Whether I move the fence or not, I always run my "boards" through the router a second time to smooth the cut and clean up any rough spots that might still be on the board.
7. For some reason, I often get an uneven cut on the first or last half inch of this piece I'm routing. So, if you're following this tutorial to make your own molding or baseboard, always be prepared for some wastage. I usually route at least one if not two extra pieces just to make sure I have plenty of stock to work with. (Nothing is more frustrating than coming up inches short and then having to start all over to recreate another piece of the same stock!)
8. Moldings and trim boards are all about lines and shadows. I created a line in my baseboard just below the curved portion of the board by cutting a 1/32" depth table saw cut. I used my thinnest saw blade that I currently have for my table saw to cut this line. This blind cut adds to the overall shape and personality of the baseboard piece. It has no other serious value or purpose. However, if you wish, you can always flip your baseboard over and reverse the wood 180 degrees to put a groove into the back of your baseboard for a wiring run. Some commercially manufactured baseboards have a gap cut specifically to hide the tiny electrical wires. See photo below for the approximate set-up of the table saw.
   
   
9. I always sand the cut that I put into the side of the baseboard to slightly round the edges of the cut. (An emery board held at an angle and sanded very gently on both of the sharp edges of the cut works well for this.) 
10. Next, stain or paint your baseboard, and you're ready for installation!
    

Did It Work?

I just logged into my blog today and tried to show the video I did about making Cabriole legs to one of my co-workers. (http://tallminiguy.blogspot.com/2009/04/video-how-to-make-cabriolet-leg.html)
To my surprise, it would not play on the computer we used,. I noticed that there were no comments about that post, which got me to wondering if it didn't work for other folks who tried to view it. So, my question to you, dear readers, is this: did it work for you? If not, please post a comment to let me know so that I can figure out what I need to do next time I decide to post a video to this blog. Thanks!
Geo.