Mini preserves: Use polymer clay to make fruits and things to go in the jars, they don't have to be fancy. And use scenic water for the preserving jelly, syringed into the jars it should look the part (don't forget to put your preserves in the jar first). To finish the jars cut a tiny circle of fabric and wrap some thread around to hold it on the neck of the jar (that's the fiddly bit!) Now just set them on the dresser or in the cupboard, leave one without a lid and stick a spoon in it, spill a bit on the table or the floor.

Jacquie Hall

Ice-look for the 'beans' that are in Beanie Babies. Walmart has them in the craft section. A friend made a replica of a seafood shop and used them in the display cases. Works great. They are really little bead-like thingies.

Martha Simpson

Shingles on curved roof, I was putting shingles on a mansard roof with a complex curvature starting convex at the top, interrupted by a belt cornice, and then concave below that. I was using thin cedar, "geometric" shingles (i.e., fish scales, diamonds, half hexagons, and flat bottom rectangles)

On that project, I milled and shaped my own shingles to about 1/32" thickness, and shorter than usual top to bottom length so the ones above only barely overlapped the tops of those below. (Just enough for the highest point of the bottom edge shape to hide the top of those below by about 1/16"). It was necessary to hide the fact of such a small overlap so the side edges of each shingle were slightly beveled. That way, they could be very closely spaced and not appear like a long, continuous strip.

I pre-colored the roof plates with a NON-SEALING stain and then very precisely planned the position of all top edges, drawing pencil lines to follow. I ended up revising the sequence of shapes, vertical dimensions, and top edge positioning several times before arriving at a workable plan.

Installing the shingles, I laid a bead of white glue along the positioning line and along the top edge of the row below with a glue syringe. Let it set up just a bit then press into place. Where the roof pitch is very steep, you may need to put blocks under the house and tilt it while applying shingles so they do not slide downward out of position. Keep a fitch and a can of water at hand to quickly eliminate any glue runs from coming down onto the visible surface. In the case of my project, the shingles were to be painted rather than stained and weathered so extreme care was not essential. If I were doing a stained roof, I believe that I would have pre-stained and washed the shingles prior to putting them on.

An idea I considered for a while but ended up not using would have been to make long (horizontal) strips of shingles glued to gauze strips and then to a 1/16 X 1/16 (or thereabouts) wood strip which, in turn, would have ridden on the top edge of the course below.

Petitfacades

Painting upholstery: I have used PERMANENT, colorfast markers intended FOR FABRIC, that I got at A.C.Moore, and Michaels crafts. I re-colored a nursery chair that had white upholstery, yellow about 15 years ago and it has held up beautifully, and I recently tinted a colored upholstery with a light tan color to take it from bright yellow to a warm gold. If you try this approach, buy the markers that have a "brush tip" on at least one end (some are double ended) as this works best and practice on a scrap piece of fabric until you can apply it without streaks. Also, if it is silk upholstery, there is a silk paint that you just paint on and it "spreads evenly throughout the silk. If you want to make a pattern you could use the silk paint and then draw your pattern with another color fabric marker. They do sell a "resist" for the silk paint that would prevent the paint from spreading into any area that you place the resist but I think you have to wash or iron out the resist afterwards and I don't know how you would do that without taking the upholstery off.

Tracey Alan Meeker

Colonial Homes: You can take a tour of Mount Vernon online by visiting:
http://www.mountvernon.org/mtour/one.asp

Click on First Floor, Second Floor, etc., then you will get a floor plan of that floor, click on the room you want to see. You can click on the pictures to see a larger version to get more detail.

Rusty in Ky

Colonial Homes: The best book I know on Colonial House is American Colonial By Wendell Garrett. ISBN 3-8228-8278-X

Brian Long

Toile and Colonial Williamsburg: Yes - Toile and Colonial Williamsburg go together like peanut butter and jelly! We visited C.W. this past September - and loved every minute of it. It was very well organized, very lovely, very interesting, educational -- and we got a LOT of exercise walking the 'old streets'....and shopping in all the wonderful 'old shops' nearby.

