Christmas in the Farmhouse

Merry Christmas to you all!

And welcome to Christmas in the Farmhouse...

There's a tree in the children's room

The stockings have been hung

Dolly is waiting

There's a copper tree topper

Tiny sugar glitter houses

Cookies for Santa 

There's plenty of baking in the kitchen

Gingerbread men being iced

Red Velvet Christmas cake

Christmas tree cookies

December has been a bit of a roller coaster ride around here this year. It was fun to finally have a little festive mini time.

Wishing you all a wonderful Christmas and a very happy 2016!

Seven years of Book Character Day!

It was Book Character Day at Liberty's school today and this will be her last one as she finishes Primary School this year - I know right - where did the time go?!

This year she chose to be Mary Poppins. 

As it's her last year I thought I'd go back through the ages and show you all her previous characters...

2014

Anne of Green Gables

2013

Alice in Wonderland

The school Principal happened to be quite a terrifying Queen of Hearts!

2012

Miss Trunchbull from 'Matilda'.

2011

I can't remember the name of the book but her baby cousin was her prop!

2010

A crazy old lady called Daisy O'Grady from 'Guess What?'

2009

Princess Dora

I can't believe I didn't take any photos of her on her own!

You can tell she's always loved dressing up. 

The costumes have been more challenging through the years as somehow she's turned out to be a real perfectionist...not sure where that comes from!

Pretty Pastels in the Farmhouse and the Real House

Pastel coloured things just make me happy!

This little hutch and it's pastel goodies are in the Farmhouse kitchen.

This hutch is in my real house.

I've been collecting the china for a few years. I tried to fill the hutch with it a couple of years ago but I didn't have enough...now I do!

I can't keep the little hutch in the Farmhouse kitchen yet because I'm still working on the house and if I leave things in there they just keep getting knocked over - of course I found that out the hard way!

The little hutch in the life size hutch!

The china is all old English - mostly by Johnson Brothers and Grindley. Most of it I've found at  Op Shops in the last few years. The green coloured china is very hard to come by here. The green cup, saucer and square plate were a birthday gift from a  fabulous friend!

I found a very vintage postcard from Marseille in an Op shop last week and the colours look perfect with the china.

That's some of Kim's perfect mini food.

Her little creations make me happy...I miss that girl every day...one day I'll get back to the USA.

I smile every time I look at the hutch.

Even my minimalist hubby is happy with it because he thinks it 'looks less busy' than it did when it was filled with floral china. - that's a bonus: vintage china from the op shop isn't usually something that keeps the hubby happy!

Farmhouse bedroom - done!

I can finally show you the finished farmhouse bedroom.

It was going to be the master bedroom but I'm not so sure now.

It's a very pretty room!

Here's the room before - although I'd already done the ceiling before I remembered to take a 'before' pic.

There's a special glassed in area for the bed.

I love to add little references to favourite movies and books in my dollhouses. Sometimes the references are hidden, not this time though!

I fell in love with the colours and cinematography of 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'. 

It's a wonderful quirky movie!

I saw the beautiful wallpaper in a dollhouse on the internet and I tracked it down.

The currency exchange rate with the NZ dollar is not so good these days so it cost a small fortune!

But it was worth every cent.

I bought two sheets of wallpaper this time! Nearly used all of it. I thought it might be a bit overpowering to have the wallpaper covering every wall in the room so I made panels of it for this space.

Now like I said at the start - it was supposed to be the master bedroom.

It's possibly too pretty for a master bedroom...and I had a single bed sitting on my work table so I tried it out in there and well...it just looked like it belonged. So this might have to be a child's room or nursery perhaps.

I really wanted a fireplace in this room.

I found a real life fireplace I liked and did my best to create something similar in miniature.

Finding something to make that ridged backplate with was a challenge!

Another challenge was getting the floor the colour I wanted.

At last count there had been nine layers of paint and stain applied and removed from the floorboards. I'm finally happy with how they look! 

The wardrobe uses the space at the end of the stairwell in the hallway.

The window in the door lets you see through to the hallway.

The 'Crossed Keys' in the transom window are another reference to 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'.

This is now my favourite room in the house.

I am thrilled with out it's turned out...and I'm in love with that wallpaper!

So now the last part of the dollhouse to renovate is the attic - which will become the Master Retreat - as they would say in a fancy decorating show.

Work has begun...but as usual just when I get started life starts throwing all sorts of 'real life things to do' at me!

More to come...

Farmhouse hallway all done!

I hadn't really thought about what I was going to do with the other side of the hallway when I built the linen cupboard and wallpapered the area behind the bathroom.

So when I started on this area things were a little tricky...one reason being that I had very little of the chair wallpaper left. 

Here is the room next to the bathroom. 

The stairs from the lower level will come up just between the windows so there will be a hallway in the back right corner.

The rest of the room will be a bedroom. 

I used almost every last scrap I had of the one sheet of wallpaper I bought when I visited Kim.

The door on the left is where the stairs come up from the entry hall below. There wasn't going to be a door there until I realised you could see into the stairwell through the window. There's not really going to be any stairs in there so I built a door.

Thank goodness for wall panelling! That was one way to make the wallpaper go further.

There wasn't really enough wallpaper to do the two strips down either side of the window however I had wallpapered the end of the stairwell behind the bathroom - where it was never gong to be seen - so I carefully pulled the wallpaper off. I had to join a couple of small pieces.

This is looking through from the linen cupboard hallway.

This is all the wallpaper I have left! 

I was asked how I layered the linens in the cupboard... 

Here's how the linens started out. Mostly folded pieces of fabrics ironed as flat as I could get them. I quite liked the look of them all lying there nice and tidy but I went to look in my own linen cupboard for a little inspiration...and let's just say it's not that tidy...so in the interests of realism I pulled the linens out of the cupboard (the dollhouse one not the real one - haven't got time to fix that when there's miniatures to be made!)

I used tweezers to pull pieces of fabric out from the stack as I held it with my fingers then I glued the fabrics together using a toothpick to push glue between the linens. I clamped the piles together when necessary so they would stay as flat as possible. 

Really the best piece of advice I can give is to look at real linens and see how they fall.

One or two things aren't glued like the pink and white crochet blanket, it's lovely and soft and just stays there on it's own. 

And the edge of the blue blanket above needs sticking into place. I didn't see it had popped out until I'd taken the photos - very, very annoying!