Spiral stairs and other delights :)

Thursdays are always busy days here, because that's the day the KnitWits (the four girls I play with) come over. We did accomplish a few things, in between several hands of Happy Families (Evangelista won them all -- well done!) and celebrations of Fred's birthday (she's officially a tween now, a label she cordially detests).  Well, she's twelve, she's entitled :)

Tiddles and I worked on the spiral staircase.  I had cut a 1/4" dowel roughly to length, and I made a temporary base it could be stuck into so that we could construct the staircase out of the castle, and then move it when we'd worked everything else out.

I was using the rather thin suggestions for construction from Geoffrey West's book  Tudor dolls' houses.

This is a close up of it after I put it in the castle this morning, but it gives an idea of the basic construction.  We cut 1 3/4" lengths of dimensional balsa (the balsa was 3/4" x 1"), shallowly sliced off one corner, used a rounded file on it to make it fit better against the curve of the dowel, and glued these lengths on top of each other.  (If I had been clever, I would have sanded every piece perfectly before assembly -- now I have to sand it afterwards ...)

It was very hard to start the build, because the darned thing kept toppling over!  Finally Tiddles and I decided to just glue up the bottom five or six steps and leave it alone for a while, while we had a snack and played cards.

When we came back to it, I got the bright idea of using Quick Grip glue (our unofficial sponsor -- someone from the company, Karen, actually left a comment on my earlier post about the bake oven construction -- it was like a visit from a celebrity :)  which worked a treat.  I still just glued stairs on in groups of six or so, but it was certainly stickier!

This morning I drilled a hole in the base of the kitchen floor where the stairs will go, and tried them out for size:

Looks pretty good!  It's got to be sanded and then painted to look like stone, then I have to figure out the cut out for the upper floor, which may tax all my spatial abilities.

Note:  it would be more in scale if the lengths of the steps were longer, but I was building this to fit in a very small space.  I've been up some pretty small spiral staircases in cathedrals and so forth in England, but I suspect there aren't any quite as small in diameter as this one!

In other news ...

I made one door for the bake oven -- this one didn't have to be removeable, because I intend it to be closed for display, but what the heck?  It is!

And Tiddles sewed on some lengths of trim to her tapestry, made a hanging rod with bead finials, and hung it up, proudly, in the Great Hall for all to admire: