Japanese art: Some sites for anyone interested in Japanese art. http://spectacle.berkeley.edu/~fiorillo/
http://www.shogungallery.com/

Marlene

Flooring/Cork: You can find small cork in rolls at an auto supply store. They use it for gasket material. Also works framed for a mini cork board.

Ruth

Leather for walls. I have used rubber cement for gluing leather and it stands up to a beating.

Bob in Hollywood FL

Leather: How thick is the leather???  And how small are the 'bits'?  Could you cut it up to make flooring???  Or use it on the walls?  I know some ritzy :) libraries had leather walls and some 'gentlemen's clubs' did, too.  How about covering the top of a table?  Thinner wood could be used for the top to allow for the leather's thickness.

And I seem to remember hearing something about peeling leather to make it thinner or shaving it from the back, of course.  It seems like I read something, somewhere, but it's been years. Have you tried looking for a leather supply site on the web to see what you can find?  I don't know if Tandy leather has a web site, but they have been around for years.

Quinn

"The Decorated Doll House: How to Design" Create Miniature Interiors by Jessica Ridley or "Making Doll House Interiors" by Carol and Nigel Lodder: I have used both of these books and find them very good.

Dani

"The Decorated Doll House: How to Design" Create Miniature Interiors by Jessica Ridley or "Making Doll House Interiors" by Carol and Nigel Lodder: I have used both of these books and find them very good.

Jeannine

Logs: For 5/8 half round logs, try contacting a dealer who carries Celerity House dollhouses. Celerity is back is business again with new owners and they manufacture that type of log (or at least it looks that way)...but be forewarned they're pretty pricey.

I've just finished building a RGT Adirondack cabin and used their logs for the interior and exterior and found it to be a very enjoyable product.

Kathy

Logs: For your 5/8" half logs, find someone with a table saw and have them slice the appropriate sized dowels in half. If you are careful it can be done pretty easily. Attach the dowel to the edge of a scrap length of 1" x 2" or what ever flat stuff you have with masking tape in several places. This way when you slide the dowel / scrapwood across your table and into the blade, the dowel won't turn and rotate and give you a crooked cut. Remember you will lose a thickness of your dowel equal to the thickness of your table saw blade, so you may want to buy dowels slightly larger in diameter than you want the finished width to be. Hope you can understand my computer drawing below:

saw table/wood/dowel -blade slices only center of dowel, NOT scrapwood
-(blade here)
_________lllllllllO__________

Bonnie Gibson

Molding for a log cabin: First of all, don't let ANYBODY at a lumberyard treat you any differently than they would some guy walking in there. Remember that some "guys" don't know which wrench to use to pound the screw into the board.

Second, 5/8" molding may be an odd size. Look for companies that specialize in molding in the yellow pages. They do make dowels in 5/8" size, but if worse comes to worse, use 3/4" and fake it. Remember that a 3/4" log would be 9 inches in the 'real' world, and that's about right for a log.

You could also use screen molding, which is about the same 3/4 width, with slightly rounded edges. I have a book on hewn-log cabins that shows almost exclusively that the logs used were square, and a lot of those cabins were in Kentucky, Tennessee, and thereabouts.

Karen Isaacson

Mini Blinds: Go to a home decor place or section of a dept. or discount store that carries place mats. You will probably find some that, cut up, will make lovely mini blinds! Hang them and use very thin string to make the long loops that go around them to raise and lower them!

Alice Zinn, Pt. St. Lucie FL

Quarter inch stained glass windows: For the leading in stained glass windows try one strand of black embroidery floss and glue. Put the plastic ("glass") sheet over your pattern. (I reduce/photocopy from full-sized stained glass patterns to get quarter scale.) Then using a toothpick or needle-pointed scribe, put a thin line of glue down the black lines (lead lines) in the pattern. Start from the middle of the pattern and work out. When the thread lines dry, you can go in and paint the stain into the various blank spots. I do both sides this way which makes a very lifelike looking window.

Pat

Printing Your Own Graph/Wallpaper: Just found by accident a wonderful site for those who want to design and print their own wallpaper.

http://perso.easynet.fr/~philimar/graphpapeng.htm

Dorothee

Scale and Proportion: I think all things in real life aren't equal. :-) When you scale me down to 1/12th I would look ridiculous in a dollhouse (more like 1/10th than 1/12th scale). :-)

Just measuring doesn't always help, as you said. There's the mass, the proportion, the detail of a piece. What would work in one setting won't work in another. A perfect 1/12 copy of a vase in a monumental hall in a big old house will look out of scale in the hall of the average Greenleaf. :-) There are some cases where a slightly out-of-scale item actually looks better than a perfectly scaled piece. All tables are roughly the same height, but in real life you have dainty tables and tables with course, fat legs, too.

A table that's slightly too big might look just perfect in a log cabin.

I usually just see if something 'looks right'. When I doubt, I take a photograph. Usually stuff shows up on photographs that you don't see when you're working on something.

Karin Langeveld

Scale and Proportion: Most dollhouses are not to scale. We (designers) typically use 9" to 10" ceilings. Modern houses are 7.5' to 8', Victorian were 9' to 13', colonial were 6' to 8'. We make them taller so its easier to see into the rooms and to work in the rooms. Front to back we tend to use 12" to 16" which should be 12" to 14" more typically. Width we use 8" to 12" to keep the houses from becoming unwieldy, 12" to 16" would be better. The diecut people (Greenleaf, Corona, Artply, etc) use even smaller dimensions for their rooms (6" and 8" are common), thereby making true 1" scale furnishings look too large.

