Painting kitchen floor tiles - day two

I've found photographing my projects to be immensely helpful when trying to recreate something in real life.  I think we've all had the experience of thinking something looked fine, then taking a photo of it (especially a macro photo or a shot from "doll's eye" perspective), and realizing that we've screwed something up :)

This is very true as I continue my journey with the kitchen floor!

First of all, this is my inspiration photo.  I love the fact that the tile colours are so varied, yet all clearly belong together.  They're grounded, somehow.

And here's where things are this morning, after working over the floor with the original pigments, adding ultramarine blue and ochre.

I can see that I'm getting there, for sure.  It's not dreadful, but it all needs to be tied together.  I need to stipple the tiles with a darker colour, especially the paler tiles.  I need to put in a nice dark wash for the grout (that will be easier now that it's all sealed -- I can wipe the wash off the face of the tiles, leaving the pigment in the grout lines.  I also don't have to be afraid of using more and richer colour.  I think I'll do one more pass with some deeper terracotta colours and then try to create the grout look.

If anyone has some ideas, please shout out!

Painting kitchen floor tiles

NB: I'm laughing right now, because looking at the photos I took of the process of painting the floor clearly reveals that a cat or cats used the kitchen floor for a napping place sometime over the last day or so :)  I didn't actually notice the incredible amount of cat hair until I was putting an acrylic glaze on the floor!

Here are the tiles before I started painting -- dry, not shrunk at all, but cracked in places.

I don't think I've ever painted clay before, certainly not as an adult.  What I should have realized was that it's incredibly absorbent, of course. 

I did a watery wash of raw umber, first, to bring out the grouting.

The paler places are where the tiles have dried right out. Fortunately a little of the raw umber was left where I wanted it.

I then did what I'd normally do:  start putting on thin washes of colour (palette at the moment raw umber, burnt sienna and black) on individual tiles.  The thin washes didn't work terribly well, because the water dried leaving very little impression of the pigment.  I decided to seal the tiles before going any further (which I would do right at the beginning, in the future.

I used what I had on hand - acrylic gloss medium really watered down (to take away some of the gloss).  Seems to work fine.  Any clear acrylic craft finish with a satin or matte finish would be great.

Ah, cat hair.  *sigh* But this close up of the tiles after being sealed shows that they're definitely coming along.  Lots to do yet, but it's a good first stage.

I couldn't resist popping the walls back in place (the door has been glued on the back wall, as you can see) and taking a look at the scene, even though it's really far from being done :)  I think I'm going to like it!

William and Mary kitchen door

I decided to use the lovely strap hinges I bought in England on a rather rustic kitchen door I'm making for the WMH. 

They're real metal, but a darkish grey, and I asked David if I should paint them to make them look more like iron.  "Use the black patina", he suggested.

If you don't know it, black patina is used by ship and railway modellers, but it's mostly used by stained glass artists, to give lead or solder the dark patina of age instantly.  David introduced me to it a few years ago for another project I was working on.

And it worked brilliantly on the little hinges!  You can still see that they're metal (once you paint them, they might as well be plastic) and it darkens them enough to make them look authentic.

I bought a smallish bottle of the stuff last year in Toronto at a stained glass supply shop, and it will probably last me years :) You can try it on all sorts of metals.  You just brush it on and if it's going to work, it works instantly. Chemistry is magic!

This door will go in the back of the model. It will probably never be used, but it's got damned good looking hinges! It was made precisely the way I made the kitchen door for the castle, but I just bevelled the edges of the boards rather than really going to town on the carving ...

Ground floor foam walls

I'm on a roll!  I just can't stop cutting foam!

Here's the back wall in place --about 47" long and 11 inches high:

Now for the tricky one:  the gable end of the kitchen.  Because the kitchen is just a one storey extension to the main building, the kitchen end of the house needs to be angled to take the roof (which will be non opening).  I decided to add part of the chimney, too.  Because the front edge of the foam is set back 3/4 of an inch from the front edge of the model, so that a wooden facing strip can be put on it, I have to take that into account when designing my roof.

Right angles are good for the up and down bits ...

45 degree angles for the roof line:

Here's the gable end all drawn out:

And here it is propped in place!  You can see that when the 3/4 inch facing strip is put along the front edge of the foam, everything should line up neatly (I fervently hope).

You can also see that I should have changed my blade near the end :)

But it's actually starting to look like a house!  Woo hoo!

And I've used less than $8.00 worth of foam :)

I've ordered some yummy things for the house -- flooring for the front hall, lots of wallpaper and a few light fixtures, but there're many things I can work on to get the model to the next step while I'm waiting for my purchases to arrive.

First I have to mark where the interior walls hit that back wall, so I can start marking in the rear window openings and the back door ...  Then I can make the staircase unit for the hall, the back door for the kitchen and the kitchen fireplace.

