decorating | Ruby Makes...

Shoebox Dollhouse 2

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in to the craft area!…

As promised, though possibly a day late, here is the next step in our dollhouse project:

Decorating The House

You will need:

Paints

Brushes

Tissue paper

Card/thin cardboard

Fabric or patterned paper

Glue

Scissors

Before we got decorating we looked at different styles of houses on the internet. The style we have chosen is quite a traditional dollhouse one, but it’s really up to you how you want your house to look. It doesn’t even have to be a dollhouse – it could be a mad scientist’s lab, a shop, a Pokemon Centre, a Moshi Monster home, a haunted house, a toy’s hospital, a vets, a cafe, a Gormiti lair…as usual, let your imagination go wild!
Let’s start with the inside. Again you have lots of options. You can paint your walls, you could wallpaper them with pictures from magazines, wrapping paper, scrapbooking paper or material. We chose to use fabric. An easy way to make sure you cut your paper/material etc to the right size is to push a scrap of newspaper into the house and use your fingers to crease around the sides of the wall (fig. 1)
Then you cut around the creases and use the newspaper as a template for your fabric, which you then glue in to place (fig. 2)
We cut our material slightly longer at the bottom so it overlaps on to the floor. That way when you put your floor in it looks nice and neat with no gaps showing (fig. 3)
For the floor you could use more material, maybe some cord or felt, you could use card, cork tiles or – if like us – you have scraps of old lino or carpet lying around, use that! (fig. 4 & 5) Use your glue to attach it. You could even make rugs to fit your house using our rag rug tutorial.

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For the outside, pick what colour/s you’d like your house to be and get painting! You can add details when the paint is dry with pens, or you can do slightly different coloured layers of paint and use an old pencil or crafting tool to scrape patterns in to a wet layer of paint so the layers underneath show through. We used this for a tile effect on our roof (fig. 1)
When we had finished painting and the house was dry, we added some white trim which we cut from card and glued on (fig. 2)
If you do this remember to leave a gap to ensure you can still fit your lid on to the box (fig. 3)
Then we used more card and tissue paper to glue on windows and a door (fig. 4)

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For a final bit of colour we added a rose bush growing around the door of our house. We spread glue on the area we wanted covered and scrunched up tiny balls of tissue paper for the bush and roses.

And we are almost done!! Stay tuned for the final stage…making dolls and furniture.