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

Long long time ago - Or, Spring Is Here Hopefully?

Well, obviously, I am a horrible blogger! Egads. It has been nearly half a year gone by! I am going to blame it on the winter. Longest winter I can remember. Ever. No kidding.

The whole east coast of the US got deluged with snow and cold. We were still having snow the last days of March this year. The mood around here was one something like preparing for an ice age. We still have 3 feet high snow banks in our yard, and there is just a hint of grass showing around the porch.

All is well, though, it seems. We had a 50 degree day this week, so I am just going to say spring is here. It doesn't look like it outside today, but let's be optimistic, shall we?

If anyone is wondering, this winter I was busy making doll dresses and some other random fashions for Blythe. I am saying at the moment that I am not going to make any more custom dolls for sale. Maybe sometimes one for myself, but I have had a good run, customized maybe 125 dolls for others, and for now that is enough.

That could change, but I feel pretty good about the way my little dress shop is going, so kind of want to just give that a whirl. In the past I have done virtually everything for dolls. Reroots, dyeing fiber for reroots, customizing Blythes, Sad Eyed Susies and other dolls, dresses, hats, goggles, masks, original clothing, and anything that I could think up.

It has gotten so that I just have so much stuff everywhere. I would like to put some of it away and just do one thing for awhile. So, it's dresses for now. They make me happy. It's something I am pretty good at. So, that's that.

Of course, I can never seem to concentrate on any one kind of fashion for very long, so things seem to change day to day. I have gotten so I can make more than 1 of something, but not as often as would be practical. I am inspired by a lot of things, and usually I just like to do whatever comes to me.

For this post, I am just sharing some photos of some of the things I made and sold in my shop over the winter. Hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is bursting into spring madness and that in the southern, you are easing into fall and things are maybe cooling down a bit.

Stay colorful!

XOXOX

Cindy