Cutting first foam wall -- drying tiles -- Mum's doll

This is going to be a rather "bitty" update :)
First of all, I bought a lovely new utility knife (box cutter, Olfa cutter) and cut out my first foam wall!

The walls for the ground floor are 11" high, and the plans for this house call for the foam side walls to be set back from the front edge of the base 3/4". (These forward edges of foam will later be covered with 3/4 inch thick wood to which the dollhouse doors will be attached with piano hinges.)

Cutting the foam was really, really easy. I was prepared for it to go all granular on me, but by cutting slowly and in layers (i.e. not trying to cut all the way through on the first pass) and with a super sharp knife, everything went smoothly.

Here's the first wall propped up!  This is probably going to be the dining room's fireplace, but I just couldn't resist getting a sense of the scale of the thing, with Kris Compas's gorgeous little settee in place!

Next update:  the kitchen floor.  Well, it's definitely cracking, but it's not shrinking :) I'll rub some crack filler into most of the cracks before I paint.  It certainly is drying fast, and it's a nice terracotta colour ... I should be painting it by Friday!

And, finally, I took a few photos of Mum's doll in her roombox -- she looks very much at home there, and has made friends with Mini-Emma :)  Mum hasn't named her, but it's just a matter of time -- Mum names EVERYTHING, including our 1950s era teak salt shaker/pepper grinder ("Lily St Cyr" -- because she shakes and grinds ...)

Terracotta kitchen tiles -- impress mould tutorial

So, time to do the kitchen floor in the William and Mary house.  I decided to use air drying clay for the first time.  I was amazed to find terracotta coloured clay in my local art supply shop the other day.  I'd never seen coloured air dry clay before, and I was so bowled over by the novelty of it I decided to use it for the kitchen floor.  I used a tile impress mould from Malcolm's Miniatures for these. 

When I'd used my impress moulds in the past, it was on quite small bits of rolled out polymer clay (for the insides of fireplaces and the like).  This was a much bigger project, about 15" deep and 11 inches wide!

I started rolling out the clay on a piece of parchment (or baking) paper.  Not a great idea, because although the parchment paper keeps the clay from sticking, it also wrinkles.  Note:  If you have something hard and smooth to roll your clay out on, it would go much better :)  I started rolling out with a (full) wine bottle until David took it away from me, muttering something about the sediment :)  He then returned with my kitchen rolling pin and placed it firmly in my hand!

I just couldn't get a big enough piece rolled out to the right thickness to cover the kitchen floor at one go, so I decided to piece it together on the floor itself, and then make it smooth.

I spread white glue on the floor and then began piecing in chunks of thinly rolled clay.  I tried to put the straight edges of my chunks along the perimeter of the room.

Once I had all the floor covered, I rolled it smoother with the rolling pin.  You can see little air bubbles in the above photo.  I just pricked them with a nail or stylus and rerolled over them. 

I started from the back.  I should have started from the front edge, so that a row of complete tiles would be right on the most visible part!  I started off very carefully matching things up, but got a little sloppy later on (as is inevitable with me).  When I was done, I neatened the edges where the foam and plywood will be glued.

Now I need to let it dry until Friday or Saturday, and then I'll paint it. That should conceal a world of irregularities!

Staining floorboards

I just got back from a fruitful trip to Bridgewater, our nearest shopping Mecca :) I bought a small can of Minwax PolyShades in Mission Oak to try out, and a nice brick of terra cotta coloured air dry clay (that's for the kitchen floor).

I LOVE the Mission Oak colour.  I didn't want the woodwork in this house to be too dark (it wouldn't have had time to really darken too much), and was going back and forth on what colour to pick.   I wanted a darker oak shade, and the colour sample looked pretty good in the store.  Here's the dining room floor after I rubbed on one coat of stain:

I really, really like it.  It's a big load off my mind to know what the basic wood colour is going to be for the house, which will have a lot of woodwork in it.

Yummy!

I'll do the parlour's floor the same way, and then I'll start playing with air dry clay and my Malcolm's Miniatures impress stamps for the kitchen floor!

It's so refreshing to have a new project to work on -- do other people feel that, too, when you launch into something new?

Scribing floorboards - tutorial

I scribed the floorboards for the two wood-floored rooms into the plywood base this morning. 

First, decide which way your strips of flooring will run. If you're using plywood, then I advise you to go with the grain :) (I scribed the boards on the upper floor of the kitchen wing against the grain and it's the biggest mess imaginable!)  Because the grain of this plywood is obviously along the long side, as it tends to be, my floor boards are going to run across the length of the house rather than back to front.  This is important because if you choose to have visible beams anywhere, they need to go at right angles to your floorboards for consistency.  (So, for example, my kitchen beams will run back to front.)

I used a long steel ruler and a steel knitting needle to do the actual scribing.  You need a very firm straight edge because your scribing implement (knitting needle, awl, gouge, empty ball point pen, etc) will want to follow the wood's natural grain, and we want to force it to make nice straight lines :)

Starting at the back of the base, and moving forward,  I scribed lines just as hard as I could into the plywood.  Because this is circa 1690, the floor boards don't have to be perfectly even (thank god).  Much later than that and you'll want to make your boards equally spaced. 

