Chapter 90a - Step Tansu Chest, Two Low Chairs, Cushions, Bamboo Shades, Various Intermediate work

August 12th - 16th 2014

This chapter had a few more chairs to add to the house and a tansu chest.  These chests are pretty common and quite nice.  There are lots of different kinds but the step chest is quite pretty and I was looking forward to making it as I have lots of interesting articles to position on it.  But before I did that, I decided to put the chairs together and to make a bunch of floor cushions.

These chairs have been made numerous times so I won’t go thru the process again but I decided this time to actually upholster them instead of making a cushion to place on top.  I really liked the effect of the leather chairs so I made some fixed cushions on these chairs using more of my Japanese cotton fabric.  When I was looking for the leather seat cushions I noticed that a lot of these folding type chairs have a fixed cushion so, that’s what I did. 

Making the padding seat from card stock and foam.

Adding the fabric and gluing and taping in place.

Finished low chairs with fixed seat cusions.

Next was cutting up some fabric to make around 8-10 floor cushions that will be thrown around the fire pit room.  I already had a sort of tutorial on how to make these cushions so I won’t go thru it again here.  Suffice to say it took a little while as there were lots of small angles and lots of double sided sticky tape....  But I ended up finding a rhythm and completed all of them in around an hour one afternoon.  I then made a few with a french knot in the middle and then stacked them and placed them in their appropriate room.  Lots of cushions now for our guests in the fire pit room.

Cutting up various fabric pieces to make the cushions.

Stacked cushions in place.

I then worked on making my roasting fish skewers.  Added them to the irori pit and placed the pit in the middle of the room.  Since I have no more rooms to add, I also decided to pull out lots of little objects and place them in different areas.  I made some little umbrellas outside the front door and just added general things to give some nice detail to the house.  I placed the little tumblers and such on the appropriate trays and added some more food stuff and even made some rice for my bowls.  My first attempt using Fimo. It was fun adding stuff to the rooms now that I can!  I even added some beer labels to the bottles (altho one is actually for matches - just I really liked the tiger!)

Adding some umbrellas outside the front portico.

Making some Fimo rice using an extracter and a razor blade.

Filled rice bowls (hardened in oven)

Making cardstock legs for two small food tables (zen)

Gluing the table legs in place.

Adding food stuff to the dish. Salmon ready to skewer and roast.

Some quick beer labels.

Firepit with food stuff and roasting fish.

Next up were the bamboo shades.  Course I was convinced I remembered how to do them and of course, I really didn’t.  I had a very tough time getting the tiny triangular beads onto the DMC thread.  Then once I did, I realized I had forgotten to pass back through to the right side so that when I pull up and down on the thread, the shades roll and unroll in the right direction.  Anyway, one shade is technically backwards but the others I managed to force the beads thru the bamboo slats to the back side and then glue them all in place.  I then glued them into position on the windows of the second floor.  Done!

Threading the DMC for the pulls.

Cutting the back sections to attach the shades to the house.

Shades now attached to the house.  Looking pretty good!

The last part of this chapter’s work was the small lantern I decided to add to the spa.  I just had the LED installed and positioned in the center which, after seeing how easy the little lanterns were, wasn’t really nice.  So, I made one for the spa as well!

Small lantern for the spa LED.

I’ve decided to postpone the tansu chest for now as I’d like to see how the roof is going to be attached.  The next chapter has a section of roof and the final pieces of the tansu chest so I will start the chest once I've made a part of the roof.  I'm just too curious to understand how it fits!

UPDATE Additional info on the Zen Table
August 18th 2014

The Zen table, tho very small, is very cute and maybe more than one of you would like to know how it was made.  Obviously, you can adjust the templates to your own scale.  This one is just a scan of the leg template on the page and then I adjusted to the 1/20 scale size.  I think the actual leg size was about 11mm wide.  I used a small leftover square of balsa wood for the table top instead of card stock but you could easily do it with a few layers of cardstock.  The legs were two layers as well then cut with an exacto knife and glued into place (see above pic).  The instructions are in Italian but the fotos are self explainatory.  Hope this inspires you to try one! They are super cute!

Table leg template. Cut out four.

Intermediate Work - Bamboo Shades for Right Side First Floor Porch, Pavement Research

April 26th - May 3rd 2013

I had already done a pretty extensive chapter and tutorial on the bamboo shades here, but since I wanted shades on every porch, I had some more to make.  I figured I’d make these since they are pretty easy and then start to think about how I was going to stabilize the dollhouse.  It’s getting big and heavy.

Anyway, bamboo shades were made from a cheapy placemat I found at Ikea.  I had to abandon the bugle beads since the holes were much too small to pass the DMC thread for the pull.  I opted for some triangular beads and glued those in place to line up the pull string.  I attached the shades onto the porch by putting a glob of tacky wax adhesive and glue.  That way I didn’t have to come up with a way to clamp the shades in place while the glue dried.  Done.

Trimming the bamboo to size

Fitting in the beads which will hold the pull string.

Glue the back support (bottom edge of the placemat cut to size)

Glue and tacky stuff for easier attachment.

Ready to roll.

 While I was working on these, I got to thinking seriously about the final disposition of the dollhouse.  I had bought a table at Ikea (for like €20.00) and had some plywood cut to size at my local hobby place (€5.00).  I decided I would fix the house to the plywood and the plywood to the table.  That way if I wanted to ever change the actual table I could do that.  Plus, I wanted to decorate the plywood with some kind of stone pattern to simulate a street or garden path. 

