Today I finally finished the flooring in the middle room of the attic!  So, the first thing I want to show you is a comparison between the flooring I was going to use and the flooring I did use.

I was going to use this super plush flooring sample.  I have enough of them to cover the floor!  But I couldn't get them to lie flat... they had a bit of a curve, and I couldn't get the edges to match so that it looked like seamless carpeting.

Do you know what makes perfect dollhouse carpeting?  Upholstery fabric!  I got a few squares in different colors and patterns from a garage sale, and I attached it to a posterboard backing.  Tada!  A floor for my Gentleman Velociraptor to stand on!

Happy arting!

Okay, you folks, I know that I've been quiet lately, but I'm working on flooring and I want to post it when it's finished.  So I'll give you something from Garage Sale Saturday.

I got a tiny rubber ducky!  Among other things.

Look how interested in the duckie Van Gogh is!  He must be in a mood.

So, I did the flooring, and I experimented with my bricks idea.  (I know, I know, I'm an art rock star, people ask for my autograph and swoon at my feet regularly.)

I used some textured paper/paint samples that I got from a home improvement store, peeled off bits of that terrible green wallpaper, and cut bricks. 

A closer view:

Why visible bricks?  Well, the going theory is that Edgar Allan Poe was up to some Cask of Amontillado tomfoolery.  Don't worry, everyone in the house is present and accounted for.

Guys, you better be so proud of me!  I finally finished the flooring in the turquoise room!  I used shaggy carpeting that's evil to cut but it covers up the seams gloriously, and just melds. 

Here's my workspace.  I made a template of the room, then mapped it out with tiny squares.

It was actually the easiest flooring I've done, once everything was cut.  I had a few close calls with the boxcutter; kids, be more careful than me.  I'm a clumsy-bug.  The shagginess of the carpet made it really forgiving, especially since it has this kind of chaotic look to the weave already.

Here's the Doctor talking to a benevolent giantess.

Here's a closer look at the floor proper.

OKAY FOLKS.  HI.  HI I HAVE MISSED YOU SO.

I am living in a pit of artistic squalor. 

The reason this is taking me so long is that I have some serious decisions to make.

Here's a groovy dollar store find!

The cheap-looking satin bow and ruffles are held on by hot glue, so I peeled it off, and now there's just the one question: am I going to keep it white and classy, or paint it a wildly bright color like the rest of the house?

And I have new carpet for the teal-ish room that I went medieval on a few days ago!  But I have to decide which one to use.  The picture doesn't do it justice, but they both have flecks of green in it, and other colors, and they're pretty gosh darn groovy, and shaggy.  I'm equally enamored with both.  I could just chop them into smaller squares and checkerboard it, but I don't know aaaah what do you think?

Also deciding which room I want to make the Batcave since there really isn't a basement.  HEY YOU GUYS GIVE ME YOUR OPINIONS.  I want to keep them in a little jar have some input.

In a furious fit of obsessive compulsocity I ripped up the carpeting from yesterday.  It wasn't working. 

Here's something that I learned the hard way that no one ever told me: SUPERGLUE DISCOLORS STUFF AND THEN IT HARDENS AND THEN IT'S USELESS.  I knew to try it on a sample bit, and I did, but maybe I didn't try enough.  At any rate, I may try to salvage what I have, or I may get more samples and start from scratch.  Only time (tomorrow) will tell, because I have another rule: never art anxiously.  At least, never for something that matters.  Go to town on a canvas to get out some aggression with abstract splashes of paint and swishes of glitter and snips with a scissor, but don't try for precision work.

I do have a tiny stroke of brilliance for you to make up for it, though. Six words: Dollar Store Battery Operated Tiny Booklamps.  They'd make the perfect indoor lighting.  You're welcome!  Happy arting.

Okay, so, no post yesterday.  That's because I came home late and I was tired.  I have a rule: never art tired.  It's the same reason I don't get drunk.  I'd swerve all over the place, cry to my friends about how much I suck, and then stare bleary-eyed and blinking at the results of the evening.

Flooring day.  Did you hear my screams from where you are?

It started out like this:

This terrible floor makes Batman cover his face as he weeps.

I made a pattern, and tried to follow it, and ended up experimenting more than I followed the pattern.  I glued each piece as I went.

Better, but the seams in between are too huge, and Batman is now wailing on his stomach:

I superglued the seams together, dotting glue here, dotting glue there, and pushing the fibers together.  It's a little better, but I still have to play with it.  See?  Now Batman can do what he does best.  Punch bad guys.

By the by, thank you for the comments and keep them coming!   They totally brighten my whole day!

You might notice a distinct lack of thingamajigs and doodads and whatsits in this post.  And that's because my mom brought up, quite rightly, that this was a dollhouse building site, and my dollhouse is still languishing while I make thingamajigs and doodads and whatsits for inside this shack of a dollhouse. 

So tomorrow I'm doing flooring (uuugh, flooring), and I intend to complain loudly about it the whole time (loudly, you hear me?  I am going to be in one of those moments where I scream, and the camera pans away from me and out to the house, and the camera pans out to the city, and the camera pans out to the planet small in a swathe of space, and all the while you can still hear me screaming).

In preparation for that grueling task that I'm hoping to get to tomorrow if I can finish my reading, I am doing absotively nada today.  Well.  Paint touch-ups in the room I'm going to carpet, but.  Nada. 

Okay, homeskillets.  Because I was super lazy yesterday I decided to do hard work today.  Flooring.  Which I have been dreading.  Mostly because I'm making it up as I go along, and I have no idea whether this method will work.

But look at how bad the floor looks now!  It looks like a place that a sick koala bear would go to bask in his own misery.  Something had to be done.

If you're a big doofus who hates measuring like me (and you have no right angles to work with, like me), you can make a pattern.  Like so!  You do it by taking pieces of cardboard and paper and taping them together in the room that you're going to be flooring, until it reaches all of the edges and is a perfect fit.  It looks stupid, but it's good for you.  Like yoga.

What I'm using for this floor is bamboo placemats that I got at the dollar store.  See?  Pretty nifty, huh?  To get the brown fabric edging off, I just pulled the stitches.  It can be tedious work, so I just found a youtube playlist full of Queen music and rocked out as I worked*.

Then it was time to fit it to the pattern.  I taped the placemats to a big piece of cardboard, traced my pattern, and cut.  Cutting bamboo is tricky, evil business.  It's hard to turn corners with your scissors without splitting the whole piece.  What I do is just make horizontal cuts, then vertical cuts, and I let the piece come out that way, rather than trying to turn my scissor.

When you glue, make sure it's flat, squish it with books if you have to.  If you have to make corrections, you can use some of your scrap and cut it to size.  I have a few slats that I'm going to replace.

And voila!  You have a room where the aforementioned koala bear can recover and have a cup of tea in peace**.

*this is related to whistling while you work, but with fewer cartoon birds
**the area rug is a potholder also found in the dollar store (two for one buck!)  The chair I got from my sister who went antiquing.  And the cup I've had for a while.