Huyze Herkert, morning room: back to the dollhouse in the dollhouse

By adding the extension on top of my dollhouse-within-a-dollhouse, quite a bit of space became available. How would I fill it? This question became easier to answer by reframing it as a different question: what did I really want to try to create on this scale? Definitely a fireplace! And curtains—would I be able to make those? Only two of the walls offered enough free space. And so the parlour remained on the ground floor, while the first floor became a music/drawing room.

The teeny-tiny fireplace (2,9cm high in total!) had to go in the parlour. I cut the various parts from different thicknesses of cardboard. I painted the mantelpiece dark green, with ‘tiles’ featuring a floral motif on either side. The hearth got a black-and-white marble effect, and I covered the chimney breast with the same wallpaper as the walls.

Several layers of semi-transparent paper glued together form a fire. I cut a thin strip of metal to size and folded it into a fender. After adding a little gold ornament with mirror foil inside to the chimney breast, the fireplace was finished.

What is a mantelpiece without decoration? A missed opportunity, if you ask me 😉. So I rolled tiny little balls from crepe paper and coloured them with an acrylic marker (otherwise the colour would fade really fast). I then added stems made from ultra-thin wire to turn them into flowers. A bead became the vase. Over on the other side of the mantelpiece, I put a candle.

Next came the curtains. It took quite a bit of thinking to figure out how to approach it (This is exactly the kind of thinking I like to do when I’m lying in bed unable to fall asleep. Much better than worrying about real life!). I had a suitable piece of very thin beige fabric, but needed to come up with a method to create tiny (ultra tiny!) pleats in it—and, more importantly, to make sure they would actually stay in place. So I made a miniature pleater from very thin cardboard and sewing pins, using the exact size I wanted the curtains to be. The idea was not to remove the pleater after creating the pleats, but rather to permanently attach the fabric to it. The whole thing would still be barely a millimetre thick, making it perfectly to scale.

I covered the pleater generously with tacky glue. I laid the fabric on top, folded it around the sides and secured it at the back, making sure all the cardboard was covered. I then painted the beige fabric dark pink with acrylic paint. Drying the whole thing with a hairdryer gave me the effect I was after. (This description makes it sound rather simple, but it was definitely a process of trial and error. I spent almost an entire day on it!)

At the top, I made a curtain box from cardboard and finished it with a valance made from a checked fabric, which I painted the same colour as the curtains. The frayed edges came in very handy as fringe (a happy accident!). A cardboard window, with a painted blue sky, completes the illusion.

Among my purchases at the 1zu12-Die Messe fair was this Volker Arnold kit for making 1:144-scale lighting (I showed it to you in an earlier post).

Before punching out the individual pieces, I painted everything with gold paint. Once they were punched out, I gave the little candles a thick coat of white paint and the flames a thick coat of pale yellow paint. At this scale, this very quickly created a 3D effect! By adding a few teeny-tiny gold beads of my own, I turned the pieces into a chandelier that I glued to the ceiling.

Time for the furniture!