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January 29, 2014



I NEVER remember to add a penny to my miniature pictures for scale.

The finished mirror!  The lights worked, too, although there's a weird shady bit on both lamps that seems to be coming from inside.  Not my fault!  

I love how it turned out - almost exactly how I pictured it in my head.  I need to wipe the fingerprints off the mirror, which I left on because I was kind of hoping they would obscure the reflection.  Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of a mirror without getting yourself in it?  Very frustrating!

Recap:
Illustration Board
half inch scale sconce lights
3D nail art flowers
bunka
sconce adapter
oval mirror piece
Techniques adapted from tutorials at 1 Inch Minis By Kris.





Update 2/25/2014:  Please do not attempt to copy whatever I've done with the wiring.  I just fried it, so I obviously did something wrong.  I will do research and write another blog post when I figure it out.
January 28, 2014



one inch scale bathroom mirror, nearly done

This is the project that stalled me out on the Willowcrest.  I'm STILL not yet done with it, but I'm so thrilled with its format that I can't help but provide a sneak peek.  

Naturally, I wanted a mirror for the dollhouse bathroom.  I've read that you should have lights to the sides of the bathroom mirror, rather than above, to get the best view of your face, so of course this was how I wanted to set it up.  Then I started thinking about all the extra effort of installing those lights, and finding the right mirror, and wouldn't it be better if the lights and the mirror were all one piece anyway?

Would you believe that it's VERY difficult to find such a thing in one inch scale, let alone full size?

the mirror's 'innards'
Guess what I decided I could do myself?  Out came the illustration board, the Xacto knife, and a handful of oval mirror pieces that were in my stash.  The frame is two painstakingly cut layers of illustration board.  There is a sconce adapter sized hole in the back -  the brass frame it normally snaps into went into my stash for possible future use.

I bought half scale wall sconces, after being assured by Camp members that it wouldn't have any problems with the 12th scale electrical system.  You're not supposed to run two sets of wires through the adapter, so I exposed small sections of wire on each sconce and wired them that way, so only one pair of wires needs to go to through the adapter.  There is an explanation about making multi-light lamps somewhere.  I  don't remember where I learned it, but I have some early lights I made some time ago with the directions.  All's I remember is that the electricity needs to flow in a circle through each light.  It's hard to tell with the mess in the picture - I mostly need to make sure the bare wires from one section don't touch the bare wires from the other.  

UPDATE 2/25/2014:  I did something wrong, as I just totally fried my mirror.  Please do not follow my instructions!  I need to do some research as to what I did wrong.  And buy a new half scale light.

I also glued a strip of bunka around the edge of the mirror, as the mirror was a tiny bit thicker than the illustration board, plus it was sitting on the wires.  It helps clean it up quite nicely!

The flowers in the first photo were pieces of 3D nail art I bought at Sally's Beauty Supply.  I am planning to paint the frame and the flowers gold once I'm satisfied that everything else is properly in place and that the lights actually work.

The mirror should hang quite nicely on the wall by the sconce adapter plugs and a little bit of mini-tack or similar for security.  

And, once again, all of this was made possible by 1 Inch Minis By Kris' blog.  She posted a mirror tutorial a few weeks before I thought about making a mirror, and just the other day posted about the nail decals for her latest tutorial on making lamps and lighting them.  She's making my life harder yet more satisfying at the same time.  


January 21, 2014


I decided I should focus on my real life house instead of my dollhouse, and have been driving my husband insane by randomly changing and adding things to the house.  Mostly I've been putting holes in walls, hanging all the curtains and pictures I had not yet gotten around to.  It's been fun and frustrating at the same time!

The biggest project I took on was one I had seen on This Girl's Life blog.  She'd taken a large canvas and glued similar photos to it, then outlined those pictures with copper foil tape.  She used images of the sky, but I had a much better idea.


These are photos I took in the summer of 2013, at Colorado National Monument and Arches National Park in Utah.  I had a lot of them, and they all went so well together that I couldn't resist.  They even go with the copper foil!  

I took a chance and used www.sharpprints.com to order my 6"x6" photos.  Walgreens didn't offer that size, and I would have had to order 24 8"x10"s, which would have cost me close to $100.  SharpPrints was so cheap that it was worth the risk.  I was very pleased with how the photos came out, although there were one or two that came out too weird for me to want to use.  I went back and checked my pictures - it was my fault, not theirs!  (How did I manage to get the sky that shade of pink?)  I was going to place a second order anyway, so I just picked a few new ones!

After I got my photos, I was standing in the dining room, trying to decide where to put what, when I began to pay close attention to colors.  The blue of the sky, the red of the rocks, the soft greens of the plants (there IS green in a desert!), and the tan sands.  Then I looked at my sage green living room and the barely cream dining room.  Same. Colors.  Now I have a color scheme for the entire first floor!  Ivory, rust, and sage, with some dark wood accents.