Let’s Digress……

So it has been quite a while since I have updated the blog for DragonFly Manor. Let’s take a peek ay the progress I have made so far and I’ll fill you in on everything as we go. Ready….set….let’s go!

Here is Flora sitting in her little window. This is a view of her house before we started priming the inside.

Flora grabbed her nail file and decided if I wasn’t going to do anything then she was. So we started wall papering her bedroom walls. I used scrapbook paper and some ribbon for her bedroom walls. You can see the pink “carpet” under neath her wall. Where she is sitting will eventually become her daybed.

Here is the downstairs view after we primed the inside of the house. We are making progress now.

Today I took a friend to a resale shop here in town so she could tr to find some items for her wedding. However, I discovered a few items of my own for the dollhouse.

I found a dollhouse that is an icecream shop/sweets shop. I also found a few little garden decorations I can use when I landscape the outside of the house.

These are little shopping or gift bags with bunnies on them. Aren’t they just too cute?! There were also some small easter eggs, Flora says she needs an Easter Basket now, does the Easter Bunny deliver to tiny people too?

There was also a bag of small tree ornaments that I thought would look cute in a hutch for Flora, however, she pulled a couple of them out and decided they were toys for her room. I told her she could keep the two she was holding.

At the end of the picture session, I look over and Flora had plopped herself right in the middle of the trinkets saying this is mine, that one is for you, oh look another one! I think we are in for a long argument if I intend to actually get these from her tonight. I guess I’ll let her keep them for now. I’ll be sure to post some more photos as soon as I start working on the Manor again!

Daydreaming

I do not have pictures to update DragonFly Manor’s blog with because I have been lax and not working on her as much as I should. I have made progress, but I forgot to take photos of the steps for most of it! Shame on me! 🙂

 

Today, instead of posting the boring details about DF Manor without all the cool pictures, I will post my new dream house!

I walked into Hobby Lobby to gaze up at the houses they have on display and right there in the very middle was a BRAND NEW HOUSE! I was in love the moment I saw her! I have to have her!

 

Isn’t she just beautiful?! She is called the Painted Lady like in San Fransisco. I am not thrilled about the colors they used for the display, but those can always be changed, just look at DF Manor! I am not sure who will live here yet or what the house will end up being, but I am sure crossing fingers I get her for Christmas (hint hint DH!).

I promise to go home and snap a few more pictures and start posting them into the blog! Until then, enjoy the picture I just posted and feel free to reread the blog entries! 😉

House of another Color!

I have been working on Dragonfly Manor I promise! I finished all the stucco work and even painted the house. She is still in need of a few touch ups here and there, I can see a little white still showing through.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have paint!

I am really pleased with the colors on my house. I think the pink and green stand out really well with the purple I have chosen! I am getting very excited to be adding various colors to the house finally!

Unfinished front door

Here is what the front door looks like unfinished (still have two pink panels to put on the bottom) and unattached and without trim. I am still priming and painting the trim pieces. I will be adding those at some point!

Look we have a window!

This is a close up of the large dormer window. You can see in the first photo that there are two other windows installed upstairs! These are not the ones I did stained glass on, those have not been installed yet! This is as much progress as I have made on the house lately. Flora, Inferno and I have been kind of tired. Between “big people” life and mini-life, Flora and I have decided we need some rest. I’ll post some more pictures of Dragonfly Manor as I make progress on her! I hope you enjoyed the color changes that DFM has undergone!

Flora Needs to Read

I ordered something for my dollhouse a while back and was all excited to get home from work and open it! I never get mail address to me that isn’t bills or what have you! So KNOWING a little box was going to be arriving just for me had me all a tingle. My husband called me from home to tell me my package had arrived in the mail while he was home from work (oops got busted on that one!). I looked forward to it for the rest of the day! I walked in and went in search of my box and look what I found!

Flora finds her "stuff"

You can’t see it very well beause when she noticed me she tried to rush around and stuff everything back in and it blurred the picture. If you look closely, there is a wreath on her head, a wand in her hand and a bottle of fairy dust laying to the side. Right in front of her is an adorable book on a podium all about dragonflies (the house IS Dragonfly Manor after all)! I have no clue where Inferno is, he must have gotten burried in the paper that was in the box! Naughty Flora! Guess we are going to have to introduce her to “Hooked on Phonics” and teach her how to read her name! I sent her scampering off with the new “pretties” as she likes to call them and got back to work on my dollhouse. The last you saw of it, there was a light coating of “stucco” on it. I decided it was too thick and I didn’t really like it so I scraped it all off and tried again with a different product. Here is the result.

