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. 

I wish I could say that I made the bunny slippers for Poe because his feet are the most stable and he was the most likely to be able to stand in them.  But I didn't.  I did it because it was funny.

Look at it.  Felt, white glue, embroidery floss, and patience.  The bottom is that thin cardboard you get from the backs of notepads. 

A closer look:

Look at how thrilled he is about it.

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

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.