Seven Months of Silence

Wow, I almost can't believe it is seven months since I last posted. Real life has been very busy and filled with some difficult times. Progress on miniatures has been slow, but finally I have some things I can show you.

Remember the French washstand I made last year, during November I made a Victorian bath towel for it based on some real ones that I saw on the internet. Mine is made from 50 count linen with a crochet edge made using a 0.4mm hook and some cotton sewing thread, the embroidery design dates from Victorian times and were stitched with Pipers Silk.

A close up of the stitching.

Hanging on the washstand, now I must do the embroidery on the second towel.

I spend some time building the second room for my Cape Dutch house during the last six weeks. The house is finally standing in a decent place where I have good access to it after we moved some furniture around.

The front of the house with the entrance hall in the center, to the right is the bedroom I just built, the empty spot on the left will become the drawing room.

The space behind the front rooms of the house will have a corridor in the middle behind the entrance hall with a kitchen behind the bedroom and a dining room behind the drawing room.

One will have a nice view through the doors into the other rooms. The furniture I used here is just to give you an idea of my plans for the bedroom, most of them won't be used here.

The wallpaper I used for the panels is gift wrap with a chinoiserie design dating from 1780, since the pattern is quite big I decided to use it in panels so as not to overwhelm the room. I am thinking of painting the bottom panels just a shade darker before I add molding all around the panels. I plan on using the beautiful silk velvet for the curtains. Making the flooring for the bedroom is probably next, at this stage all the walls can still be removed, I find it a lot easier to work on them while they are lying flat.

I have made some progress on my 1740 rug which is destined for the bedroom, the colors match the wallpaper perfectly.  

Hopefully it won't be another seven months before you hear from me again!
Elga

Building a door and two furniture pieces

This last weekend I spend some time on the building of the screen doors. The top rail is curved and after some thought I decided it would be easier to cut a slot in the wood for the glass as opposed to grinding the glass to fit, especially since I have to build four doors.

The slot with the glass in it.

Cutting the slot on my table saw was a bit nerve racking as all the curves and molding were already cut, I didn't even try to cut it to the full depth in one shot, probably did about 15 cuts raising the blade a bit each time.

Cutting the door side rails to length presented another problem, they were way too long for my table saw and I don't have a full scale table saw and my pieces weren't the same length either. in the end I taped a piece of wood to the arm on my band saw and cut all eight side rails to the same length but still a bit overlong.

The last little bit I cut off on the table saw because I wanted a really smooth cut.

The panel for the bottom of the door was slightly too big and I had to remove about 0.5mm on all four sides, with the angle in the middle rail this was all quite complicated to cut and fit.

One of the four doors in the frame to check that the height is right.

I also checked that the glass and small rails will fit right, I am using microscope slides as they are nice and thin and I was lucky enough that they fit perfectly height wise, now I need to cut the glass and the wooden rails to size before any gluing can be done.

I also took time off from my orders to build two pieces of furniture, I had a deadline and finished both of these in eleven days. The first is a 19th century French washstand, the original was build from pine, I used Oregon pine for mine.

I think this piece lends itself well to all kind of uses, I used a granite look melamine to imitate the slate of the original.

And here is the original full scale washstand that I copied.

The second piece is a lovely Regency Etagere from 1840. I need more books for this one!

The original was made from Rosewood, I made mine from some mahogany sheets that I had because I didn't have time to cut and sand the wood I really want to use for this, a South African wood called Candlewood, it has a very nice grain and color that resembles Rosewood very well and I will make some again later this year in the Candlewood.

The reason for the rush, they were for class proposals, I will be teaching for the first time later this year, looking forward to it and kind of dreading it at the same time, first time nerves I guess! I will tell you later when and where when all the details has been loaded onto the website.

Have a great week
Elga

Progress, fitting and rain, rain, rain....

Sorry for the long silence...life is just so busy!

I made a bit of progress on the Cape Dutch home, because the door opening between the hall and back of the house is so big, I thought it would be a lot easier to glue in the door frame before I screw the walls together.

Using some squares to keep the frame square while the glue dries, hmmm, the rusted big one isn't mine!

