Ice Fishing Shanty: Go to your local video store or library and enjoy a few hours watching Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier. . . Good, very realistic ice fishing sets. A mix of saw dust from cutting Corian and Lucite makes pretty nice chopped/cut ice around the holes. You can make a nice press for creating corrugated metal roofing by gluing a row of 3/32" dowels spaced 3/32" apart. When glue is dry, overlay a piece of extra heavy aluminum freezer wrap, wrap them, starting at one end, press between bottom dowels with similar dowels from the top. Remove top dowels and tip up to drop out a nice piece of roofing. Practice a bit to get desired sizes right so you do not need to recut after pressing.

Mel Koplin - Las Vegas

Ice Fishing Shack: translucent plastic light fixture cover (it comes in sheets) should work very well for ice. The material is easy to cut and very inexpensive. Buy it at one of the big box DIY stores like Lowe's or Home Depot.

Margaret in Texas

Book Bashing: To make your book into a box, take the cover off the book and make a cardboard box to fit the book. I have found second hand some Reader's digest books that are hollow for keeping things in secretly, they have regular book jackets on them. I currently have 2 of those not used yet as I have one book/box commercially made about the same, I got it at a Rite Aide Drug Store that I am preparing as a vignette for one of my children.

Rhoda from Whidbey Island WA

Beaded Siding: Perhaps I can help with your problem. I carry Northeastern products in my shop so I went to take a look. They have "beaded" clapboard siding. The 3/8" is in 1" scale and is their number 387. But I think what you are looking for is what they call "bead & board siding". This has a flat strip about 1/4" wide with a "bead" in between the strips. This usually goes vertically on the interior wall for old-fashioned knotty pine paneling. Their number for this is 385. Hope this helps some! Any miniature shop can order this for you

Marlene

Double Beading: If you look closely at my photopoint http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=1507950&a=11387125 shot of the Southwestern hutch (I know there's a Spanish name for that piece, but it escapes me at the moment...) you'll notice a bit of bead work on the edges. An easy trick to create that, and Laurie, maybe this could solve your problem? Take a 3/16" or 1/4" dowel, and drill into the end of it, making a pilot hole for a screw. Screw a small wood screw, the kind that countersink with an inverted cone head. The screw _must_ require a flat-head screwdriver, _not_ a phillip's head, and also the head must be a bit smaller than the dowel. This is now a scratch tool. Screw the screw into the end of the dowel the just until the sharp edge, which is the top of the screw's head, is the same distance from the tip of the dowel as the thickness you want to make the bead on the wood. Place the _dowel tip_ against the edge of the work piece. The screw is hanging over and resting on the work piece, and the screw _slot_ should be perpendicular to the work piece. Now apply pressure downward onto the work piece with the screw head, draw it carefully toward yourself while keeping the dowel tip in contact with the edge of the work piece. Now watch the bead appear in the work piece, always exactly parallel to the edge of the work piece. You will need to scratch it back and forth a few times for deeper beads.

Dave Pierce

Victorian Fencing: I have a catalog I bought from the Elegant Doll House it has a few companies who sell the fencing I believe you want. Call the Elegant Doll House at (916)484-0419 the co. names I saw are The Lawbre Company, Timberbrook and Precision Products.  or go to the web site http://www.dkwp.com/elegant.htm

Kari

Wood Movement:   Solid wood often warps because it swells and shrinks based on moisture content.   Once warped it usually has memory and when straightened returns to its warped condition.   On the good side, if you use glue properly and figure out how to hold it in place while it sets up, using the warped molding won't hurt a thing.   Look in the archives for other comments on wood movement.

Pete Boorum

Spiral staircases.    Since I did not catch the original post, I don't know if the question involved buying one or building one from scratch.   But in case someone was wanting to build one from scratch (the ones available for buying are very expensive), I thought I would mention that in her book, "Making Victorian Dolls' House Furniture", Patricia King gives time-consuming, but VERY easy and inexpensive basic instructions for making a spiral staircase.   I followed her instructions, adding my own embellishments (as she encourages one to do), and I am extremely pleased with the lovely result - so pleased that I am going to make several more, and have already scrounged or bought the necessary components.   So, whoever it was that asked the question, if what you wanted was to make your own, I recommend that you try Ms. King's idea.   The book is new enough that it should be readily available in any mini store or failing that, try  www.Amazon.com, www.Bibliophile.com  or www.Bookfinders.org .

Shirley in Chesapeake, Virginia

WOOD TURNINGS: Off the top of my head, they could be used to make plant stands/candle stands, candle sticks, hall trees, porch rails and stair banisters as well as porch posts. If you could drill them lengthwise, floor and table lamps; split them lengthwise and the fancy woods would make moldings to apply to cheap furniture or picture frames to gussy them up, or to miter and apply to walls to frame out wood paneling effects.

Loretta Sniarowski

Southwest Room box: I did make a Southwest Room box using Styrofoam as the structure. I used spackling paste for the stucco, Red Devil brand is very light texture and easy to work with. The first coat is the hardest to get to stick to the Styrofoam, but after that it is pretty simple. You just apply the spackle, let it dry thoroughly, sand it and apply another coat. It is a time consuming process but gives wonderful results. My 1" scale room has a smooth stucco finish and my 1/2 " has a rough textured stucco finish. I think I applied about 12 coats, on the smooth finish, but they thin and sanded. I applied several coats of my finished paint color as well. The stucco will absorb the paint. Feel free to e-mail me if you would like more info.

