Still fluttering by...

I finished the Flutterbye chair this week, but most of my time has been spent on the Flutterbye wardrobe which is really cute but was quite time-consuming to make.

Here is the finished chair with the artwork applied.  The chair in the picture also had artwork down the sides of the legs to finish them.  I thought my 1/24th chair, which didn't have the additional strips, looked a little unfinished.  So I cut some tiny slivers of leftover artwork and glued them down the sides of the chair legs.

I am not a big fan of words like 'cute' and 'precious' when it comes to dollshouses - but what I can say?  Have you ever seen anything so cute and precious as this little chair?  How come my bedroom never looked like this when I was a little girl?


Flutterbye Wardrobe

I struggled a bit with this wardrobe.  The basic structure is straightforward: a box with a glued-on front with door and drawer openings, a top, and a drawer.  The directions however are extremely opaque, with only measurements to identify the numerous pieces, and very unclear wording in some parts.  I'm assuming this line of kits was an early attempt, and that lessons were learned that helped to make the Miss Lydia Pickett kits so detailed and comprehensive later on. There is a quite a lot of artwork to apply after pre-painting the wardrobe pieces, as you assemble the piece.  One thing I really liked about this kit is that there is artwork inside the wardrobe and the drawer, where probably no-one will ever see it, but we know it's there.

The doors are hinged with small squares of fabric (not supplied) which are glued on the front of the construction and then covered up by the artwork, which surprisingly works quite well.  The drawer fits without much spare space, so I found that by painting it, it no longer fit into place and I had to sand it down a little then retouch the paint, to get it to slide in easily. A metal curtain rail is supplied.  The lasered components include four tiny wooden flowers to be the drawer and cupboard handles.  These are so tiny that I broke one just trying to free it from the surrounding wood, and promptly lost another so I had to carve a replacement.  The cupboard doors are held shut by a latch (supplied) pivoting on a pin (supplied).

Also in the wardrobe kit are two other pins, which aren't mentioned in the instructions, two incredibly tiny laser-cut clothes hangers, and a length of fine wire.  Neither the wire nor the clothes hangers are mentioned in the instructions but I'm assuming the wire is to make the hook for the hanger.  I also have artwork for a tiny hatbox (can't remember whether this artwork came with the chairs/table kit or with the wardrobe kit) which isn't mentioned in any of the instructions but I can probably assemble it without.  Once again the wardrobe instructions seem to be from a different scale: they recommend that you glue all the artwork onto the piece of card they say is supplied in the kit (it isn't) and cut it out on the card then  apply the card/artwork to the kit, which I don't think would work at all in this scale, particularly on the doors where the rose-in-pot artwork is applied on top of the background door artwork.

However, the end result is a gorgeous little wardrobe which I'm very pleased with.  I'm surprised at how lost the two weeks worth of Flutterbye kits seem to be in the Fairfield bedroom.  It doesn't look like a very big room, but it is about 6" x 7" which in real life would be 12' x 14' which here in the UK would be a master bedroom.  Definitely a good size for a kid's room.  Once I get my bed, that will fill it up a bit more, and I have kits for a night stand, bookshelf and chest of drawers which I will build and add.