Simply Curious

I've had an idea for a fully carved spider-web pumpkin lantern in my head for ages, but wasn't confident enough in my abilities to attempt it without someone else's instructions.




I never found those instructions, but when my husband brought home a free little pumpkin from work, it seemed to be just right for a full out lantern, so I attempted it on my own.  It turned out so well I'm going to share my how-to with you!

So, here you go, my process for creating a spider-web jack o'lantern.

• A small pumpkin, not too lumpy or creased - ideally symmetrical all the way around, about 8-15" in diameter
• pumpkin carving tools like PumpkinMasters, or a serrated knife that can cut small pieces
• a pen or marker
• tape, about 1/2" wide, scissors to cut width if necessary
• a light (I recommend the small cheap LED tea lights - much safer and can last you several years!)
• Several hours to devote to carving

Step 2.  Vertical Webbing

Another attempt to get me back into working on this.  My brain is trying to create new projects already and I can't get THIS one finished!

We'll start at the top.  Here's the attic.  Not as tall as I remember, even without the roof..


The Bedroom.  This is probably the most complete of all the rooms.  The floor had been done previously.  The wallpaper is scrapbooking paper from Hobby Lobby.  I cut out the window trim from illustration board, and there will also be illustration board wainscoting around the room.  I made the doors - again out of illustration board and what is probably half scale siding.  (the closet doors are louvered.)

I have only installed one door of four, and in order to install them all I had to rip out the wall, which was only partially glued in by the molding on the other side.  In the process I managed to hit the ceiling fan that was hanging from the plug in the ceiling, and broke off one of the pins.  I think I fixed it, but I'm still not happy with the ceiling fan in general.  I also made a mistake with the closet door handles - they're way too high!  (yet it LOOKS right?  so confused.)

Ideally I want half height steam radiators under the windows, but I can't find them and don't feel up to making them.  I may build boxes under the windows and claim that the radiators are hidden underneath.





The bathroom has been very time consuming!  I still don't know what I want to do with the floor, and am not happy with the wall color.  I also haven't bought the lights I want to put over the sink, nor found a mirror yet.  Or faucets, for that matter.  Or a washer and dryer.  My brain wants me to install a hamper in the bedroom closet that can then be pulled into the bathroom.  I guess I could at least install a door and claim it's for that?  I'm pleased with the sink and tub, however.  They will work, although I feel like the tub isn't deep enough.  I measured against my full size tub, though!


The paper in the upstairs hallway isn't sticking well at all, so I need to make some repairs.  I also have to redo the floor due to the warping problem which really threw off everything else.  (you can see the problem in the bathroom picture above.)   I still have the old floor for this area - I may go ahead and make it work for this new configuration.

And I haven't worked on the downstairs hallway at all yet.

I've been trying to finish the interior before I start working on accessories so I can at least show off the finished house, but sometimes I feel like I'll never get there.  I don't know if making a checklist will help.  I'm kind of discouraged at this point!  I feel like I've been working so hard on it all and it's still a hot unfinished mess.

I recently came across an unlabeled Willowcrest on eBay that claimed it was a replica of a real house in Saratoga, NY.  I scoffed a bit, knowing it was a kit, but then realized that it's quite possible this kit WAS based on a real house.  I haven't seen the box in so long that I don't remember what it said.  Curiosity got the better of me and off I went to Google Image Search and Pinterest.

I wasn't planning on making a bathroom sink.  I had a big white cabinet one that I liked very much.  I don't even LIKE pedestal sinks!  If there's a spot for storage, I'm going to use it!

However, after the tub went in (someday I'll get pictures, I promise!) I realized that my white cabinet sink was going to make things very cramped in the bathroom.  I loved the new Houseworks modern bathroom set I had seen online, but I only wanted the sink, and given that I have about four bathroom sets already, I couldn't justify buying yet another just to use the sink.


I realized with chagrin that I'd likely have to make my own, or else beg someone to sell me just their sink, so I started poking around online, looking for small sink ideas.

I finally came across this one, and it started dancing and singing "Copy me!  I'm perfect!  PERFECT!"  I protested, of course.  There was no way I could imitate all that, right?

Yes. I could. I had bought several styles of candy mold in the hopes of them being useful for ceiling lights, and one of them was perfect for a sink bowl.  Plus, with the eye opening tutorials and advice of 1 Inch Minis by Kris, I began experimenting, and things started happening.  Yes.  I made a miniature sink.



