Simply Curious

I'm not sure how I found out about this, but probably a random Internet search for local Steampunk events.  It was in a town we were interested in visiting, on our anniversary, and Steampunk themed.  We mutually agreed to do it.

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.

I haven't done a lot of crochet this past year, and it's all the fault of an afghan.

I get much colder at night than B., so I have a throw for my side of the bed.  It's a basic no-sew, fringed and tied end fleece blanket that I've had for ages.  It went much better in my previous bedroom with its rustic style.  It looks downright silly on a Chippendale four-poster.

My book doesn't actually look like this.

So I thought I'd crochet a nicer looking afghan, about the same size.  I eventually came across a Leisure Arts book on Aran afghans and bought it, about the time we moved to Boulder.  Then I found some sage green yarn at Walmart, and bought a few skeins of that.

I particularly liked this book for the way it gave instructions.  It would specifically label sections, i.e. (cable row) so you could conceivably combine different stitches and make up your own pattern.

I went with the Basketweave afghan, although I initially bought it for the Sampler afghan.  Sewing together sections of crocheted yarn is annoying, so I moved on.

I'm terrible when it comes to reading crochet instructions all the way through.   I figure if I don't know a stitch, it will take me five minutes to look it up and figure out how to do it.

Really, I should have stopped here.

What I should have been paying attention to is what the stitches were.  It took me a while to realize that the afghan instructions I'd chosen were not symmetrical.  One side was different than the other!  This annoyed me to no end.  Not to mention that I discovered that the afghan was going to be a lot narrower than I anticipated.  So I decided to start winging it.  I repeated several rows to give it extra width, and looked through the rest of the book to decide which stitches I liked enough to include in my blanket.

About this time B. got interested in the project.  He liked the look of it.  He suggested that I make it big enough to cover the bed.  The big, huge, king sized bed that comes up to my waist and is fondly referred to as the Monster Bed.  I resisted, but he kept suggesting, and so I modified my pattern again.  I bought more yarn.  Then even more.  I had to wait and ransack various Walmarts because they generally only carried 4-6 at a time, and apparently the had exclusive selling rights on that particular color, because it was the only place I could find it.

The afghan got bigger. And heavier.  And harder to maneuver.  Eventually I stopped working on it, because I'd had a molar removed and was exhausted and achy and recovering slowly, and it was just too hard to deal with.  Plus the weather was getting warmer and I was sitting under a ridiculous amount of yarn.

I didn't attempt to start any other projects during the year because 'I still had that afghan to finish.'  (I did knit a few hats.)  Finally in January I hauled it back out, and finished it in early February 2014.

That center panel is an example of the 'Celtic Weave'

Well, didn't that month just fly by!  Things got a little crazy, and very little crafting got done.  Why?

We attacked the kitchen.  It was time.

Here's the kitchen from the online listing, right before we moved in.

Before!

The island didn't stand a chance.

It started right before Christmas, and fortunately after I had finished my holiday baking.   We started simple.  We'd always had the impression that the island was in the wrong place.  There should be a "magic triangle" between your stove, sink, and fridge that allows for unimpeded traffic, and the island was causing us to veer to the left to get from the sink to the refrigerator.  B. had lots of holiday leave and we decided that we might as well take the time to experiment.  A few good shoves and a heave or two allowed us to detach the island from the floor.  It was only attached in four places with a few screws directly into the grout!  We cut the power to the island and detached the wiring to the outlet, and proceeded to  turn it 90 degrees and 'float' the thing around to determine its best position,  We picked a spot we thought would work and left it there for a week to see how it would work, nudging it one way or another once in a while.

We had to eat out a lot in the end, which is not fun when there's not a lot of allergy safe places to eat.   I think the people at Mumtaz know us by name now!

 We also decided to rearrange some of the drawers, and I took the opportunity to add some little-used items to the donation box.  I am still attempting to find new homes for some items.  I also took the opportunity to replace all the brass knobs with some silver colored ones, which seemed to go well with all the grey in the granite.