Stucco take 2

I got brave and applied it to the whole house. It has been put on, dabbed with a brush, the points kocked down and I started painting it. I have one whole side and most of the front painted purple now. I will show you pictures of that later. I am really excited to see it going together. The other colors are going to stand out well I think!

Before I leave, I thought I would post a picture of something non doll house related. Here are a couple of my clay creations. Santa Baby and Bunny are the only two remaining clay creations I have that have survived. I had two crawling babies at one point but they got broken during a move.

Clay Creations

I hope you have enjoyed today’s update of the dollhouse! Stay tuned for more!

Texturize!

So I started texturing the side of my house last night to see what it would look like. I had to get really brave because this is commiting to an idea at last and actually applying it to the house. I got most of the way down the side wall and ran out of Spackle. I will be having to go to the store today to get some more! It doesn’t look like much at the moment as it is just plain white. I think the pretty shade of purple I have picked out will bring out the lumps and bumps though! Here take a peek!

We have Stucco....or snow?!

DH suggested I make it a Christmas house and tell everyone it snowed on the house! LOL Silly Hubby! I kept explaining that it was white but will soon be purple and that would be some funny colored snow. His suggestion?! Paint it yellow! LOL My DH is so funny! Seriously, I think it is coming out fine but that stuff is tough to work with. As you can see from the pictures, there is no sign of Flora or Inferno. I think they heard my grumbles from the other room where they are temporarily living and decided it was better to stay clear for a while! I will try to finish the “stucco” over the weekend so I can actually paint the purple walls and start installing my new stained glass windows!

They call it…Progress?

So I have picked up working on Dragonfly Manor now that DH helped me fix the bottom floor which was warped due to my leaving the bottom skirting off the house. Problem fixed and now I am on the way. I installed the porch stairs yesterday.

Porch Stairs

While I was watching the glue dry (see the white on the bottom stair? Nope, not dry yet) I worked on a few other projects for the house. Recently I came across some Stained Glass Paint at the craft store. It promised to create the textured look of real stainded glass. SO I doctored up the plastic silk screened windows that came with the kit. Although the redish color looked pink in the container, it dried almost red. Which I guess is ok because the tiles I picked for the kitchen floor are a redish color. I also Gessoed and painted the window casings.

Pink Window Casings and Stained Glass Windows

Next I painted some of the porch trim because you really CAN have too much of a good thing. Amazingly enough, I DID get tired of seeing pink! SO I broke out the pretty green and got to work. I Gessoes the trim and painted it all green.

Porch Trim

Since watching paint dry is quite boring as I have discovered, I will post another project I did a few days ago. I attempted to make some perfume bottles and a vanity tray from beads and findings I had in my stash. Pardon the blurry pictures, I will get better ones with my camera later.

Blury Perfume Bottles

Here is a picture just to show you how small they are. This is the whole thing on the tips of my fingers.

Blurry Perfume Bottles

Again, sorry for the blur, I took the pictures with my phone and it is hard to get clear closeups that way.

Flora and Inferno are still asleep, otherwise they would have been helping me write our blog. I think they have been staying up late getting used to their surroundings.

We are off to a movie, I’ll get back to work on Dragonfly Manor soon! Keep a look out for more pictures!

Sneaky Residents

So I come home last night all excited to start working on Dragonfly Manor again and when I walk in, I find someone has decided to move in and considered starting working on the insides of the house on her own! Look what I found when I walked in!

She calls herself Flora

I found this little fairy sitting on my bottle of glue (which was across the room by the way) and digging through my small parts box looking at the flooring tiles I want to use in the kitchen. She says the redish pink is VERY pretty and can she keep them. I told her they were for the house and she promply informed me that she and her pet dragon Inferno would be moving in to please make her somewhere comfortable to sleep. It seems she used to be a princess but she kissed the wrong toad and he turned into an angry wizard who zapped her with his wand. His intent was to turn her into a fly so he could eat her (he had not lost all of his froggy senses yet after all) but misfired and zapped her into a fairy instead. Still disgruntled about being plucked from his happy life as a lazy frog, he broke his wand in half, proclaimed he quit and left her as she was. She has been wandering around ever since looking for a happy place to live. She seems to be friends with the other fairies who live in my garden and heard about Dragonfly Manor. She got so excited she thought she would come see it for herself. She was very displeased with the house itself proclaiming it dull and unfit to live. However, she got into the “pretties” and decided to give it a chance. She did make me promise that it would be colorful and fun. So I guess I will have an extra pair of hands from now on. Let’s just hope Inferno does not like to wander off with things!

Eye Candy Time!

So things have been busy and I have not had a chance to work on my pretty little dollhouse as much lately so there is nothing new and no new pictures to report. However, I did manage to find a few odds and ends for the house! So in lieu of pictures of the house, I am going to post pictures of stuff!