A close up of the frame.

Test fitting with the two side walls...something was bothering me.

Oops, the roof isn't going to work like this, can't have those two gaps..I kind of did expect problems here, the room on the back of this wall was added about 70 years after the original house was built, the gables on this house was also added at that time...so after thinking about it for awhile I decided to change this wall to what it would have looked like before the additions.

I cut the wall down as you can see in this photo.

And then added a slanted piece of wood that I cut on my band saw to bring everything up to the height that it needed to be.

Next I need to finish the four doors, fitting the rail with the slant is rather a job. Somebody asked me why the side rail is wider at the bottom, I am not really sure...but I wonder...these doors are a lot taller than your usual door with a lot of glass in the top section and I think...maybe it was to have more solid wood in the bottom part of the door to support the weight of the glass.

Last night Yoda came to inspect the house...he is rather a bored kitty at the moment as it has rained almost non stop for more than a week now over a fairly large part of the country. We have a river going through our city and the least bit of rain makes it overflow now, roads are starting to cave in...

The building to the right is a hotel... just behind it to the right is a big shopping mall that I often go to, I live on the other side of the horizon, the water you see here is the river bursting it's banks. Fortunately I live quite high up and away from the river...weather report says it still going to rain until the end of next week!

A damaged road in one of the suburbs.

The highway between Pretoria and Johannesburg, this happens to be the sign for the off ramp that I take when I come back home from Johannesburg, fortunately it wasn't raining when I used the highway on Saturday to go to our mini club meeting.

A road in Johannesburg...wow, that is serious damage, and I wonder how many more are going to crack when it starts drying up, I have noticed a few potholes appearing in roads that I drive on...I took none of these photos, most of them I received in an email.

Keep well
Elga

Cape Dutch House: Entrance Hall

I spent the last few days building the side walls for the entrance hall of the Cape Dutch house.

Busy gluing all the studs on.

Ready for the plywood to be glued on, since I don't have enough big clamps this happens with the assistance of my hubby who puts some very heavy over sized concrete bricks on it, too heavy for me to lift. Next time I will try and remember to take a photo.

Next I had a bit of hand trimming to do at the angled door openings.

I still need to glue the walls permanently in place. Ha, I had a big bummer...for some reason I got my measurements mixed up and the attic door openings were too low, raising the bottom wasn't too difficult, but the top...still need to fix the top level on the right hand wall.

The plywood surface is not the nicest I have seen, I don't particularly feel like spending hours on filling and sanding the walls, so I have decided to cover them in watercolor paper and then paint them. The paper has just the right texture for a plaster wall that isn't quite smooth. I am rather happy with the size of the room, none of these furniture will go into this house, they are just there to give you an idea of size. Sorry for the bad photo, it is gloomy outside and raining, not that I really mind, so far January has been very hot and dry.

I was hoping to show you some photos out of a book that I ordered on Monday, but a postal strike put a damper on that, last year we had one as well and that took six weeks of striking and backlogs to sort out with many parcels disappearing forever...I was so looking forward to receiving it, it is a newly released book on Cape Dutch furniture with over 400 pages and more than 1200 full color photos and lots of new research... the last books on this subject was published in the 80's with mostly black and white photos. This book isn't available at the usual book stores, my middle brother is in the museum business himself, got to hear of it and let me know...now I don't know how long I am going to have to wait...grrrrr...

Since the rug I was busy stitching is so very Victorian and won't fit in with the time period of the Cape Dutch house...I started a new one.

Not much yet, but you have to start somewhere...right? I chose a chart in Annelle Ferguson's book, it was charted by Sue Bakker from an antique English rug from about 1740. I have a book on the way with the original rug in there...but that one will probably also land in the strike backlog...another grrrrrrrrr...I will go and ask at the PO later today, maybe I am lucky and it got here from the UK before they started the strike.

So in the mean time, here is a scan of the rug Sue Bakker stitched, I am stitching mine with french knots and this rug is destined for the bedroom.

