Today I made a Sorting Hat!  I'm on a severe Harry Potter kick right now, rereading the books and remembering how badly I want to be a wizard.  I'm taking that out on my dollhouse.

I made it out of real leather, from a pair of pants I got at a thrift store for the precise purpose of snipping and stitching.  And let me tell you: sewing through leather is so not worth it.  I should've used that polyester that I have that looks like leather, but that frays.  And now my fingers hurt.  Count yourself lucky that you don't live with me, because then you'd have to listen to me whine about how much my hands hurt and how I'm bleeding and stuff.

So what I did is I made a sort of donut shape out of one bit of leather, and a conical shape with another, two strips, and basically the rest is self-explanatory.  Except I gathered bits of the cone with in-out stitching to give it that rumpled look.

I think it still needs some roughing up, but I think this is a good start!  Happy arting!

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.

This post almost didn't happen, because I worked out yesterday for the once a week workout that I do and I didn't want to get up, sit down, get up, paint, sit down, wait for the paint to dry, get up, crouch.  What can I say, though.  Today I'm a limping artist with a mission.

Check out these pen caps.  They look pretty uglytastic, huh?  The first thing you want to do is snip off the bottom, either with scissors you don't mind ruining or a pocketknife (but be super careful).  Look for caps you can imagine as vases or lamps.  Ones that are fluted, or ones that have a nice shape.  The white blurry blob is fluted, and I think it would look pretty elegant as a vase, with a few modifications.

You don't want to try painting it with regular acrylic paint.  A long strip will peel off just when you think you're finished and then you will throw a mondo fit.  Trust me.  I've done it so you don't have to.  And if you paint it thick enough to cover, it'll look lumpy.  I know, I know, the first thing they teach you in Artist 101 is that you don't put acrylic paint on slick plastic because it won't take, but I wanted to try it anyway.
Then I tried covering it with paper, and I did make a workable paper bottom, but overall it looked schlocky, not the professional-looking stuff I promised.

My mom had a brilliant idea.  Nail polish!  It sticks like a dream.  I wanted to try a different kind of fake lightbulb so I dipped a q-tip in pale yellow paint and then this incredibly shiny gloss.  The picture doesn't look that great because, well... camera phone I AM SO SORRY GUYS I'LL GET MORE BATTERIES ONE DAY. 

And the final picture, with my brother watching tv in the background.  The base looks kind of blocky, but I guarantee that in real life the cap tapers up just slightly and it actually looks pretty neat.  It's this really deep blue enamel with a neato sheen to it.  I might add a pale ribbon to break up the space about two-thirds of the way up.  I still need to work on the bottom a little.  But hey, not too bad for a first experiment!  I imagine Doctor Frankenstein said the same thing.

Happy arting!

Lamps!  They're super exciting!

I'm using those thingamajigs from IKEA, and a template for a lampshade that I found on the internets.  The internets will be a great resource for dollhousing on a budget because it has printables!  Printables will be your bff (best friend forever).  You will paint each other's toenails, you will gossip about the cutest boy/girl/alien/robot/otherwise unspecified together, you will call each other up crying over the season finale of that show that you both love.

Basically, printables are normal things but shrunk down to tiny size and flattened and put on the computer so they are printable.  I've seen everything from teeny movie posters, to 3-D foldable Victorian chests, to tarot cards, to whole printable dollhouses.

Anyway, I printed the lampshade on cardstock, scored the folding lines, cut it out, glue-stickified the fancy paper I wanted onto the cut out template, and cut around it one more time so I'd be sure it would match up exactly.  In case you don't know: I'm not very good at cutting.  Or gluing.  Art is hard.

I painted the IKEA thingamajig with five million coats of gold so that it would cover.  The gold picks up the gold accents in the super rocking paper I chose.  I used ticky tack to keep it still when I painted it, because, again, I'm totally not a delicate, graceful flower.  I'm more of a sledgehammer than a surgical instrument.  If I can make this look good, anyone can.

I wanted it to look as much like a real lamp as I could when you looked down the lampshade hole, so I took a clear bead and some wire and tried to imitate the look of a lightbulb by stuffing the ends of the wire into the beadhole and pulling until there was a loop, then flipping the loop. 

Then I took another wire, curved it into a circle so it would fit near the narrower part of the lampshade, and I had pieces that were too long so I could attach the shade and the lamp itself, and then I hotglued everything together.  Make sure to click on the pictures to make them bigger.  I took them with my cellphone camera, so.  Sorry for the quality!

Check it out, yo!  The glue stick is for scale. 

You might be thinking, "But Heather, I can't get to IKEAland, how do I make lamps and vases that look groovy?"  I'll cover that tomorrow, for sure.  Happy arting!  And feel free to leave comments on the blog-o'-blog!  I'd love some feedback.

Okay, so this probably wouldn't have taken me eighteen thousand years to make if I weren't so focused on making it fancy-schmancy.  I'm annoying like that.

This bulletin board is actually pretty basic.  Take a coaster, cut it into a rectangle, back it with cardboard because probably it's going to be sort of flimsy.  Remember those bamboo slats from yesterday?  You can make a workable frame with the scraps.  What I did is I used two slats that are still attached, so I could curve it around the edge of the coaster and cover up any raggedness.  Trust me, there probably will be a little bit of raggedness.

It took me forever to find the shade of purple that I wanted, and it's still not 100% there, but then I painted some gloss over it and I'm more chill about it.  For scale, the shortest side of the bulletin board is slightly shorter than a standard pair of tweezers.

And the pins!  These are just regular pins, cut with  a wire cutter, and you are probably a lot better at this sort of thing than I am so you are probably not going to stab yourself in the fingers so often that people don't even look up anymore when you yelp (you know who you are).  Slide a small bead onto the pin, glue it, and leave it standing pointy end up on a piece of plastic wrap until it dries like the world's most painful cookies.
I added some shinies onto my board, just stuff I had lying around or stuff I could cobble together from stuff I had lying around.  A TARDIS, for the Doctor.  A red bow tie for the Doctor.  And a raven's feather for Poe. 

And in case you can't read the notes....
First one:
Pick up:
coffee
cheese
Lenore
detergent

Second one:
You can't put a person on a grocery list.
* Toad

Third one, all smudged and crinkled:
I'M ON IT!
-- DOCTOR