Carpet Bookmarks

One of the vendors at Costume College (in 2011) had these carpet bookmarks. I'm not actually sure why they had them, but I happily picked up a few of the designs.

Below Germaine and Stephanie model some dresses on one of the carpets.

I decided at some point that I should put together a workbook of crocheted clothing for Sylvanian Family figures. These two dresses were probably the start of that idea. The plan is to have increasing levels of difficulty, from a fairly simple dress in size 10 crochet thread down to items in size 80 thread or single strands of floss. I have some of the patterns figured out, but I haven't gotten around to writing them up nicely yet. You can follow some of the progress on Ravelry: Workbook Test Dresses.

Mini Furniture From Daiso

I have a backlog of posts. I didn't even realize how long the backlog was until I acquired some new Sylvanian Families.

So, some time ago (in the spring or summer of 2011), I was wandering through Japantown and stopped by the Daiso store. They had a bunch of mini furniture at really cheap prices (like $1 or something in that range). So I grabbed one of each item I thought would be sized correctly for Sylvanian Families. Most of the furniture was too tall, but a few looked like I might be able to cut them a little shorter if necessary, so I picked a few of those as well.

Clarice Bamboo with a hexagonal end table. (Packaging for the furniture in the background.)

Edwin and Ella Ellwood behind a desk. Well, I think its a desk. It almost looks like a table except that there are low support bars between the legs on three of the four sides.

Clarice and Alexandra Bamboo beside a fancy self. This was my favorite of all the furniture I picked up. I was very tempted to make a trip back to the store to get some more of these shelves. (By the time I wandered through Japantown again, Daiso no longer had any of this furniture.)

This 'Country' set was one with items I thought would be too tall, but easy enough to cut down. Chair on the left is the original, and the one on the right had its legs partially cut off. I haven't decided yet if the cabinet needs to be trimmed down a little as well.

Below is Edwin relaxing on the chopped down chair. The new height seems pretty reasonable when compared to a standing figure.

I pulled out some of my other items, and set up a couple scenes with the new furniture. Below, Elliot gets a sewing lesson from Ella while Eliza takes a look at the knitting basket. Father Edwin is putting away the dishes in the cupboard.

Alexandra starts a sewing project while Bertram relaxes at the end of the day. My brother gave me the glass mushroom on the far right on the end table; he made some while taking a glass blowing class. (He also gave me a glass elf hat, that I still need to post a picture of at some point.)

An Outdoor Chair

At some point I decided to go through all my old dollhouse furniture and see how much of it was correctly sized for Sylvanian Families. I didn't worry much about scale as a kid, and as it turns very little of my furniture was scaled correctly. So I contemplated making appropriately scaled furniture.

During my browsing of articles about making dollhouse miniatures, I came across The Art of Dollhouse Miniatures. This site discusses craft wood supplies that can be used as 'scale lumber', in particular the rather useful "Skinny Sticks" (I picked up a bag at my local Michaels). The site also has instructions for a Garden Lawn Chair.

Well, after looking at some number of miniature Adirondack chairs, I decided to try designing a chair scaled for Sylvanian Families. I also wanted a chair that they could sit in. Because of the way their legs angle, this made the project somewhat more complicated, since the seat needed to be extremely trapezoidal if I wanted the back to look like it was sized for one person rather than two.

The resulting chair is somewhere between the Lawn Chair and an Adirondack chair, and is made from 'Skinny Sticks'. It was stained with a wood stain after gluing all the pieces together. Also, some amount of filing and fiddling was required to get the pieces to fit together the way I thought they should.

I don't have complete step-by-step instructions, but here are the rough plans I made for myself along with a few notes on construction (pdf). I had some difficultly getting the back angled with the armrests actually sitting in the notches for them, so some additional filing may be needed. When printing the pdf out, make sure that it is printing without scaling (nor fitting to page, nor anything else that might cause the sizing to change).

Overall I am pretty happy with the result. My goal is roughly to have furniture the appropriate height: for example, table tops at adult waist height. Thus the legs should probably be a little shorter, so the seat isn't almost at their waist, but its pretty close.