Have a great weekend
Elga

A Bit of This and That

This weekend turned up some unexpected treasures, I was asked by the chair lady of our club to go and look at some tools at an estate sale of a miniaturist that passed away last year, somebody I have never met as he only lived here for the last few years of his life to be closer to his family and he wasn't active in the local clubs. He was well known in Cape Town though and much loved by the members of the club there.

This man was a furniture maker and there were these chests of drawers mostly filed with all kinds of woods, both exotic and local woods, many that I would like to have but are difficult to come by either because of cost or rarity. The family seemed to be hoping that the wood would go to a good home and be used for miniatures. Well, I am saving for my trip to Denmark later this year and was torn in two....and then hubby came to the rescue and offered to buy it for me, the deal included the chests of drawers, a good thing because I wouldn't have known where to put it otherwise, there were ten drawers!

The two woods I was most happy to find was birdseye maple, hard to find in SA and expensive and the second stinkwood (so called because of the smell it gives when cutting it), a local hardwood that is protected now, it was extensively used in Cape Dutch furniture, a very dark and close grained wood...and I was just wondering last week where I was going to find enough of it....plus a kind friend has some that he can't use because of faults in the wood, the good parts are big enough to use for miniatures, so he is going to give it all to me when I see him again. I am really happy about all this as I like to use if I can the woods that were originally used for the antiques.

I spend some time over the weekend cutting more wall panels for the Cape Dutch house. View from what will be the front of the house, I had time to cut door openings in the one wall before the sun set, as I do this outside.

This will be the center wall of the house, fitting all those different roof lines are going to be an interesting exercise.

I also started a piece of embroidery last year for my newest sewing table, this one will be mine, I am copying an old English piece, you can see the original here, I used a different border from another antique sampler and moved it to the bottom as the bottom will be hidden when the screen is pulled up. I am cross stitching it on 75 count silk gauze with Pipers silk.

Well, that is all my news for now, have a great week everyone.
Elga  

Building on the Cape Dutch House has begun

I have started to build on the Cape Dutch house over the last two weeks or so, I started with the back wall of the entrance hall. Before I go any further, I should say here that when hubby and I carried in the base for the house, I realized that I would have to build the house in two halves, otherwise it would never be able to come out of our house again as it would be too wide to fit through the door, with a bit of thinking I figured out how to do that and you will see the details of that as the build unfolds.

Here is a scan of the real wall with it's beautiful screen door.

And the beginning of my wall, these houses had very thick walls and I didn't want to lose it in the miniature house, so I decided to use plywood with pine strips for the walls.

The walls are a bit thinner in the attic part of the house, so on the one face of the wall I only took it up to ceiling height.

The first wall almost completed, the small cutouts that you see in the top of the wall is where the ceiling beams will slot in after painting the room. The side walls will slot onto the pine that isn't covered by plywood. That door opening is big enough for a real cat to fit through, mine already went through it, I will have to watch him.

When you look at the door and window opening thicknesses in this real house, you can see why I want to keep that in the miniature build, it adds so much character and charm to the house.

This is the scale drawing for the screen door and it's molding.

Making such a big molding on a small drill press are no joke, it took me days to slowly cut away the excess wood in thin little layers.

The shape is emerging nicely.

The finished molding.

I also made the door panels last week, I wanted to be sure that I would get the curved top right before I made the door stiles. I am using Rhodesian Teak for all the woodwork in the house, Burmese Teak was used in some of the real houses of the time but the wood is scarce and very expensive and I just happened to have quite a bit of the Rhodesian Teak on hand, we bought it about ten years ago to make a book rack with it but that never happened.

I am still busy doing research as to how the houses were decorated in the late 1700's, the real house was built in the early 1700's, but underwent quite a few changes by the end of the century, by that time the British were in control of the Cape, I found a nice book with letters and extracts from a journal that were written by the wife of the secretary to the Governor of the Cape, she mentions quite a bit of the domestic arrangements of the time. The book starts off with a bit of her history, I found it very interesting, she was about 47 when she arrived here with her much younger husband (15 years in fact), she came of a good Scottish family, knew the Prince Regent personally as well as Sir Walter Scott, a famous English writer of the time.

Elga