An almost done doll house

I should wait until it is finished to take glamour shots but I'm not going to do that. I probably shouldn't put this on my blog because the blog name would suggest that I made this, but I didn't and obviously, I am blogging the story.

This is the handiwork of my sweet hubby. He has always been able to fix things, but until retirement almost 6 years ago, he never made anything from scratch with wood. First project, if I recall correctly, was a bird house. That bird house was visible through the window near the changing table (actually, a counter in my craft room) and delighted our grandson when birds visited.

Hubby and oldest son put up walls in the basement, made shelving units and reworked niches in our son's house that first winter. Next he made a headboard for a twin bed in our home, turning it from just a bed on a frame to something very nice. His skills improved and he made a book case headboard for another twin bed, this one going to son #2's house.

Same son needed an odd size cabinet to fit between refrigerator and stove....Dad to the rescue! His drop leaf kitchen table had seen better days when given to him and one day, the weight of a friend's elbow finished off the leaf which damaged the main table top as it broke. Hubby made a new top that looked better than the original had looked when new!

When we couldn't find an entertainment center to fit our living room wall and hold the new flat screen TV, Hubby dismantled our former entertainment center (which we still liked) and created something that worked. The before version was almost twice as tall with a square opening for the old TV.  The only cost to this project was having the glass in those door cut down to size ($2 each).

When our granddaughter was born and I started talking dolls, a doll cradle was made.

All of this led to the building of a doll house. With the work and love poured into this, I should re-type that as DOLL HOUSE.

While researching plans, a friend said she had plans she never go around to using. It was just the style Hubby was considering. Many of the supplies were already on hand, and we haven't kept track of additional expenses because it might make us woozy. Just kidding....every penny and every hour spent has been worth it.

Now that I've written all that background, here is the DOLL HOUSE as she stands today.

Doll house, open, front view without porch attached

One side of the house with half of the front standing open

The other side

Back which will remain uncovered

A peek into the rooms

Hubby built the railing and the stairs

A piano hinge allows the room to open below the peak for access to the attic's 3 rooms

He didn't want to build a 2nd set of stairs so the attic has a trap door. The hinge is from a kitchen cabinet in my childhood home. Sweet bit of history that our granddaughter will have something from her great-grandparents in this house. 

The only finished items purchased were the door, door knobs on both sides of the door, the uprights on the porch (but the rails and spindles were hand made) and over 2 bags of individual roof shingles

The shingles were glued one row at a time and clamped to dry.

Here is the front, closed, without the porch attached.

You can see enough of Hubby to get an idea of the size of this DOLL HOUSE

My only contribution so far has been to say "oooh!" quite often and to paint the rock foundation.

There are some moldings to be added to the interior, a few paint touch ups and the porch will be permanently attached before this is officially done. 

This will be a house to be played with. We have furniture and people from Toys R Us that are of a size and style meant for little hands. If our grand-daughter loves this beyond a few childhood years and wants to upscale the interior, that will come later. 

The house is pretty heavy. For the time being and maybe longer (limited space for this at son #1's house) it will sit on top of a green mat on a table in our family room. It just might need some Halloween and Christmas decorations so I'd better get busy. 

Some of us should not use super glue....

New posts have been scarce here due to LBC (life beyond crafts) getting in the way. I'm still coloring, knitting, cutting and yes, gluing.

I rarely spill anything on myself or my work area. I don't have paint spattered clothes. I don't have nail polish stained carpets. My sister-in-law marvels that my paperback books never look like they've been read as the spines never have creases. Oh yeah....this is me....the Princess of Pristine Perfection. Until super glue is involved.

My husband is making a gorgeous doll house that he thinks is for our grand daughter. Actually, everyone in the family but me thinks it is for her but I'm a greedy Princess of Pristine Perfection. She is still too young to play with this so it is staying here for a while once it is done. Hubby is nearing completion on his end of things. I have to paint the foundation to resemble a rock wall (as opposed to cement blocks) but my task before this was to glue two small door knobs and their plates to both sides of the entrance door.

Uh oh.

First off, what glue to use to adhere metal to wood? The consensus was some form of super glue. I bought a package of small tubes of this. Has anyone used super glue and successfully sealed it for use on another day more than a week away?

I have the door knobs on and drying, clipped to the door with spring clothes pins. I don't think I got the glue on my hands during application, it more likely happened when aligning things and a bit of glue squeezed out the would-be keyholes. My right middle finger, index finger and both thumbs have a bit of super glue on them. This is no surprise. I think I can look at an unopened package and get glue on myself.

