Piano Jam

Ellis and Brigitte are the only ones hanging out at the mouse house at the moment. It was a quiet evening last night and they decided a piano jam was in order.

This is Brigitte. She is a lovely cream rabbit girl. She is wearing a fancy boysenberry silk dress with lace and tulle layers, with a vintage lace neck wrap. She is quite fond of her friend, Ellis. Ellis is a mouse.

He is a very cute, obviously dapper, cream mouse wearing a very striking 3-piece silk suit in autumn colors.   He is a man of good taste.  He would like to impress Brigitte with his piano playing skills, so he asks her to sit down while he plays a tune for her. 

She leans back on her seat and gets comfortable. She just knows she will love his selection.  He is, after all, a man of good taste.

He takes his jacket off so that he has better movement. He is quite confident and at the ready, as you can tell.  Brigitte loves the tune Ellis plays for her. She is quite impressed. She is very pleased and would like to play him a tune as well. She asks him to sit down.

Of course he does. He is quite a gentleman.

He sits back to enjoy a relaxing piano moment.

Brigitte takes her seat at the piano and plays a lively march tune. Ellis is surprised by the tempo, but quite pleased.

She has him. She can tell. She sits back down and watches as he leaves the room. Most likely he is going to brag to some of his friends about his good taste in ladies. 

I hope you are having a good start to your week.  I have cleaned up this blog a bit.  I noticed that it has been so long since I last edited the list of blogs I follow, that some of them had since turned to pornography sites.  No kidding.  Eeep.  Hopefully I have that under control and those sites deleted.  :)

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 Hare Sisters are Dining Out

 I have set up my little rat dressmaker's shop now and it's time to have some clients.  The 3 hare sisters came in over the weekend and wanted similar dresses in different colors, as they will be dining out, and love to look the same, but prefer different colors.  The hares are a lovely shade of nut brown and they have long ears, making them a bit more stately than the rats.  They fit the same dresses and can sit in the same chairs, but their ears take up more space than the little mouse ears.

The 3 hare sisters, Rita Mae, Claudine and Katrine have decided that they will choose cream, blue and pink as their dress colors.  The rats worked hard and gave each girl a lovely elegant dining out dress, made from a satin devore of rayon and silk.  The bodice of the dresses have a layer of cream colored cotton lace and a bit of white silk gauze at the neck, for a bit of fluffy frou-frou.  The dresses have an underlayer of the same silk gauze as a bit of petticoat.

Each girl was given a head wrap to complement their lovely ears.  No good French hare would like to be out on the town without one.  Keeps the breeze out of the ears, and adds a lovely festive element.

The hare sisters seem happy with their dresses.  They are ready to go.  The rats had a busy day and the shop can be swept and the lights dimmed.

I trust you are finding creative things to do as well!

XOXO

Cindy

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