18” Doll Kitchen Tour

Watch the video here.

You are probably wondering where the second part to the table and chair kit is and why are we looking at a kitchen for 18” dolls this week.

Well, I have been really busy with this project but I had set aside time to work on the table and chair kit. Then I managed to slice the end of my index finger open, I am not even sure how I did it. I discovered what I had done when I found that I had bled all over a part of what I was doing at the time. Then it took almost all day to get the bleeding to stop. The cut itself is tiny but for some reason none of my normal tricks to stop bleeding would work and some things that normally work really well just made it worse. So for most of the day I had my finger wrapped up and elevated trying to not bleed on anything important. It finally stopped bleeding in the evening but now it is so sore I can't stand to touch anything with the tip of my finger. So the kit will have to wait until that heals a few days.

In the meantime I figured I might as well show you the project that has been keeping me busy for the last 2 or so weeks.

First a little background, as you know I have been doing dollhouse stuff for a long time. About 2 or 3 years ago I fell in love with the 1/3^rd scale dolls too. This is the scale that American Girl dolls are as well as a host of other brands. I started doing more and more in that scale.

A while back I decided to start a blog dedicated to that scale (you can find it here) and that is what this project is for. My plan for that blog is do a couple of different kinds of posts. Some will be just to show what I have been making in that scale, some to showcase items that I make for sale in my Etsy store (I know I need to get busy and get stuff listed on there), some will be reviews of products that I try that are related to the dolls of that scale, and some will be what I am going to call “photo stories” those will in the future be listed as being from “Allison's journal” since Allison is the doll that narrates the stories. Those posts will be stories that I create backgrounds and props for and tell through words and photos. There are some of those posts on the blog already (of the 7 current posts 5 are of this type) and there are many more to come.

One of the things I wanted to do was to make room sets, like what you might see movies or TV shows being filmed. These will be room backgrounds with furniture and props that I can quickly set up to create the backdrops for these stories.

At the same time as I was thinking through what I wanted to make and what rooms I wanted to represent a doll sewing group I am on did a Sew-along project with a cute apron, oven mitt and chef's hat set. That project sparked a multitude of project ideas in my mind. I knew I had to make some cookies for the dolls (after all if you have an oven mitt and an apron you probably should be baking) and then of course they would need a kitchen. I thought for a few days about how I wanted to do the kitchen. At first I couldn't really picture the project in my mind in a way that I thought would work. Then one morning I woke up way too early with the inspiration for the project. I couldn't get back to sleep that morning so I got up and started making scale drawings of the different components of the project. By afternoon I had a stack of pages of these drawings and a pretty good idea of how to make it happen.

I picked up supplies on my next trip to town and started to build the kitchen. I started with the background wall (I was lucky to find the perfect fabric for the wallpaper) then the kitchen island then I proceeded to the stove and finally the back wall unit. I also made a few little touches like the canister set and the cookie jar too.

I hope you have found this tour a fun change from the normal video. If you are interested in the larger scale dolls I do hope you will follow the blog and come back to see what the dolls and I are up to on a regular basis.