My original idea was to use some paper with stone decoration on it.  But it just seemed so flat to me.  Plus I had to keep in mind that the ground floor has two sliding rooms so the this may cause too much friction every time I would open the rooms.  I thought I could use stencils but even here was very time consuming considering the amount of space I was going to have to fill (60cm by 90cm).  Then I came across a blog that has some excellent suggestions for flooring.  I used a scrap piece of plywood and made some cutting tests with my dremel machine.  I figured out the speed had to be pretty high otherwise a straight cut into the wood is impossible.  Also, once I started screwing around with color, the cut areas were not so visible and I really did not like the final effect.  I also made a cutting test using my stencil to make some stone pavement.  I used some of my smelly vinegar wood aging (copper and steel) to age the wood and see what kind of result came out.  Didn’t like that either.  Altho the steel one made a nice effect by darkening on top of the “stone” and not on the inside.  Since I’m debating on adding grass inside the cracks, this could be doable.  Anyway, I have a lot more testing I need to do.

Paper stone pattern

Transferring the stone pattern from MitchyMoo's blog

After "carving" the pattern.

Painted a bit...do not like. The detail is lost.

Cutting out the stencils.

Penciling in the stencil for "carving".

Cooper wash on the left, steel wash on the right.

In the meantime, here are some pics that got me thinking.  I love the food pic in particular (ok, I HAVE to try fimo!!!) and the perfectly shiny waxed floor of a ryokan hotel entrance.  That is what I should have done from the beginning ! Live and learn.

Like the different pavement sizes.

Straight forward long stones perhaps would give depth?

Absolutely yummy looking fish and love the serving tray! Help! I must learn to use FIMO!

Perfectly waxed wooden floor.  Looks liquid.

I like this placement of the table and the futon layered on top. May use this.

I think this is my favorite stone look.  It may just be where I'm going.

Intermediate Work - The Bamboo Shades, An Iris Plant

Shibuya Town Feed - inspiration for the bamboo shades.

October 1st - 4th 2012

I had seen on a feed some nice fotos of Shibuya in Japan and in one of these fotos, there were these lovely bamboo shades which were hung on the outside of the terraces in many of the two story houses.  It reminded me of the same shading process here in Italy but here they use fabric curtains that just serve to block out the sun and heat during the day.  Most have these rolling full window shades but if you want to move in and out of a door, you need one of these curtains.  So, I decided my ryokan would have some bamboo shades to keep out the heat and sun.

I did some searching on the internet and came across a tutorial where you can use a bamboo placemat as a bamboo shade.  The bamboo slats are the correct scale so all I needed to do was find some bamboo placemats.  Years ago I found a ton and now all of a sudden I couldn’t find any!  As luck would have it, one day at Ikea, in the discount section (where they dump opened packages or the stuff they use in display) there was a nice bamboo placemat for a Euro 1.50.  Can’t go wrong with that! So I picked it up.

Ikea E 1.50 place mat!! Yoohoo!

Glueing the edges where I plan to cut thru

The first thing to do was to glue the slats where I would be cutting since we didn’t want the threads to unravel.  So, after taking some measurements, I glued the top and bottom and waited overnite to be sure the string was hardened and set.  Then I cut using my exacto-knife.  The bottom of the matt was perfect as a support to hang the shade.  I then measured out some black DMC thread, tied one end, threaded it round the back and up the front again and back thru.  The whole ordeal was because I wanted my shades to actually open and close.  I had to find a way to fix the threads across the top and I did that with some bugle beads.  Threading through those was a pain (I had to glue the tip of the floss to a fine point to thread it thru) but eventually I got both threaded and secured.  I used a small orange bead to weight the end of the pull.

Cutring the matts to size for the shade

Threading the bugle beads...

...and glueing them in place so the string would slide.

Glueing the back support (bottom piece of the placemat)

The next part was a little more difficult.  I had to figure out a way to weather the bamboo shades on one side.  I really didn’t like the new look to them.  I generally do not like the whole ryokan looking brand spanking new so the shades had to look a little sun faded.  I tried using household bleach and a paintbrush but it just isn’t concentrated enough.  Neither was hydrogen peroxide.  Only solution was to put some bleach soaked paper towels on the sun bleached side and let them sit on there for around 5 hours.  That did the trick enough to please me.  I then added a little graphite colored paint (has a bit of a blue hue) to make the shades look weathered. 

Top side now slightly weathered, underneath still fairly clean.

Attaching the shades was great since the bottom piece of the placemat was actually almost the exact same width as the space between the top window sill and the under roof beam.  Just a bit of sanding and those fit in perfectly. 

And the shades do go up and down! Fun!

Funky little flower petals - also a find.

The finished vase....

...in situ.

I also found some small terracotta vases which were a good size for the house.  I aged one with some brown and green and then stuffed it with some of the pink flowers I had purchased.  I also found a package of blue purple flowers and used the same method as making the geranium petals - squishing them on the mousepad - then glueing them to a green wire support.  I then inserted an iris that I had purchased from DHE UK site.  I think it looks quite nice on the porch! 

Next will tackle the magnetic closure of the first floor porches.