 

 

Here is a hutch I found at a resale shop for $1! I was so excited! On top there, you will see three spools of thread. I found the little empty wooden spools in with my craft stash stuff that was still packed from our move a few months ago. I got out my boxes of colored cross stitch thread and made a couple of filled spools. However, I don’t think they are quite to scale, they look a little big!

These are some cute little “hat boxes” I found at the resale shop. They are really tiny and will make good storage boxes for the house. I’ll post pictures of those when I decide how I want to decorate and use them!

Then I came across various pink fabrics and some lace for real cheap! Thinking they will make good bedding and curtains….as soon as I learn to make them! The fabric with the hearts on it I thought I could use to make heart shaped pillows for around the house.

This is just some random goodies I found at the same time as the fabric. The doll I thought I could turn into a fairy. I am thinking I will pass her on to my daughter for her plastic dollhouse I also got at a resale shop. I will probably reuse the pillow as a form. The robin’s eggs I thought I could use somewhere in there, it is a fairy house after all. The thimbles are buttons but what fairy house is complete without buttons and thimbles?!

These were given to me for Christmas two years ago by my adoring husband. I realized last night that they would be perfect scale for my fairy house. However, I don’t want to open this package so I am going to go look at Wal-mart and see if they have the other set I found with a blue fairy in it. Their knees don’t bend so they won’t sit very pretty on things, but they can “sleep” in the window daybed and “play” on the floor with misc items.

I found a great site yesterday through a blog I am reading that had WONDERFUL printies. They had miniature game boxes (scrabble, monopoly and such) as well as some patterns for other things. I am thinking I will start building my own pieces with plywood or something to use in the house. Then they are custom.

Yeah, I am having WAY too much fun living in mini-world! Stay tuned!

Dragonfly Manor

My house has decided it wants to be a fairy house. I have named her Dragonfly Manor. Her colors have been chosen. She has undergone a few changes the last few days and we now have a roof and the dormer windows are up.

Front of Dragonfly Manor

Here is the front of the house while the glue dries.

Back of Dragonfly Manor

And here is what the back looks like with the roof on. Still lots of room to adjust things and do the walls and flooring.

Dragonfly Manor has Dormer Windows!

Here she is with her dormers in place. They are glued and taped and there is still some tweaking I need to do to it as the middle dormer does not meet the roof on the bottom. Easy fix though! The stairs are built and drying. They will be going in sometimes this week. I have decided what all the rooms will be but have to create another divider for the upstairs as it will have three rooms there. A bathroom, bedroom with daybed in the dormer window ledge and a stair/hallway area with storage. The bottom will have a kitchen and living room. I am very excited to have the main shell glued and ready for wood filler and primer! YAY!

Colors of my Manor

Here are the chosen colors for my dragonfly manor. The purple will be the main house, the green will be the accents and the pink will be the smaller accents like window frames and such.  If you look at the original picture, everywhere there is cream will be purple, the teal will be green and the pink is this shade of pink. I’ll be sure to post pictures as it comes along I am far from painting right now!

Back to watching glue dry!

Officially Under Construction

The Orchid is officially under construction. I have sanded down her main parts and sustained my first “injury”. Since I was using a piece of sandpaper without a sanding block because of the frailty of the piece, I managed to sand the skin right off of my first two knuckles. I didn’t even notice until I was done with the sanding. So DH helped me bandage up my fingers with band-aids and I laid the pieces aside. Yesterday when I got home from work I started gluing the front and side pieces to the first and second floors. Here she is without her roof pieces.

Main House

This view is taken from just looking at the front of the house. There are two side pieces that come to a point, that is where the roof will go. The flat surface on the top will be the floor of the second story once the roof goes on. I will be gluing the roof later on. There are some things I want to do to the inside first.

View from back

This is the house from the back. The two strips going across the opening are tape to hold it together while the glue dries.

Bottom Floor

This pictures is a close up of the bottom floor. Again, those strips across the opening will go away tonight as they are only there to help hold the house together while the glue dries. I have not put the partition in as of yet to establish where my rooms will be because I don’t know what my house wants to be yet. She is saying a fairy cottage or a woodsy cottage. Typical woman, she can’t make up her mind.

Tonight I will be taking off the tape, filling all the lines, crevises and joints with wood filler and allowing that to dry before sanding it back down. Once that part is done, I will go through and prime the outside of the house so I can set it aside and work on some of the detailing on it. I am only priming for now as I have not decided on any of the colors for the house since she is not sure what she wants to be. I do have a pretty sand color oops paint I bought for $1 at Home Depot but I am not sure that is the color of the house yet. She is coming along and I am getting really excited to see her going together. Thinking of “stained glass” windows instead of what the kit came with. She needs some character I think!