Dollhouse Miniature Easy Corner Roombox pt 9

Watch the video here.

First I want to apologize for being out of frame. I am trying filming in a slightly different location in the house and I need to find the perfect angle for the camera. Clearly the one I used this week was not perfect. Be patient and I am sure I will work it out.

This week we are finishing the Corner Roombox! Wow, I am kind of sad to see both to the big projects finished. Well, except for a doorknob, I need to come up with one of those but that will come later. I have tried a couple of things but wasn't happy with the results.

To finish the roombox we are finishing off the raw edges with a combination of wood strips and some paperboard (cereal box) strips. I am not sure what sizes of wood strips I got because the display at my local store was almost empty and what was there was all mixed up. The wide strip is about ½ ” wide the narrow strips are around ¼” both of these are 1/16” thick. The square piece is about 1/8” square. I wish I could be more exact but like I said I really don't know what the sizes were.

To prepare for the video I did paint the wood pieces to match the front door color.

Then the process is simply a matter of going around the structure and cutting pieces to fit and gluing them in place. Since it is not really practical to clamp or weight down the pieces we are gluing today I did find I had to check the strips about every 10 minutes and make sure they were staying where I wanted them to be. After a few checks where they were staying in place I let them dry before moving on. This takes a while but by only gluing one spot at a time it is easier to make sure everything stays in place.

Since my floor/base warped really badly I decided to glue my roombox to a wooden board. I had a piece of particle board left over from a repair in my bathroom and it was the right size so I used it. I simply spray painted it with a brown color to finish it off a bit.

Since the board was fairly rough I added some felt furniture pads to the bottom corners. I don't want to scratch any tables that I might set the box on for display in the future.

I do want to say I have made rooms like this before and never had the bottom warp like it did this time. I have a feeling it was caused by the extremely damp weather we were having when I did that step.

If I wasn't going to use my roombox for photos I would add a dowel or square strip wood as a support column to the outer corner. Since that would block camera angles I won't be doing that but if your box is just for display I do suggest it.

I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have.

Dollhouse Miniature Green Onions

Watch the video here.

I decided to take a break this week from our lighting series and our corner roombox to do a bit of clay work. Actually I thought I had done this tutorial a long time ago. I discovered I had never shown you how to make green onions in kind of a roundabout way. I have been doing a “Clay 101” series over on my 18” doll channel for the last few months and I decided I wanted to do a tutorial over there on green onions so I could show some of the techniques I had been teaching. The first thing I did was check this channel to see my notes from a tutorial over here so I could save myself a few steps. I do that often when I am doing tutorials on that channel, I look here first to see my notes then translate them to the larger scale. I was more than a bit surprised when I found I had never done a tutorial over here on green onions! How did I miss this one??? Anyway I decided to film both tutorials at the same time so both channels can learn how to do this.

Next week I think we will probably finish up the corner roombox (if I remember to pick up the supplies I need or come up with a different idea for finishing)

I know I did a tutorial a long time ago on this channel on how to do the skinner blend and if you need a refresher on how that works you can find it here. I do love using the skinner blend, I find it very relaxing to watch the blend come together.

The clays I used were:

Fimo white

Sculpey III translucent

mix these in equal parts for the white blend

Sculpey III String Bean

Fimo Translucent green (or the same translucent you used in the white blend)

mix these in equal parts for the green blend

I find it really useful to bake a sample of my clay blends when I am adding translucent clay to the mixture since the color of those blends changes a lot when baked.

Feel free to use the same plain translucent clay in both blends, I used the green translucent because I had a lot more of it than of the plain.

We want our finished green onions in this scale to be no bigger in diameter that 1/16^th “ and about 1” long. Instead of measuring the diameter just make them as skinny as you can. They are going to be bigger than true “to scale” but get as close as you can.

Any time I am using a translucent clay I lower my baking temperature to 235° F because translucent clay has a bad habit of discoloring at higher temperatures. Bake these for about 10 minutes and allow to cool.