Bonus Post - Off topic - Doll house vignette

 Scroll down for today's regular post.

Sadly, I have been forgetting to look in my spam -- and there were several comments waiting for me to moderate. There were also some very spammy comments that reminded me why I have to go through the moderating process. I will try to do better at checking the spam daily because I appreciate comments and would like them to pop up promptly.

 Thank you to Eva for help with my spelling. Also, a couple people suggested we find the snail mail address of the author of the NYTimes article about the joy of actual letters - which is a good idea. Or perhaps, we should just send some mail to the NYTimes - pick an editor and ask them to forward the mail to someone who is looking for a topic.

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And now, because I always have a photo with a blog post, here is something off topic. I need to start another blog for my off topics stuff - or consolidate my blogs - but it's just easier to deal with these photos here -- and then I can delete them from my phone so that I do not end up with 10,000 photos on my phone.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

By Jean Wilson

My daughter was not into making things so I missed out on making things with her when she was growing up. Happily, she has a daughter who is my clone and could make things all day. My daughter is happy to be learning how to make things with her daughter and is picking up all kinds of new skills. A little girl on their block had an adorable miniature vignette. Vignettes are like a doll house, only just one or two rooms. My daughter decided to order a kit and did not understand the difference between *small* and *tiny* and ended up with a kit that was very, very tiny. Luckily, I was going to be at their house for two weeks, so Alex (the granddaughter) and I started to work on the kit. 

She was a little peeved that she could not do the entire thing by herself, but every time I let her try something that was too hard for her, she handled it. Mostly, she applied glue using a straight pin which was seriously challenging. The instructions were translated from some other language and were skimpy. She can read - so it was helpful that she found the part that said the kit was recommended for people who were 16 years and older. Apparently, her mom did not read that.

And then --- there were the three electrical fixtures. The BigHelpfulBrother gave me a couple serious lessons via FaceTime and I was happy to get the electrical work done. We made a few little mistakes, but it mostly turned out perfectly. My daughter and son-in-law kept apologizing that I got stuck with the project - but I assured them that I truly loved the whole process. The only hard part was that sometimes the little helper would start inventorying the parts and then it was hard to sort them out. At the very end, I went through the instructions and tallied up how many parts there were -- and it was 285. That is a lot of parts.

My one regret was that I did not take photos of the items sitting on the tip of Alex's fingers to have a visual record of how tiny they were. And Alex was pretty upset that she did not have any dolls that were to scale.  We tried to find some online, but the dolls they sell for doll houses are very strange. I guess I will have to figure out how to make some.

I'm thinking we might need to build a complete doll house.....

The base is approx 4" x 6"

The bedroom loft over the living room - which has a ceiling fixture.

I put my wedding ring on the floor to show the scale of the slippers. The slippers were made of fabric, which I had to laminate to paper with glue. The pillows are just under 1/2" square and the directions were to glue the edges which made no sense. I could see no way of gluing the edges and still have them look like a pillow. So I put a bead of glue on the very edge of the fabric so that it would not fray and then stitched them by hand. I probably spent 1/2 hour on each pillow. And I have no idea how long the entire project took. Probably 20-30 hours.

More pillows.

The lighting isn't very good on the teacups. I had to form the wire handles by hand and then figure out how to glue the handle to the cup and also adhere a base.

The umbrella was really challenging. I saved it for last as I knew I would learn a lot on the other pieces. I did the chair cushions first and would have liked to redo them.

The birdhouse on the shelf was smaller than 1/4"x1/4"x1/4" - just cutting it out was challenging.