Toile was usually combined with a very large check fabric - about 1-1/2" square checks! - in a matching color (blue toile, blue checks, for example). Red/white checks were also 'in vogue'. They used some pretty wild colors in Colonial Williamsburg - things we'd consider a bit 'much' now - green and purple walls and woodwork, for example.

We stopped and chatted with the weaver for a long time while we were there - you can interact with all the craftsmen/women and find out some fascinating things -- and learned that during the Colonial period, cotton fabrics were MORE expensive than silk! The reason was quite practical: The cotton gin hadn't been invented at that time, and in order to get cotton fabric, you had to sit by firelight (after a hard day's work) and pull cotton seeds out of the fluff....and they're hard to pull out! It was common practice to give unruly children this job - especially during long winter months and rainy days when they couldn't go outside and grew restless. Probably where the phrase 'make work' came from..... Mama just had to 'make work' for the kids to do to keep them out of her hair!

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has a nice web site, and there are LOTS of books, pictures, and more information on the period and the area. Search for 'Colonial Williamsburg' - in Virginia - and I'm sure you'll find all sorts of references. The C.W. Foundation is a wealth of information on all sorts of things - and responsible for a great many reproductions of furniture, fabric, wallpaper, etc., from the period. Additionally, you can search www.amazon.com and find a lot of books on C.W. -- as well as your local library, more than likely. You can get the best prices on books, I believe, at www.bookfinder.com - where you can buy nice used or new books through smaller dealers, through one large book buyers/sellers system that referees the whole thing.

Linda Gale

Shaker style: For Shaker style references, check the library for life-scale interior decorating books (Milton and Emily Rose's Shaker Tradition and Design or Scott Swank's Shaker Life, Art, and Architecture). If you want period authenticity, remember there was no such thing as a Shaker home. Shakers lived in celibate religious communities, with separate men's and women's dormitories (dependence on converting new members rather than "growing" their own was a major cause of the sect's extinction, somewhat analogous to today's shortage of young Catholic clergy in some areas). The Shakers had communal kitchen, dining, and work areas (livestock barns, smithy, mill, furniture, broom, seed packing, tool factories, etc.). An accurate 19th century Shaker miniature homestead would be a small village, not a solitary dollhouse!

For an on-line overview of Shaker life, check out http://www.shakervillageky.org/ dedicated to Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Most US Shaker heritage sites are on the web; unfortunately few include many interior photos. In miniature, Jessica Ridley's Decorated Doll House has a Shaker-inspired bedroom with commercial furniture customized with DIY Shaker accessories. Peter Westcott's miniature furniture pattern books include Shaker Furniture volumes #1and #2; check your local shop, or Tom stocks them at Earth and Tree. Barnes and Noble's Out of Print section also lists How to Make Shaker Furniture for the Dollhouse or Miniature Rooms by Pat Midkiff. Both authors' pattern books are priced moderately.

Loretta.Sniarowski

Mini cattails: I have made mini cattails by using leftover stems from dried flowers (the flowers were used for something else as a frugal minnier never wastes useful hoarded stuff - heh! heh! ). Dip in tacky glue and then dip in brown "scenic sand" (found in may craft stores). You can then shape and let dry and recoat later until you get the thickness you want. They looked pretty realistic, although not fuzzy to the touch. You could use smooth round toothpicks if you haven't any spare stems around.

Ginger in sunny New River, Arizona

Mini cattails: Mini cattails can also be made by wrapping a small (1") piece of brown florist tape around the end of the short piece of florist wire - leave a teeny-tiny bit of wire sticking out the end. Hope this makes sense. The leaves can be made by gluing a piece of florist wire between two pieces of green florist tape, and when dry, cutting the leaf into the proper shape.

Lynn in Cahokia