I used a candy mold, cut out and nearly in half.  I used a piece of balsa and a piece of illustration board to make the counter.  The pedestal is made out of a toilet paper roll with poster board glued over it.  (I cut out rounded rectangles.)  The circles underneath the pedestal is more illustration board.  Then I Gessoed where necessary and went to town with decorative painting.  Does this look like paper to you?  NO!  I still need to add a layer or two of glossy varnish.

I still have to make the faucets and handles.  I actually carved a faucet from balsa, but it just looks like carved wood, even after painting and sanding.  I may have to talk myself into buying one of the fancy but expensive new faucet sets I've been seeing.  After all, I don't have to buy a new sink now!

Finally got around to taking some pictures of my finished mini cat.  I got confused by the instructions at one point and did some research, and discovered, to my horror, that I had been crocheting wrong!  ALL THIS TIME!  I'm embarrassed, but at least I was consistently wrong, right?  A stitch goes through two loops, not just the back loop!  Oops.

These are preliminary shots.  I wasn't exactly expecting this to work as well as it did, and I'm very excited.  My only materials were illustration board, poster board (the heavy stuff with one side shiny), and gesso.  I ended up buying it on amazon because I could never find it in the local craft stores.  It's thick and fluffy white paint, and fills in those cracks and edges quite nicely.  I've done several layers with lots of sanding, and have one or two more to go before I get to painting.

We've been in Colorado for six months now.  There's things I miss, and there's things I've gained.

Food.  Brands vary from place to place.  I REALLY miss Utz brand potato chips and Trader Joe's sunflower seed butter.  (Fortunately they're building one in Boulder!)  I haven't really found replacements yet.

Restaurants.  I miss Don Pablo's and a few Northern Virginia locals, but they still have Little Caesar's and The Black Eyed Pea out here, as well as a bunch of nice locally owned places.

Traffic is MUCH lighter out here, and the speed limits are higher.  Improved gas mileage!  Less road rage, but a lot more people running red lights.  I think it's because you can SEE the light for so much longer that you still see it as green by the time you get there.  Or else the yellow lights are much shorter.

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the WTOP and WNEW news radio stations.  There are no news radio stations out here, and you're lucky if you can even get the weather!    On the other hand, maybe that's why people are friendlier out here.  They get to listen to things like the Denver Comedy Station instead!

Less diversity.  I kind of miss Centreville's large Korean population and all the shop whose signs I couldn't read.  I REALLY miss being able to tune out other people's conversations in public because they weren't speaking in English.  It's annoying to have to listen to people blabber on in English!

The Redskins.  I have no interest in the Denver Broncos.  Football season is likely going to be mostly a game of finding a sports place that will air the game.

The view is AMAZING.  I was always excited to see that little bit of mountain at the overpass where 29 crosses 28, but here, the mountain is EVERYWHERE.  Lots of big empty areas, too.  And animals.  We'd have to drive for an hour or two to pass cows, chickens, or sheep.  Here, they're right down the street!  And prairie dogs.  We're still excited to spot one of those.  And then there's the cottontail rabbits that like to hang out in our backyard.

Sunshine.  I admit I miss the amount of rain we got in Virginia.  It's just been sun sun sun, and I'm going to have to invest in a new hat or two, I think.  I've gotten a tan, something I haven't had in years!  I'm so brown that I think my hands look weird.  (I'm not THAT tan, just enough to notice my skin is a different color!)

Interior Space.  I LOVE having closet space.  Stuff gets put away and stays out of sight, rather than being tucked into corners and then moved to different corners when that space is needed.  Having only one set of stairs instead of two is also nice.  As well as having the washer and dryer outside the master bedroom.

I miss our Centreville kitchen.  The gigantic sink, the high faucet with the built in sprayer, the layout which put everything right at hand . . . I didn't realize what a nice setup it was until attempting to maneuver in the new one.  The island is just totally in the wrong spot!

Having a yard is an awkward problem.  It's nice to not share walls, but there's a learning curve in figuring out how to keep stuff alive, and which stuff should be removed instead of encouraged.  I recognize dandelions, but it took me weeks to figure out that the other weird weeds are actually tree saplings!

So there's lots of changes going on, but some of them are most definitely an improvement.  I just need to control my food cravings . . .

I saw this particular ceiling on Pinterest and loved it.  I never thought about executing it until I found myself staring at my extended Willowcrest, trying to come up with an idea.  It wouldn't go away, and it fit in with my plans for an earth tone house perfectly.



Because of the way I extended the side of the house, the bathroom ceiling has two levels, and this design would work really well with it.  My house has been telling me it wants an oak theme, so I picked up an oak leaf punch (half off!) at Michaels, and went to work.