Most dollhouse furnishers/collectors put too much into their dollhouses, making the rooms look small and the furniture large. Hey, but what the heck, its all for fun anyway so do what you like. Rather than worry about absolute scale, life will be much easier if you just make it look right.

Tom Berkner

Scale: Part of my job is determining whether samples we get for the catalog are proper scale and I always translate the inches into feet to see if the item would be appropriate in full-scale. But that doesn't mean that all 1/12th items will look right in all settings. In full-scale, hutches, for instance, come in different heights and widths; some are 5' tall, others are 7' tall. The big ones look great in large dining rooms with high ceilings and loom like monsters in a small apartment breakfast nook. This is true in dollhouses and room boxes, too. A piece could be a perfectly scaled replica of Chippendale hutch and still be too large for one of the little Greenleaf cottages...

Sometimes, a piece is right in all its measurements but still looks "wrong."

In translating full-scale into miniature, it is sometimes better to go slightly smaller than the real thing. I am thinking of the hands and feet on dolls. I made a doll with hands and feet that were true in scale but they looked too big.

Sally Cook-Thomas

Scale/Perspective: One thing that I haven't heard anyone talk about is the fact of perspective. We are, in fact, creating a picture ... with perspective! (hopefully)! I do a lot of kit bashing so that the houses have more room, look more architecturally correct, etc and also fit into the customs of the day. I had done this with my NEWPORT and obtained a very large dining room with enough room to put a music room for the entertainment of the dinner guests but the only piano I had that would look right (and it had to be a grand, of course) looked smaller than my 5 ft. harpsichord ... but when it was put into the far side of the room complete with a smaller that 1" singer the room took on a whole new perspective looking about 10' deeper than it was!

By the way, on the Victorian grand that we made at the Partelow workshop he intentionally makes it less than 1" scale as to be accurate would make it look like a monster (which they usually are anyway) taking up the entire room. A grand piano is 5' wide and anywhere from 4 1/2' to 9' long and an upright has the same keyboard measurement with anywhere from 39" to 60" in height...and I thought square grands would solve the problem but they are 7-8Ft long and 4' deep (so much for theories). So what really counts is "does it look right?"

Ana Gerard

Regarding the miniatures that are too large for 1" scale, I set up a special display that has large scale items and they seem to look in scale when grouped together. Most of these things are from people who mean well and get me miniatures as gifts. So when they see how I've used them with other items they are never the wiser as to the scale.

Terri Young

Scale: I ordered bunk beds for the log house I made the grandsons. I thought it would be cute because they have bunk beds. I was dismayed because the mini beds filled the mini room. After reading the comments on Small Stuff, I went over and took a good look at the boys' room. Oh, yeah! Their bunk beds fill up their little room, but it's a lot harder to take it in when you are standing there and the beds are towering over you. Also, the boy dolls look so small on the mini bunk beds...but again, when I take a good look, the little boy looks very small on the real bed.

Bar Turner

Scale and proportion: What you're talking about is the same thing we run into in "real" size. You buy a piece of furniture for your house, you measured it very carefully so that it will fit into the space, it gets delivered, and it looks terrible. Maybe the style is wrong for the space. A lamp may be beautiful and the correct size but it doesn't look right with the chair which is also the correct size. That's why there are interior decorators. If it was easy, they wouldn't be needed.

However, it is true that not all 1" scale items are indeed, 1" scale. Those of us who have been doing this for a while seem to develop an eye for it. Not every craftsperson gets the scale exactly correct. There are certain artisans or commercial brands I stay away from because I feel that they're off scale. German made minis are often 1/10 scale.

Some pieces are off scale on purpose. In some tea sets that are reproductions of full size sets, the sugar bowl is unusually large. The reason, I've been told, is that in the era that the original set was made, sugar was expensive and a large sugar bowl was a sign of wealth. To me, the sugar bowl is off scale but it's supposed to be.

Carol, S P Miniatures

Lights for art and craft gallery: Cir-kit or somebody makes a cannister style light - the kind you see in "real" places - just a round tube that is installed in the ceiling (so nothing hangs down) and a light bulb goes up in the tube. I don't think they're directional though, like the real ones are. But that might be one option. And then there are the mini-floodlights that *are* directional - they're quite bright but might suit your purposes. I want to do a gallery type setting myself for my pottery collection and have been pondering the shelving/lighting, etc., questions for a while now. I think somewhere (don't you love how definite I am about everything?) I saw a tip or hint or something on making the type of hanger you're talking about for the glass shelves. Might have been in one of the Workshop Wisdom columns in an old Nutshell News. Anyway, that would work very well if you could get each piece exactly the same (which I couldn't). I bought some microscope slides from American Science and Surplus thinking I'd use them for shelves or whatever, and when I got them I discovered that the end of each one is frosted for about 1/2" or so. I think probably for my gallery I'm going to try some sort of "built-in" arrangement of shelves. I bought some bookcases to use but decided I didn't like them.

Mary Lynne in Huntington, WV