Making my Georgian Dolls House

To start:
I ordered some plain, untreated wooden shelves from Homebase costing around £20 and I measured the height and width of these. Then I worked out how much MDF wood I would need making sure I had extra on the top for the roof. Using a Jigsaw I cut out the windows, doors and the roof shapes ready to begin painting. The MDF wood was £7.50 from Homebase.

Here is a working drawing of the shapes to go around the windows-to be kept simple!

Next step was the exciting part where I selected the colours I wanted to use. I knew that pink was a definite so I found about 20 sample pots of shades of pink and then painted them onto some lining paper. Once dried I could see which ones went best together…This is the outcome.

The main colour on the outside of the dolls house was painted in this Crown Easy Rider. I originally brought 2 pots of Farrow and Ball paint thinking it was on special offer and got home to realise it was £7.00 for sample pots. So I took those back and noticed Crown paint samples were on sale for 93p each.

I wanted to test what colours would work best and how they would come out, so I stamped straight onto the lining paper sample paints I did earlier. I found the glittery ones looked magical-I picked this up from The Works for £1.49 and it does go a long way.

I have a selection of woodblock stamps which aren't the easiest to print with onto wood, but they do look very effective as a collection. You could try using foam stamps but the design wouldn't be as intricate.

This is what the final background looked like before I glued it to the shelves. I left a small space in-between each section so the glue stuck better to the wood (wood to wood sticks best). To glue it together I used Evo-Stik which is a wood adhesive and I left over night to set with loads of books on top to weigh it down. I also banged in small wood nails/pins to hold it firmly in place.

Finally I brought some decorative wood from Homebase, cut it down to size and also two little door knobs and using some metallic spray I coated them in a silvery/gold. 

Nearly finished-To add the finishing touches to my dolls house I used a metallic silver Sharpie pen and drew around the windows and added some little trees on the steps by the front door. Then I printed two stamps-one on the top of the house and the other above the door.

And this is the final outcome:

Georgian Dolls house

For my god daughters birthday I decided to her something special and a one off piece. I came across these Dolls House cabinets by Andrew Martin in January 2014 edition of Homes and Gardens magazine. I love the simplicity of these especially the chalk grey colour-very in this year!

From here I did a google search of Georgian style houses and created a mood board of some of my favourite houses and even little features I liked for example the patterning around this door frame.

I then looked at patterning I would put around my windows and door frames as Georgian houses are typically very simple with touches of pattern but mainly a few clean lines around the tops of windows. 

I looked at dome and triangular shapes.

Dog task

One of my tasks at college was to create a dog that looked like 

ourselves, so I selected an Afghan hound simply because I have

long, blonde hair. I won first prize in the dog competition.

Final Show exhibition

 This is a view of the board I had to display my work on. The top

piece is a large scale screen printed fabric and the bottom

piece is some hand printed wallpaper.

 Chest with my screen printed fabrics spilling out.

 A pillar in the centre of the room in which I had a little

extra space to display some work on.Two wallpapers,

three lampshades, a chair and a chest of fabrics.

 This is a view of the pillar with my work on and you can 

see in the background my board of fabric and wallpaper. 

A few layouts

I think this layout works well because the only colours 

used are grey and pink. The background colour of the 

chair pulls out the little circles of pink on the lamp.    

Two wallpapers lined up to create the pattern carrying on.

To the right is some of my fabrics folded to give little

gimples of the pattern.

Lampshade 2

Originally I made this design up as wallpaper but

then decided to cut it up and make it into a lamp.

 The base for the lampshades are old bits of

drift wood, picked up from Orwell Shore.



Wallpaper 5

This wallpaper is the same as Wallpaper 2, but here 

I changed the colour scheme to light grey on to dark

grey and off set every other collum.