Naturally this was a day I did not bring my spiffy new camera!

it's KIND of like snow in August . . .

Then it began to hail. I didn't remember that hail was so loud.  I decided it was time to head to the basement.  (My mother would have been proud.)  I grabbed my cell phone and my Ipod and headed downstairs.  I wandered around in circles in the basement, waving my arms to break up the cobwebs before I walked into them face first, and listened to the noise above me.  Then I saw that one of the huge window wells was filling up with hail stones that were roughly pea sized.  OK, not too bad, don't need to worry about them denting the Mustang or the siding, right?  Nothing else to do, so I snapped a picture.  I made another attempt to call Brian.  Still nothing.  I kept a close eye on the radar.  Nothing to do but wait it out, right?

Holy window wells welling with water, Batman!

That's when I realized there was more water noise than I expected coming from one window, so I investigated.  The rain was coming down too fast for the ground to absorb, and the window well was filling up!  Worse yet, water was leaking in from the bottom two corners.  I ran to check out the damage, and to my amazement, discovered that on the left hand side, it had formed a neat little funnel behind the insulation and then down to the floor.  Our basement has a wooden floor, with a 2-3 foot subfloor dugout underneath.  There was about a half inch gap between the plywood and the cement walls, and the water was travelling below that.  Fine by me, it would work its way to the sump pump that was somewhere down there.  However, the right side was traveling down the front of the insulation and spilling onto the floor.  Fortunately, I had recently lugged down all the empty plastic bins we had purchased for the move.  I grabbed one and shoved it under the window, and managed to catch the worst of the waterfall.  I also ran back upstairs and grabbed some rags in the hope that I might be able to plug up the holes in some way.  (it didn't really help.)

Look close and see the flood line of debris still clinging to the door! It got higher than that.

Luckily we only lost two containers of cheese and a package of pork, everything Brian had picked up was fine with sitting in a car for several hours.  After I got home and put the groceries away, I grabbed a shovel and went back to try and move the rocks back into the yard.  The rain had stopped, the road pond had dried up, and the neighbors were crawling out of the woodwork.  Pretty much everyone's basement had flooded, including the house to our right that's currently empty (the neighbors thought to check!) and they were all spreading their wet items out to dry.  Everyone was hyper, and the excitement grew as the tow truck arrived, and the driver very cleverly managed to load the car up the driveway and INTO the garage.

The dvck, normally seen peering out the rear window.  Qvack.

I've begun work on the living and dining room floors in the Willowcrest.  I wanted to emphasize that there were two rooms, not one big one, so I decided to make very distinct floors for both of them.

The dining room has a bay window, so I decided to imitate that shape on the other side.  I used 1/32"  wood, cut into 3/8" strips.  I wanted to use the whole sheet and just scribe it in, but the difficulty I found in going against the grain made it too hard.  This way I can easily correct my mistakes, and I've made a lot!  I'm not as good at angles as I thought, though I tried.
Looking back, I think I should have done the long edges first, and then cut the corner pieces to fit.  I WAS trying to cut 120 degree angles.  I should have dusted off the math skills before diving in.  Even that may not have helped me.  The walls are most likely NOT square.

I'll use wood to fill in the extra space around the octagon, and part of it will be taken up by a built in cabinet.

My excitement about using the 1/32" wood as flooring has died down quite a bit.  It doesn't score well across the grain or on diagonals.  And when I'm NOT gluing it to a hard surface, it warps . . .

Oops.  Argh.

Determined to make my dollhouse as fancy as possible without installing plumbing (DON'T TEMPT ME), I purchased quite a few of the Cir-Kit CK1011 slide light switches.  I thought I understood how it worked, but the instructions that came on the tiny piece of paper folded up with the switch really threw me for a loop. The pictures were hard to see, and the multiple options confused me.  Eventually I figured it out, but not before melting one switch and possibly shorting out another. Yikes!  I am sharing these hints so you'll have an easier time of it!  You might find it useful to be looking at the original instructions while reading this, as it's possible I may have missed a step, and I don't feel like telling you just how wide the gaps should be, etc. ;-)

Electricity runs in loops. It needs to return to the source in order to keep the power 'flowing.'  (The bulbs act as a bridge between the two lines.)  This is why there are two lines of copper foil in the tapewire, to send power to the lights and bring it back again.  They are color coded so you can don't accidentally switch your flow around or miss connecting one of the lines, but the color actually means nothing.  It is exactly the same copper foil on both sides.  I am referring to the foils as wires in my instructions because 'foil' confuses me a bit.