Oh we suffer for our art, but it could be worse according to this cartoon. Yikes!

Why do we craft?

The answer probably varies a bit from person to person, but I think there is a common reason for why we do what we do.
We make things out of love for the recipient.
We make things to be unique.
We make things to save money. Okay, sometimes that is a joke....refusing to spend $4.99 on a greeting card while spending $24.99 on a set of stamps and a die might not be ample justification.
We make things because we enjoy making them.

Anniversary card for hubby (41 years!) Image is from Art Impressions, Love Thing.

Sometimes we make things because we just have to, period.

 

Balloon is from Stampin' Up's Celebrate today die set. Inside, also from SU is Party Pop-Up 

I don't think my knitting, sewing, card making or painting reflects my moods. Unlike Picasso, if I have a blue period, it is because I really like the color or maybe the type of yarn or fabric was only available in that color. I don't pick a color because it consciously reflects my mood. I'm either not very deep or so deep that I come close to the surface on the other side. I like light. I like bright. I like whimsy. And I like to ramble but I'm reeling myself in...

Cupcake stamp and die Sprinkles of Life by Stampin' Up

I'm not taking classes right now due to other commitments and conflicts in schedules but it turns out, there is a lesson to be learned in not taking lessons! Don't misunderstand me...I love taking classes and always learn something, but I've realized that I was so busy with classes and ongoing social events (book club for example isn't a class) that almost everything I was making and reading was to meet a deadline.

What's Up? stamp set by Avery Elle

Since unexpected events disrupted my scheduled events, I've been knitting, reading, painting and making cards for no reason other than doing so feels good. My instructors and circles of friends in these various activities certainly don't put pressure on me, it was the student of long, long ago that stood up within me and told me to get things done and get them done right!

Flowers cut with Stampin' Up's Botanical Builder dies after paper was randomly painted with water colors. Background Stitched Lattice is a die by Kaisercraft.  

I shut her up with Washi tape and if that doesn't hold, I have needle and thread ready.

 

Gopher It! by Gerda Steiner Designs 

I'd show you my knitting but it is a confusing mess while on the needles. I would say it is getting close to completion but I don't want to jinx myself.  Meanwhile, one last design that I really, really like:

Pegboard Coverup and Tool Time, both by Die-Namics

Wherever you are in life, have some fun. Smile at others. You might make them feel better and you will definitely look better and begin to feel better if you think and act positive. If you have the creative bug, go ahead...feed it and play with it. 

Calendaring...like journaling, but on a refrigerator

I have seen many cute ideas for journals but I'm a calendar girl. Wait....anyone hearing Neil Sedaka singing? No?  Well, I was too young for good ole Neil in 1960 when that song was recorded and I have never been the pin up calendar type. When I say I'm a calendar girl, I mean my refrigerator is Mission Control with everything important entered on the calendar that hangs on the freezer door. Recurring events and appointments also go in my iPhone, but after decades of looking to the fridge for guidance, the habit is not likely to be broken now.

Hmmmm, looking to the fridge for guidance may have led to my weight issues but that is a different story entirely!

A few years ago I had a calendar kit from a store that no longer exists in brick and mortar reality. That calendar was a mix of colors, textures, photos and anything you could think to add to a page. The problem was the thickness of the completed project. It could never go on the fridge. All of the layered embellishments meant the pages stood away from the door at nearly a 45 degree angle. Forget ever scribbling a note on a calendar page with a phone in the crook of your neck. That calendar languished on my desk, occasionally looked at but never really used.

I bought a Cambridge calendar by Mead at Target. The overall size is listed at 14 7/8 inches by 11 7/8 inches. The individual dated boxes are 1 7/8" square. One plus to this calendar is that the squares are roomy for writing in appointments and there aren't pictures in any of the squares or decorating a border. This is good for self expression. A negative is that the paper is very thin. I'm lucky that the first page I decorated did not bleed through to the underlying month. I'm now using cardboard between pages as I stamp and color them. This calendar runs from June 2016 through June 2017. I thought it was an 18 month calendar when I bought it and didn't realize this until I had already started decorating. Oh well.....

I began with September, a month with a few family birthdays and anniversaries. The first attempt at stamping "Happy Birthday" directly onto the calendar page did not go well. I'm blaming it on the stamp being brand new and the ink not covering well. Starting out with a mistake freed me from the pressure of perfection. This was going to be a functional calendar with some fun and color in it, not a museum worthy piece of art!

