The Ladies Men

There are a couple of boys in town this week. Actually, there were 3, but one moved to Australia rather quickly, on short notice. That leaves 2. We have Benjamin the little brown mouse. Very dapper. Very manly, as you can see. We also have Peter the Rabbit (how original, right?), also very dapper, very manly. The deal here is, they are ladies men. Truly. Look at how they are dressed. What else could they be for heaven's sake? There are a couple of ladies still around the mouse house and the boys want to do some dancing. They have been discussing the proper way to get a lady to dance prior to the girls' arrival.

Here come the ladies.

First we have Lucille. She walks in and sits down, pretending not to notice the boys in the corner. She is a lovely little blonde mousie girl. She is quite shy and a bit demure. Benjamin will go first.

"Well, Miss Mousie, would you like to dance?" She turns her head the other way. Benjamin is quite bold. He moves out in front to get her at eye level.

Well, all right. She will dance. Why not? That's what she came for after all.

You'd think she thought of it herself! She is quite smug about the whole thing. After a bit of dancing, Benjamin spots Bernadette. Now it is clear, she is an actress. She is very dramatic seeming and maybe a bit out of his reach. But, it's a dance. He intends to dance with all the ladies.

On the approach, it does seem she has her nose a bit in the air. Not a problem. Benjamin is brave. He will try some sweet talking first. "You are quite lovely, Miss. Care to dance?"

At least she turns towards him. She is considering it. Well, all right. It's a dance. She came to dance. No use trying to play too hard to get. She agrees.

She is not going to take her nose out of the air, though. She has her pride after all.

In the meanwhile, Peter sees Lucille is without partner. It seems that Lucille will be a better candidate anyway. She doesn't seem quite so snooty.

Well, that wasn't too bad. She agreed quite quickly. Peter still has it. He is a ladies man, after all.

Hope everyone has a lovely Thanksgiving. Do some dancing. it will keep you young!

Friday is For Relaxing

It's Friday today and I was planning on taking the day off and relaxing a bit, since I usually work through the weekend anyway. It's a rainy day and seems like the thing to do. It's almost noon, though, and I still have to go through photos and list my rat girls on Etsy, so perhaps the sitting back and being chill is going to have to happen later. Ah well, the life of a country doll maker :)

I have 5 new rats done for the week. It actually takes a lot longer to make each one than I imagined would be the case, but I am still having fun, so it's my little labor of love. I have continued to find little furniture pieces for them, and can now switch things in and out and change it up a bit. At least the rats can relax, as they have some furniture that fits them, a room to sit in, and they haven't much to do for the day other than look pretty and sit.

I seem to have gone a little miniature crazy. Besides a few more pieces of furniture, I have gone onto Amazon (usually a big mistake) and found some books on miniatures. I almost can't resist. Everything is just so darned cute! I hope I can find others who are interested in doing little 1/12 scale things. It's really quite fun.

If you don't require umpteen million books to satisfy your curiosity, a lot of the stuff can be had for cheap. There are little furniture kits and also used furniture available out there for in the $10 range, so that as a weekend project you could paint a little chair and have something to add to your scene without feeling like you spent all your hard earned money.

Hopefully you will find a bit of charm in my rats and rabbits and other tinies and see potential for your own scenes and room settings. The stuffed things also go nicely in Blythe scenes if you aren't for the teeny tiny miniature stuff.

My plan for the weekend is to make a few dresses for the rat girls and maybe look into some things for the walls of my little room box. I haven't worked on putting together any faux paintings yet, and I think that might be fun.

I am inspired a little by the old-timey children's books with their illustrations of animals in little jackets and trousers. I want my little rat girls to be a little less countrified, and more city fancy, but the works of Beatrix Potter and Tasha Tudor certainly come to mind.

We are running into a cold snap here for the week, so staying inside seems again the thing to do. It won't be long before winter hits here, and even this morning we had a tiny dusting of snow, and still there are little flakes flitting around outside my window. Nothing sticking yet, but it won't be long.  I hope this is a good weekend for you.  Stay warm.  Stay creative and always find time to play.

The Rat's Have a Dress Shop

 My mind is in a whirl.  I have never before looked into 1/12 scale dolls and miniatures.  I thought 1/6 scale was tiny enough!  But, I seem to have grown dissatisfied with the accessories available in 1/6 scale.  There isn't much furniture out there, and what there is, is so expensive, because, well, it has to be OOAK, or it is plastic, and that isn't what I was after.  There just isn't a market for 1/6 scale roombox stuff.  Takes up a lot of room.  However, in dollhouse scale, there is literally tons of stuff.  Just search 1 thing.  Any thing you can think of that a human might need, and you will find it in 1/12 scale.  I had no idea.  Really.  

