Gingerbread Men: you can punch your gingerbread men from brown fun foam. Works great and then you can string them for your tree after adding any details you may wish to use. Get the punch from Hooked on Miniatures (no, she's not related).

Dottie in Tucson

Book Covers: To get the books you want take the cover off and tape or pin it to a wall in a bright room. Stand back about 6' and take a picture. When the picture is developed cut out the cover and make a book for inside it-a block of wood for a closed book. If the photo is too thick then photocopy the photo onto whatever thickness you need. This probably breaks copywrite laws but it works. I'd think the publishers would be pleased at the free advertising. I've often thought that if the big companies that spend millions on buying space in magazines just printed scale replicas of their products like cereal, they'd have all the advertising they need. They'd be in every doll house in the world. The problem would be with entrepreneurs trying to sell them.

June in London Ontario Canada

Holly wreaths - a really easy DIY base: the plastic rings left on plastic Bottles when the cap is removed - Water, Pepsi etc. These can be covered in florist tape, ribbon or tinsel. They look very effective over fireplaces.

Chrissie London

Golf Tees - turn upside down and push a large wood bead onto the pointed end. Makes a hat stand.

Laura Miller

One more wreath technique. If you don't want a deep, dimensional one - I have made them by using either a rubber gasket (many sizes) or cutting a ring out of card board and also cutting out the inner circle and painted it green before gluing the lycopodium or Finescale to it and any other trims you want.

Jeanette in Wauwatosa, WI

Icicles: Haven't tried this, but why wouldn't this work? Lay strips of fine white thread down on waxed paper and with a toothpick drip and drag glue downwards, to different lengths, at intervals along the thread. Let dry and lift off the waxed paper. The flat side would toward the house. For more dimension You could go back and drip more on the first layer that had dried. Let me know if it works, if you try it!

Betti from MS

Christmas Tree: Anne Gerdes has a page on her site giving wonderful directions for an evergreen tree, or Christmas tree.  http://gerdesdesign.com/tree.htm

I modified the directions and used as a base one of the "bottle brush" trees instead of the foam and it came out great!

Donna in Montana

Wicker Ideas: This Bend, OR, firm makes dollbuggies and related toys in Victorian styles, wicker and iron. Apparently authentic designs; could be a great pictorial resource for wickerworkers..

http://www.newsom.com/buggies

There are also some iron hatstands. Look at them and you'll immediately start thinking of contriving your own from assorted jewelry findings, etc. We often think of hatstands as having head-size tops, but these don't. As I recall a wonderful Illinois shop for cheap hats in the 1940's, theirs didn't either. (This shop would be fun in a mini version. You bought your hats and trims separately, cafeteria style. A feast of ribbons and flowers. Probably feathers too, though I don't remember them.)

2. There's also a picture of a glass and iron bistro table. A bit flimsy-looking, but the legs are trimmed with iron cutout leaves. If you have those oak or maple leaf box punches, you might get some additional mileage out of them this way. It wouldn't have to be that particular design. You might need to thicken the leaves by layering two or three together. Or maybe the acrylic gel recently mentioned by Mary Kinloch would do the trick here? (These and other punches can be used for stone work too.)

Mary (Oregon)

If your lycopodium Christmas tree starts to dry out, spray it with a mixture of alcohol and glycerin.

Tom Berkner

Lycopodium: I have used lots of this and found that coating with a sealer is great; however some of them shrivel up the Lycopodium - Decoart Sealer will shrivel it. The one that I use that DOES NOT shrivel it is Patricia Nimock's Matte Spray Sealer by Plaid and I use it for sealing everything that I make!

Roz Weitzman

Christmas Stockings This is in response to a request for Christmas Stockings: I have Christmas Stocking Cross-stitch kits on my web site. I sell them finished as well. They can be found on the Cross-stitch Kits page at http://www.weedarlings.com.