The fifth is my wedding anniversary. I started out stamping the word anniversary and the heart from a BoBunny collection called Icons.  This was too small to suit me. I added the cactus, pot and sentiment from My Favorite things Sweet Succulents and colored them with Prismacolor pencils.

Yours truly has a birthday next month. The leaf is a leftover from a project that hasn't been finished yet. Since the 22nd is the first day of autumn, it seemed appropriate to stick it here. For the record, I was born in the early hours of the day when it was still summer. Summer is my favorite season. Fall would be okay if it didn't lead to you-know-what. The sentiment about treating me like a queen is from an Art Impressions set called The Queen.

October has a few good things going for it, including my son and daughter-in-law's anniversary; the anniversary of dear friends on the 14th (that greeting in blue is part of an anniversary set by the Stamps of Life); a night out with friends to see Jeanne Robertson; and Halloween. The dazzling damsels represent my once a month dinner buddies. Our initials are T, L and C. We were meant to be together, right?  This stamp set is Flaunt It by Art Impressions. The markers used are Zig Clear Color markers. 

Halloween is a big event for me and could have its own page if I had designed the calendar but alas, October is one of those months where a few dates share a space and Halloween got shortened. The word Boo and the bat are from Inky Antics Creepy Crew. The Jack O'Lantern is an orange marker from Zig but I didn't want to do the bat in black and lose the detail. I used Prismacolor pencils, first a layer of chartreuse, then Warm Gray 90%, and finally a layer of Slate Gray. I have no idea why I chose those colors other than experimenting on something like this is fun. There isn't going to be a "wrong" and if it went really badly, I would have stamped another image, colored it, cut it out and glued it in place. Everything in life should be so easy!

November is saved from doldrums by Thanksgiving and my sweet daughter-in-law's birthday. Sometimes that order changes since turkey-fest changes dates. The turkey stamp is Gobble, Gobble by Your Next stamp. The cupcake is one cupcake cut from an image of 6 cupcakes on a tiered stand, Cupcake Greetings by Sizzix.

December has a few more birthdays and of course, the jolly old guy who arrives at the end of the month. The stamp I used is Jolly Santa by Woodware Clear Magic Singles. His image prints with a solid square border. I wiped off some of the ink before stamping but not all of that border. I added the two ornaments to cover areas that were too visible to ignore but not visible enough to look like anything. The ornaments are from Clearly Besotted Laugh Out Loud: Christmas. The ornaments and the red hat are Zig markers, the face, facial hair and skin are colored pencil. The facial hair has a light base coat of cool gray pencil, the fur on the hat has warm gray. Over both I used white Signo Ball pen, done in squiggly lines to represent fur and hair. The silver dots on the purple ornament at the hanging device of each ornament was done with a silver pen, also Signo brand. The lens of Santa's glasses have very light blue coloring (pencil) under a coat of clear gel pen (Glaze) by Sakura. 

Appointments are being added in plain pencil as we all know they sometimes change. I have numerous markers and many aren't used often as I forget about them. I have a database of my stamps, dies and punches. Don't roll your eyes....I like data bases. I have binders with photos of my stamps. This is easier for me to flip through when I'm trying to decide what birthday image to use for a card or wondering if any set has elongated star or a perfect sentiment that I might want to emboss rather than write by hand. 

I'm having fun doing this. Let's face it, most of us aren't going to save the world in a dramatic way, but we can enjoy ourselves and spread cheer with what we do. Some of us plant beautiful flowers (I have a black thumb and it isn't from ink!). Some of us cook magnificently.  I can bake sweets like nobody's business but try to avoid that since being successful on Weight Watchers. Some of us sing so beautifully, people would pay to hear us. People would pay me to remain quiet. 

If I'm creating something to share, I am hopefully bringing a smile to two people, the recipient and myself. If I am creating something for me, I am happy in my own little world where the ugliness that all too often fills the news is kept at bay. To quote Martha Stewart, it's a good thing. 

A dark Copic background; Darcie stamps and buttons

Whenever I use directions or closely follow an example given elsewhere, I try to credit the source. Life has been full of distractions lately and craft time has been more fractured than usual. I include blog reading and Pinterest viewing as part of my craft time. I thought I had pinned the directions for creating the dark background I am about to describe, but I did not. I'm sure this isn't an exclusive lesson or formula, but I do want to be clear that I didn't come up with this on my own and apologize for not being able to name my source.