Did you know you can find all sorts of flooring, wallpaper, trim, windows, furniture.  Oh, and then the stuff to put on tables, on chairs, on beds.  It just goes on and on.  Okay, so my new love of tiny rats has led me to investigate.  They need things.  You know they do.  I mean, why have little rat dolls if you can't actually do anything with them?  I am not one for a lot of stuff sitting on shelves.  Things I own have to amuse me.  That is their job :)  

So, I set out to make a room box for the rats.  It is pretty small, as rooms go.  1/12 scale means every inch in the doll's world is the same as 1 foot in human world.  So, my room box thingie is 11.5 x 11.5 inches.  That is a little less than a 12' x 12' human room.  A bedroom more or less, and not a grand one either.  An average sized bedroom.  I didn't know how to proceed, so I bought 3 pieces of ready cut wood on Ebay.  1 for the floor, 2 for the walls.  I wanted an open room to start, because we don't have a lot of light here, and I am not sure about indoor artificial lighting yet.  They came to me flat.  The flooring had 2 grooves on 2 edges, where the 2 walls would slide in.  Apparently I was supposed to glue those in the slots, but I wasn't sure I wanted anything permanent, so I just slid them in.  Seemed okay.  A little unstable, so I taped everything well on the outside, where it won't show.


After initial assessment of the new room size, I first went to the Home Depot, gathered paints (the small sample sizes are perfect, at about $3 a pop - so for a small budget you can get a handful of colors to try and not feel you have broken the bank).  I also got some drywall tape in the lightest weight I could find.  And some spackle.  I taped the seam where the 2 walls adjoin, added the spackle, let dry, sanded, and repeated.  Then I painted the wall a pretty pale peachy pink and added in a bit of rag painting of a slightly darker shade of the same color.

 I painted the floor in a random stripe pattern and gave it a mopping with toweling to make it look a little messy and shabby.  I was going to put some baseboard trim, but I just cut out some paper using a die cut edge thing i have, and painted it gold.  I haven't permanently affixed that, because not sure if I like it or not, and the furniture hides it anyway.

 I painted a bunch of furniture I got on ebay, which was originally various shades of stained or painted wood.  My goal was to not pay over $5 for a piece of furniture, and I did that in all but 1 case I think.  I painted the furniture various colors, and the room was basically ready.  I had started originally with the idea of having an elegant room.  Well, that never happens with me.  Whenever anything starts to get serious in my artwork, I have to make a joke, and it always ends up being more whimsical.  I don't know that I love whimsical, but that is just what happens.  So, with all the crazy painting I did, pretty much whimsical is what I ended up with.

 So, now I have a nice dressmaker's shop for the rats.  They will be working there.  They may need more room eventually, as there isn't much of a dressing area for the ladies they will be waiting on.  But, these things take time.  For now, it's a small shop, with a limited number of rat girls.  All of the rat girls you see here are for sale in my Etsy shop and I plan to continue making more.  Ultimately I would like to have little 5-6" rodents for sale as well as dresses and things to go with them.  The costumes are changeable and no one, even a rat, likes to wear the same thing day after day.

I still have to put things on the walls and have things on shelves and maybe hanging out drawers, but I only started this yesterday, so I will need time to figure out the best way to proceed.  I bought too much furniture, so maybe at some point that will have to go in a second room.  It seems to be a learning curve - thinking in small :)

Hope you are having a lovely creative week!

XOXO

Cindy

Rat Style - All Dolled Up

The Fancy Girls

I have not blogged in forever.  I don't know what has gotten into me today, but I feel like blogging!  So here goes.

Aggie

I have been working for a month on little mohair animals.  Bears and rabbits mainly.  This past weekend I got the idea that rats in fancy dresses would be just the thing.

Aggie

I knew I wanted them to have skinny limbs.  Rats don't have fat arms and legs like bears.  They have wiry limbs.  So, I drew up a long pointy nosed pattern and added in some skinny legs and arms.  The legs should have boots and heels, I thought, so I gave them that as well. 

Little Debbie

I have been messing around with traditional teddy bear making stuff - cotter pins and disks.  They make the limbs move, especially the head, around and around.  The rats should have movable heads, so I gave them those.  The legs and arms, since I like to pull them in tight and because they are quite skinny, I gave button twist joints instead, and put vintage buttons on the outsides of each limb. 

Little Debbie

The rats are between 5 and 6" tall.  That is roughly dollhouse scale.  They are probably a little fatter than most dollhouse folk, but it seems like the furniture fits them pretty well. That led me, of course, to look into making my own dollhouse setting for them.  

Francine

That will have to come later, as I did order a bunch of stuff for a roombox, but it won't arrive for another week or 2.  Hopefully I will be sharing that with you soon.

Francine

So anyway, back to the rats.  I gave them fancy dresses, which all good ratty girls should have.  The contrast is lovely, in my mind.

Martha

Fancy dresses for ratty girls.  I hope to make a bunch of them and then offer dresses for them in addition to the ones they come with, so that they are more like a small doll - with changeable clothing.  I think they will need other things as well.  Perhaps hats and maybe furniture.  We shall see what I come up with, but I am a little inspired at the moment.  It brings back childhood memories or little mice dressed in finery.

Martha

I have included some photos of the girls.  Hope you are all having a lovely season of creating!

Dancing the Can-Can