Lillie in Texas

Perfic Panels:While rummaging through my local model train shop I came upon a product named Perfic Panels.It is a polystyrene clad panel with a polystyrene foam core that is water proof, weather proof, etc. In other words,it behaves exactly as Gatorboard. It comes in 1/8 inch thick 16 inch squares.

Here is their home site: http://www.appliedimaginationinc.com

The material canbe cut with a knife, bent into round shapes,and is reasonably priced.

Pooh

Gatorboard: Go to http://www.gatorfoam.com/main.htm Click on Find a distributor.This will give you a list of stores in your area that carry the product.

Kay / Ottawa,Canada

Roofing  destruction: When reading your roofing destruction adventures I thought that I would mention using an airbrush for your roof. For one of my projects at art school we had to make a miniature scene using an airbrush....ripping the pattern from thick paper or cereal cardboard instead of cutting the fishscale strip gives it a nice worn look. You then airbrush over the edge of paper pattern and it leaves a neat fishscale pattern that looks quite realistic when all the layers are completed. Micro Mark carries spray cans you attach paint to if you don't want to invest in an airbrush system. I've also sprayed bricks made from spackle and with the splatter effect it makes nice bricks too.

Joanne, Calgary mini club

Location of flashing: Flashing, visible or not, is installed in so-called real life wherever something interrupts the plane of a roof (chimneys, vents, dormers, parapets, intersecting roofs of different heights or pitches, etc.etc.) or an exterior wall (windows, doors, et al.). Or it is stupidly not installed, as where my mudroom roof intersects my main house roof and sheets of water come down inside whenever there is too much snow, and then the front door swells and I am stuck either inside or outside, depending. But that is a different issue, since dollhouses are blessedly free of leaks. If you are installing a shingle roof on your dollhouse, you can choose to have exposed flashing OR you can claim it is installed under the shingles/siding, out of sight, and no one will sue.

Melissa

How to cover small areas of roof in copper: Make a paper pattern for the roof surface that you want covered. Use this pattern to cut the copper from copper sheeting. Make sure you leave enough on the pattern to fold over and under the roof edge. Glue to roof area. I used a combination of wood glue and quick-grab. Clip corners, and roll over roof area with hard rubber roller to get good adhesion. For the trim pieces, I covered strip wood (1/8 inch square pieces cut to fit) with copper tapewire on three sides. This is the single "run" of tapewire that comes in a roll with an adhesive paper back. The fourth side of the wood strips were left uncovered so they could be glued to the roof. I put the strips at 2 foot (2")centers, and also trimmed the area where the copper roof met the exterior walls. This copper tapewire was left over from my "tapewire" period. I only use round wire now. I have left the copper to darken naturally and plan to add a little "verdigis" with paint in the future.

Sharon Blake, Wasilla, Alaska

Chimney pots...we made them for the Rik Pierce thatched cottage class. Some students made them from paperclay. I have a collection of flower pots (well, you never know just which style you might need...) and selected one that seemed appropriate to me. It was terracotta but not the standard flowerpot shape. I painted it to blend with the chimney. Nobody has ever questioned it, but several have pointed that out as a cute feature of the house. After looking through some picture books at the library, I decided that chimney pots are just flower pots that came up in the world.

Bar Turner in La Honda, CA

Wonderunder-foamcore: I have not used WonderUnder on foam core, but I have used a product called "Heat and Bond". I attended an event that we build a box that looked like a present - but one side dropped down to use as a floor for a room. I built the structure and glued it together and then ironed on fabric with Heat & Bond. I assume that I did not have any warpage because the structure was already built and it adhered to the foam core quite easily without the iron being on it for very long. The product is used for appliqués on fabric. It's can be bought by the yard at fabric stores, Wal-Mart-- or also purchased in 5 Yard packages. It comes in regular and "lite" - I used regular, but I'm sure lite would work just as well. You just iron it on to the under side of the fabric, remove the paper and iron the fabric on the foam core.

Patty Johnson-- From beautiful Campbell's

Wonderunder-foamcore: I've done it to "brick" a building with an iron (a Sweetheart kit bashed with foamcore addition). Worked fine, but I do recommend that you follow the directions exactly for temperature and pressure, and practice on some foamcore scraps first to get the technique down. That's about as explicit as I can be; it's been a few years since I did it. Subsequently I've mostly done "stucco" houses with fleckstone because it's even quicker and very pretty.

Loretta.Sniarowski

Wonderunder-foamcore: - all I can tell you about trying to iron Wonder-Under onto foam core is that when I tried it, I warped my foam core. Perhaps the iron was too hot - but it made the foam swell.

Jeanette in Wisconsin

Wonderunder-foamcore: We did this in a club project several years ago...a member was teaching a wonderful, 1/2-scale 'tree house') the house sat atop the trunk! We used wonder-under to apply fabric 'wallpapers' to the foamcore before assembling the house...I only remember that we needed to use a lower heat setting, because high heat would melt the foam. Maybe you can practice on a few fabric and foamcore scraps to get it right?

Laura in OKC