This play time began with Copic markers, X-Press It paper, and a few Signo pens. I began with B99, Agate. I used the chisel tip of the marker to color a base coat. I didn't think to take photos of each step but I don't think they are truly necessary. After that base color, I used the brush tip of B69, Stratospheric Blue, over everything. The goal wasn't a streak free blend, this was an experiment and may have resulted in a night sky if I liked the result.

Perhaps not many people have any of the fluorescent Copic colors, but I have a few of them, including FB2 (Fluorescent Dull Blue) and FBG2 (Fluorescent Dull Blue-Green). I would not have thought to use them in this application, but those markers were good for lightening areas of the dark background. I believe these qualify as Super Eaters. This first photo has FB2 in random cloud-like circles.

In this photo, I've added clouds of FBG2 and some dark patches of 100 (Black), and then gone over everything with B69 again.

I wanted to reclaim some of the lighter areas so I used FB2 again.

Now for some colorless blender. The plan was to pour a bit into my palm and flick drops onto the paper. Reality happens. In common vernacular, that would be shit happens and the small mister bottle of colorless blender that I was using spilled. Not once mind you, but twice. That takes a special kind of talent to repeat the same mistake twice in ten seconds.

This is what the back side of the paper looks like. The large blobs are the colorless blender spills. The top one is the long arm of the law (or perhaps a hungry dinosaur?) coming in to pat (or eat?) the profile of Jimmy Durante. Please tell me someone else is old enough to know who he was. if you are too young to know who he was, think of Gru from the Minion movies.

In this photo I've added some dots of white Signo pen and some of silver. I also dripped and misted additional colorless blender. Now I needed to decide what to do with this.

I attended a scrapbooking expo months ago and purchased stamps and tin pins from a company that was new to me. The company is Darcie Heater Designs. Here is a link to stamp that I used Frankly Stamps, and here is a link to the coordinating tin pins Frankly Embellishments.  I decided to cut this down and use it as background on a card with Franky and his bride stamped, colored, fussy cut and glued in place. 

Before adhering anything, I thought I would try embossing some spider webs with a stamp from Inka Dinka Doo and some glow in the dark embossing powder. That didn't work. Either my Versa Mark isn't moist enough or the grainy embossing powder was too heavy for the fine lines of the webs. I heat set the Versa Mark, then re-stamped the webs with silver ink. 

Here is the background, mounted on sparkly silver paper and then onto a black card base. The words Happy Halloween are from a Stampin' Up's Teeny Tiny Wishes.

I colored the faces in to resemble the tin pins. The ghost (an old rubber on wood stamp) was stamped on vellum and colored first with Copic markers and then Prisma Color pencils. Accidents continued....I put glue on the "wrong" side of the ghost. Technically there isn't a right or wrong side I guess, but the pencil strokes looked better on the underside. I wiped off the glue and added some to the back side.

Here is the finished card front with the tin pins in place, held with glue dots. 

I don't know if I will use the card as is or if I will repeat this with a little more care before Halloween. 

There are two more sets of each face in the tin pin package. I think the bodies stamped and  cut out in a sturdier shape (not fussy cut) with magnets on the back might be cute on the refrigerator this Halloween, something sturdy enough for the grandkids to play with as long as I make things secure enough for Princess of Sparkle who will be almost 18 months old at Halloween. 

Dragonflies and Anniversaries

Two recent die purchases were this Dragonfly die set from Technique Tuesday and the words Happy Anniversary from Tonic Studios:

      

Anniversary greetings, both stamps and dies, aren't as prevalent as birthday greetings which I understand. There are more occasions to give birthday cards than anniversaries. Throw in personal tastes and the choices becomes even more limited. The dragonflies certainly won't be limited to anniversary cards, this is just their debut from my craft room. That Tonic Studio die of Happy Anniversary is going to get a lot of use. I really like the style and size. 

I began with the top two cards. they were going to identical but they didn't turn out that way. The dragonfly base and the lacy overlay are matched pairs on each card rather than one with yellow lace and one with coral lace on each. Matched pairs seemed less busy.  

The rather nondescript background blobs are bits of glow in the dark glitter. That came about when some accidental glue smears were way too noticeable, despite being clear. It doesn't show well in these photos against the black surface, but the blue cardstock has a white mat and is mounted onto a light green card base. The card interiors have a white area for the greeting with three small hearts cut from the blue paper adhered along the lower left edge. 

The purple card used up my last scrap of butterfly paper, a small print on black from Stampin' Up. The base dragonflies, the greeting and the mat between the blue paper and white card base are from Stampin' Up, the color is Wisteria Wonder. I outlined the greeting with a white Signo pen and added dashes to mark the flight of these dragonflies.