Then I imagined where the floor joists might be (remember, the invisible, imaginary joists run from back to front under this floor).  Real floor boards butted into one another across the joists, and it's also where they're nailed down.   To represent this, decide where your joists will be.  Place your ruler firmly along this line (in this case from from to back -- in any case, at right angles to your floor boards).  Scribe a short line across the width of one "board", then skip two boards, and scribe another short line.  These represent the ends of the boards, sitting across the joint.  You'll end up with something like the example above.  (I'm not showing you the section where I DIDN'T skip two boards, and instead went mad and scribed a whole bunch of boards that didn't need to be scribed.  Sigh.  I'll put a damned rug or something over it, but it will haunt me for the rest of my days:)

Then add the nail marks.  I did this with a small sharp nail -- pressing it into every board, because every board gets nailed to the joist. You could probably put four nail marks into the boards that have the scribed line down them (two on each side of the join) and just two marks into the other boards.  You can also wait until after you've stained and add black magic marker dots, or you can go nuts and hammer teeny tiny little nails into every floorboard :)

Next I'll stain and varnish these two sections of floor.

Starting on the William and Mary House!

I've been planning like a fiend and sketching madly for the last couple of days, and I have my plans pretty well worked out for the W&M House.  Yesterday we finally went to the lumberyard to get the first lot of materials!

I'm following Derek Rowbottom's basic plans and techniques for the country house in his excellent book, Making Georgian Dolls' Houses, but I'll be making a few alterations.

His original plans make a two storey plus attic building 38" long  and 16" deep, with six main rooms and four attic rooms.  I'm modifying it to make a 48" long building with seven main rooms and three attic rooms -- I'm adding a single storey addition on the ground floor for a kitchen, so that I can have a separate entrance hall (in Rowbottom's original, the front door comes right into the dining room :)


From left to right on the ground floor:  kitchen, dining room, entrance hall, parlour
From left to right on the first floor:  bedroom, library, blue and white room
From left to right in the attic:  servants' bedroom, hall, children's bedroom

I bought a 4' x 2' piece of good one side birch plywood, 3/8" thick.  I also bought two 2' x 8' sheets of 1 inch thick medium density polystyrene foam, since it's the material Rowbottom recommends for side and back walls.  I'm very curious to see what it's like working with this material, because everything I've built so far has been plywood all the way.  If nothing else, it should make the model lighter!

David cut the plywood to size this morning for the base:

We then made an underframe from .75" square pine and glued and clamped it in place on the underside of the base.

Here's the base on the dining room table so I can mark out the different flooring types that I'll need.  The kitchen is going to be tiled, the dining room wood (I'll scribe and stain this nice plywood), the entrance hall will be marble and the parlour wood.

Here's two short lengths of the builders' foam (we had to break each 8' length into two bits to fit it in the car :))

It's got a very useful rabbet on each edge which will mean that I'll be able to get a nice join on the base:

It's not as pretty as flowers, but I've finally started this project and I couldn't be more excited!

200+ followers! Welcome, everyone!

Imagine that, over 200 followers!  I'm gobsmacked.  Reading and commenting on other people's blogs turns what many people imagine is a solitary, self-referential activity -- blogging -- into a true community.  Thank you all for opening my eyes to the huge world of tiny things, and especially the wonderful people who share our interests in the miniature!

Welcome to:

Naty, a Spanish miniaturist, who writes at El Mundo Mágico de Naty and whose latest project is a bakery!

Jonna or "rudoo" who blogs about miniatures at  BuggaBoos.

JRB Creations, who makes gorgeous small stuffed animals, blogs about her work at JRB Creations and sells her work on Etsy and eBay!  She also makes some 1:12 scale minis :)

Susan aka "microcrochetmad", who, as her user name suggests, crochets the maddest little teeny tiny objects!  Check out her microcrochetmad blog!

Daisy is a Brazilian AIM miniaturist who has lots of blogs -- one of them is Daisy's Miniaturas 1/12.

Miia is Finnish, and blogs bilingually (Finnish and English) at Hallahovi.

Jamie is a Kansas Hallowe'en artist, and she blogs at Creepy Creations!

Emily is a young fashion design student who is taking up the family hobby of miniatures -- she's blogging about her latest project, based on the BBC Merlin series at EmilyClaireFashions.

And then there's rmartedal, ele B, Margriet van der Zee, otterine, Lyn and Kathy Beaman about whom I can find no extra information, but who are most welcome, regardless :)

If I've missed your site or shop, then please leave a comment so we can find you!

I'm going to stir around and work up some kind of giveaway to mark this milestone in the life of the Tudor Dollhouse Project Blog, but I want to consult with the KnitWits first :)