Debra

Christmas Stockings: One way to get a variety would be to use needlework catalogs (Herrschners, Mary Maxim) and make decals out of stocking pictures. Coat suitable pictures with layers of decoupage medium, drying well between layers (5-7 layers, till it's fairly thick), then trim to stocking shape, soak and gently rub paper off, leaving color picture on back of medium. Tacky glue to fabric with good side of picture facing up, whip-stitch on a fabric backing, and make it look more realistic by embellishing with tiny lace, braid, beads, sequins, etc. and a hanging loop. To give appropriate credit, this is another great JoAnn Swanson idea from an old Nutshell

Loretta Sniarowski

Christmas Stockings: Recently at the Hoosier Miniature show there was the most talented family doing needlework. Miss Jeanne's Miniatures. You wouldn't have believed your eyes when you saw the craftsmanship and talent they possess. They also had quilts and pillows, more than I can recall at this time. I do think they also sold them as kits too. She is out of Dover Tennessee. Her email is msjeanne@compu.net. You might email her and see if she has a web site or can snail mail you a catalog.

Lisa Lynn

Poinsettias: I made some paper punched poinsettias a couple of years ago from a holly leaf punch. The leaves are almost the same shape as poinsettia petals. I used the tiny berry dots for the center. Or you could use no-hole beads. Little Goodies also makes a kit for poinsettias. Their address is PO Box 1004 Lewiston, TX 75067

Kristie

Poinsettias (Christmas flowers): Just caught up on requests back to last Thursday. I make poinsettias by first cutting little rectangles of red flocked ribbon, then turning them into parallelograms (those things with slanted 45 degree ends, Form a circle of covered wire about 1/8 inch, glue end of the pieces to the circle, and then fill the center with something yellow. Little bits of bunka are good. The same shape can be used for leaves, but more accurate ones are made from an oval leaf that you cut a half circle out if the middle. Leaves are usually about the length of the flower petals which really aren't the flower, but everyone thinks the red is the flower.

Alice, queen of trash in IN

Poinsettias: I have seen full size poinsettias made from ribbon in this way. If you used much smaller ribbon and infinitely more patience you might get good relults. Cut little strips of narrow ribbon to the length that you want to be the diameter of the finished flower. I would guess no longer than 1/2 inch. Cut the ends of the snippet of ribbon into points and perhaps touch the ends of the ribbon with fray check. Make six of these ribbons. Then gather them together in the middle and secure. The full size flower was fastened with wire, but maybe tacking or tying with thread would be better for the miniature. For the center you could hunt for the tiny glass marbles in a craft store and glue a few yellow ones in the center to cover the thread. Poinsettia leaves can be done the same way, only in green. This is pure theory on my part, I have not actually done it.

Kellie in Omaha

Poinsettias; Ruth Hanke sells flower kits, including poinsettias in 2 sizes. She also has other kits, and punches, and how-to books. Website is http://www.hankypankycrafts.com She's very helpful on the telephone, and ships to Canada with no problem.

Kay Gale

Fly fishing stores have spools of mini tinsel for your Christmas tree! It comes in gold and silver. The gold one is made by a company named "Danville's" and it's called Mylar Tinsel. The silver one says "Lagartun" Varnished French Tinsel. Unwrap some of this and put it on your mini tree or wind it around a small piece of cardboard to stick in a mini tinsel box for the mini procrastinators. They come in different widths. The ones I purchased are LESS than 1/16" wide.

Annie Olson

trash cans: I took film canisters the round black ones with gray tops, covered the outside of the canister with the corrugated paper that comes inside the boxes you get light bulbs in. Because the lid was already gray I just painted the corrugated paper gray to match. You could paint the whole thing silver. I added a little handle on the lid made of file card. I put a little plastic bag inside and folded it over the edges, put on the lid and they looked quite nice. Everyone liked them so maybe this would work for your doll house.

Helen Borders

ORIENTAL SCREENS: Back when it was still Nutshell, the mag had a Chinese New Year project (Joann's? probably), a restaurant scene which used these screens as furniture components -- cut down and upholstered to make fancy carved Chinese chairs. Very inspirational, so when I found an ivory-colored screen it was a natural for the deco house's white-on-white 30s glamour bedroom. I used two panels as a headboard, one as the mirror section of a deco dressing table, and the other as a nightstand. Used fan pieces to fill in around the mirror and as the shelf between the table's drawer stacks and for the nightstand shelves, upholstered the headboard's picture panels with ivory on cream lace, painted an armoire to match and replaced its "glass" panels with more fan sections. Repainted and upholstered a Big Lots wire settee as the dressing table bench. Results were ultra feminine but not frilly. I'm sure others have come up with even more uses for these items -- would love to hear ideas as I have a couple of the black screens available to play with.

Loretta Sniarowski