Posts Tagged ‘doll house’

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Haunted Princess Castle

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

October! I love October! Halloween is my favoritest holiday. So far we’re reading a halloween book each night, and I’ve made candy corn (felt) barrettes, and we’ve been working on this awesome haunted princess castle. What it is changes of course, it was a princess castle, then we painted it black-ish, and it turned into a ghost castle. In this process Rebecca painted over all the princesses she’d drawn, and then got really mad. You know, some days I’m glad I’m not still 4. Her life seems fun to me, but clearly sometimes so many things turn out to be incredibly frustrating experiences.

Back to the castle! You may not be able to tell from this somewhat inadequate picture, but the tallest tower (toilet paper tubes) is a jail shoot, you drop the bad guys in at the top, and then they are in jail. There is a tiny window, that Rebecca specified must be super tiny so there was NO WAY they could possibly escape. Of course there is a door on the back to let them out. But they can’t use that.

There is a fabulous balcony on the front, with curtains that have little pull cords to pull them open. The embroidery floss cord runs through a slit in the side of the (oatmeal container) castle that is quite tight, so that holds it in place when you are not pulling the string.

We are not done yet. It needs more windows and more fabulous sparkly pipe cleaners glued all over, and maybe some peg people ghosts and, oh, I have glow in the dark paint. No, we are not done with this yet…

PS, you are dying to go visit my Etsy shop and buy my pattern for felt monster balls you can tuck candy in…

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Posted in Crafty | 4 Comments »

Acorn Tea Set

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

For the Autumnal Equinox we had a double tea party, tea for us, and a mini tea party with fairies. We served them this nice glitter-in-acorns meal, because we’re pretty sure that fairies like to eat glitter.

This is a simple thing to make, I hesitate to call it a tutorial, so we’ll call it a mini tutorial, but what’s in a name anyway.

Step 1: Collect acorns. We live in a blessed part of the world, California, where there are several varieties of acorns available year round it seems like. Near our house we have the round fat acorns of my East Coast youth, and also long skinny acorns which belong to California Live Oaks. You need some good big flat acorn caps for the fairy plates, and some small deep ones with long stems for the cups. If you don’t live in California you might not be able to find the shape of acorn we used for our chalices, if not, collect some 3/16″ (~3-4mm) twigs for the chalice stems.

Using some heavy grit sand paper, something in the 60-100 range, sand the bottoms of the large acorn caps flat. Rebecca helped me with this, it’s good practice holding things steady while sliding them over the sandpaper. For the chalices just sand the end of the stem flat. If your chalice acorn doesn’t have much of a stem, cut a tiny bit of twig and sand the ends of that flat to use as a chalice stem, or consider yourself to be making tea cups. That was my original plan anyway…

Get out your glue gun and hot glue tiny buttons to the bottom of the chalice/tea cup stems. We put our buttons face down, which made them more stable as cups. If you decided to go with a bit of twig, glue that in between the button and acorn caps.

Have your 4 year old fill your dishes with glue and glitter, or other fairy food, such as small seeds, or beads.

After the glue dries, have a tea party! These are really easy, and I expect them to get a lot of play in the doll house!

I just updated my theme, hand integrating a bunch of changes, so let me know if you notice something horribly broken. I’m trying to get threaded comments working. I know my sidebar is grey, I haven’t figured out why yet… Oh, hey, now it’s not. Shoot. I hate it when things change for no explainable reason. Hrmph. Oh, it’s just grey on the front page… Moving along…


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Posted in Crafty | 10 Comments »

Doll Quilt

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

quilt

This is a work in progress from an embarassingly long time ago. How long? It has been stashed in a corner of my sewing basket through two moves now… probably unloved for almost 10 years. Why? Well, it was a fiddly pain, those pink squares are 1/4″ inch across. The whole thing is about 7″ across. What was I thinking? And then I got one of the stripes backwards and didn’t notice, so I had to rip a bunch out, and then I just gave up because the corners weren’t lining up. I think, it’s been a while so my motivations are a little hazy. Well, the corners still aren’t lining up, but at least it isn’t getting soaked in sewing machine oil anymore. I can’t say it makes a good doll house quilt, it’s much too stiff, but it makes an okay rug. Anyway, it’s done, so there!

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Junk Challenge

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

A month ago, or so, I signed up for Rhoda’s Recycled Craft Challenge, and this dressing table is what Rebecca and I made.

Junk Table

You can see more of what other people made at the Flickr group. It was a nice little low stress quick project, and now Rebecca’s little people have some more furniture. We can’t really agree whether this is a throne or a mirrored dressing table, but I don’t see why it can’t be both.

I have about five other projects to post about, but they are just going to have to come when they come. This here is a no apology blog. :-D Also, we did container painting (see here and here) for art group on Friday, but it seems unlikely that I’ll get around to posting that. I’m not sure I even got a good picture! Couple more weeks until baby#2 (Which do you think, Penelope, Margaret, Guinevere, Ginger, Elizabeth, Marigold? I could keep listing names, our list goes on… Rebecca says if it’s a girl she’s going to call her Monica, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Pit, so maybe it doesn’t matter what we think. Although she has agreed to lollipop as an adequate nickname for Penelope.) comes, and I’m trying to do a little less.

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 3 Comments »

Matryoshka Dolls

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Matryoshka

Here is the set of ‘nesting’ dolls that I made for my housemate’s baby shower. I like them a lot, although I should have made the pocket a little looser. Luckily mommy’s tummy is soft enough to accommodate baby.

A couple more weeks and things are going to get much noisier around here, then in another four months the noise will double when I have my baby. Almost like having twins in the house, but much easier since we also have four parents… (and by then a three year old…)

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Felt Armchair Tutorial

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Tea & Arm Chairs

Do you know a little girl who needs more places for her dolls to sit? Maybe you? We had four place settings for our doll tea time, but only three chairs, so I made up the pattern for these chairs to fix that tragic shortcoming. Really tragic, one of the dolls had to sit on the sofa. Oh noes. But now, now they all have chairs.

Chairs

(more…)

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