Simply Curious

Remember that disappointingly small kitchen faucet I bought from miniatures.com?

I searched for a ridiculously long amount of time for a replacement.  I even scoured Shapeways.com in the hopes that I could possibly get one 3D printed.  I even downloaded Sketchup with the idea of creating my own design to print.  Three hours of frustrating work with a program that kept freezing finally convinced me to stop wasting my time and turn to some time honored polymer clay to get the job done.



My inspiration?  My own Kohler faucet.  It's a good faucet. It has a pull out sprayer feature, a handle that can be easily accessed by both left and right hands, and a good height for tall pots.  Why wouldn't I want it in my dollhouse? And making the thing only took me about two hours.  Nothing compared to the amount of time I spent shopping and fussing with 3D printing.




 Maybe it's a LITTLE big for the sink, but minimally so.  Faucets are something that can scale easily. It's a hair over an inch long, and my life size faucet is about a foot tall, so I feel it's perfectly acceptable.

I got my pot lights hooked up! I'm a little disappointed, actually.  They're not as bright as I hoped, and so the kitchen has a soft, deserted, late night feel. The photo, of course, doesn't show this.



Here are the trims:

 I used my Silhouette Cameo to cut out rings to size, mostly because I was bound and determined to do something mini related with it.   They just look like those stickers you put on hole punched paper to minimize tearing.  Which I could have used, but I wanted to be sure of a proper fit.  They're not very exciting,


 I also fixed my lighted mirror!  I made up a testing strip so I wouldn't risk the dollhouse again, and left the mirror plugged in to it for a good half hour to be sure it worked properly.  Once again I find it really difficult to photograph lit lights, but I'm excited that both of them are working.

Huh.  I feel like I'm just repeating my posts with more mediocre photos.

Where did she go? What happened?  Did she give up?

No, she got a job, and has been desperately playing real life catch-up.

But it was raining, and raining, and raining, and my motivation wavered horribly.  I sent a whiny email to The Camp about not having time to make anything anymore.  So of course today I perversely sat down and made something.


A mess!  Well, a mess would have been interesting.  Instead, I made a ceiling, which is likely something you will never notice if you ever see the house in person.  There's more details to add for this, I just need to get some more shiny sided poster board and figure out the trim around the lights.

I raved about beautiful decorative ceilings in a previous dollhouse post, but a 20th or 21st century kitchen doesn't have that kind of detailing, unless it's a really expensive house.  When was the last time you looked at your kitchen ceiling?  Do you even know if you have pot lights, or how many there are?  I didn't think so.


The ceiling is illustration board, with circles awkwardly cut out.  The pot lights are blister bubbles from some random expired medicine I found while digging through my cabinet.  I added  3/16" strip wood around the edges for a minor drop down ceiling so I had room for the wiring to run.


And the wiring?  Ooh, the wiring.  I got that from Evans Designs.  Four LED lights hooked up to a single transistor.  I used 2 sets, and I 'should' be able to attach them to my dollhouse tape runs, no problem.  There was plenty of space on these for me to spread them out, and I was even able to drop one of them down so it will light up below the microwave.  The bulbs were a little over an eighth of an inch wide, and the transistor exactly 1/8" thick.

Since the ceiling is so big, and I wanted to test and make sure it would run ok without hooking it up to the main house wiring, I had bought a junction splice so I could make a temporary testing board.  I was rather shocked when I discovered that my lead-in wire didn't fit in it!  So now this project is on hold again, but at least I've made a little more progress.

I'm fairly certain that Judy Ryden's blog inspired me, or simply did what I was wanting to do first, so I'm giving her credit here.  She's the only one I've found forging pathways for DIY LED lighting in dollhouses, and has some fantastic tips and tutorials.

Next on my extensive to-do list is getting more poster board so I can finish the ceiling and template the floor, and figuring out the LED pendant lights that will hang over the sink.  I also need to work out the wall around the door, and I want to build a pass-through instead of a wall between the dining room and kitchen.