The switch works by interrupting the power flow in one of the tape wires. The instructions that come with the switch provide two ways to do this.

Option 1 is useful for mostly horizontal wiring.  Use it if you don't plan on having ceiling lights, or most of your lights will be attached in the lower half of the room.  You CAN, however, attach your ceiling lights or sconces in this option.  Everything will come on at the same time.

I think what threw me off with this is the color coding.  What they actually want you to do is 'stretch' your upper wire up to the switch and then back down again.  They want you to cut a 4" piece of tapewire and attach it over a narrow gap you have cut in the top wire, and ONLY the top wire.  This is one of the few instances where you can attach a pink wire to a blue.  Again, color does not mean the two wires are different.  Just pretend both wires are pink on that 4" strip.  Or, actually cut two pink wires and trim off the blue if it will help you.

Option 2 is for vertical tape runs, and lighting that is mostly in the upper part of the room.  This is also useful if you have a room that is mostly doors and windows and the easiest way to get power to other side of the room is to go up and over.  You can also use this to provide on/off power above but not below.

In this option, you cut a narrow gap in one wire of your tape run right behind where the switch is.  Both nails of the switch go in the same wire, one in the top half of the gap, one in the bottom half.  (Think of the switch as a bridge connecting a road on two sides of a gorge.)

The instructions have you place the tape wire and then drill the holes for the eyelets, but I found this to be messy and it also can tear up the foil a bit.  What I found easier was to cut off a small square of the tape wire for reference, decide where I wanted my switch to go, hold the tape wire sample over that spot, and then push the switch nails into the wood and the sample hard enough to leave an indentation.  (check and be sure the nail hits the wires soundly on both sides.)  THEN I drilled the holes.  After that it was easy to run the wiring over them, using the pilot hole punch (or a heavy needle) to pop a neat hole in the tape wire that covered the holes.  In go the eyelets, neat as can be.  You can pop the switch into the eyelets to test, and then easily pull the switch out again before putting up wallpaper or paneling.

They also provide instructions for how to narrow the gap between the two wires, but in the end I realized I didn't actually need this.  Good to know, though!

I hope this makes more sense to you now, if you were somewhat overwhelmed after staring at all those little diagrams on the provided instructions.  It seems like there were so many steps, but they opted to explain EVERYTHING, including how to attach tape wires to each other.

phone camera  is easier to fit inside the house!

Here's a rough draft of my final goal for the hallway.  (This took forever.  I'm hoping the rest of the rooms will go faster since I can SEE what I'm doing!)  

I managed to make the door a little taller, and probably COULD have made it wider if I had tried hard enough. 

I had to repeatedly paint the stairs and new railing in an attempt to match the stained wood.  I think it was because I tried TOO hard, with too small a brush.   I just have to keep reminding myself that this room will be impossible to see once the rest of the walls are back in place.  Luckily the banister does not appear to be that crooked from the angle I normally see it.  There's no way I can straighten it unless I cut it apart from the staircase below, which IS an option.





The orange in the first picture is more accurate.  It will not look so vivid once I add the tans and super-dark browns to the bathroom. 

I took the banister that came with the house and cut it in half to make room for the new stairs.  I also had to cut and paint a new railing since the old one had disappeared.  I traced the banister pattern onto illustration board and cut and painted it.  It pretty much imitates the original staircase below, so I'm happy with how it looks.  What frustrated me the most is that I have no idea what wood stain I used when I originally built the house.  It MAY be Minwax walnut. 

Handmade doorknob, and that's not wood, it's painted illustration board!

 The doorknob was ultra simple and very effective.  I made it from an earring post, a tiny silver bead cap, and a crystally faceted rondelle bead, and is probably my favorite part of the whole mess.  I have lots more doors to do, luckily these are all parts I already own!

I still need to redo the floor, trim out the door, and run the wiring.  (I ran out of tape wire!)  My pictures don't really capture how it really looks, but it's starting to feel finished.
I'm so unhappy with the walls that I came up with a plan for distracting people from seeing them.  I'm going to fill them with old cabinet photos!  I've collected a variety of them and printed them out on photo paper, just need to arrange them and get them in there.  The theme is adventure and exploration, Victorian style.  I have pictures of famous wanderers and exotic places and people, including Mark Twain and Lady Isabella Bird. 



I am having a terrible time with my white acrylic paint.  All of my other acrylics seem to be just fine, but the white is thick and gloppy and impossible to work with.  What happened to it?  It's the same age and experienced the same environment as all of my other paints.