Building a miniature tree house

Building a Miniature Tree House

The Parrot that started the ball rolling

This project all started with a Macaw parrot. I was flicking through my Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine (issue 296 January 2019) and I saw a tutorial for a parrot, it looked sooo realistic. I thought to myself "I'd love to have a go at that". Little did I know how it was going to fire my imagination!

The finished parrot

It was a really fiddly thing to make, indeed the magazine states it as a 'skilled' project. Undeterred I set to with my polymer clay, feathers and twig. I really enjoyed the project and was immensely pleased with the results. Now I had my own little parrot... and he just had to have somewhere to live. My imagination ran riot and the idea of a tree house developed.

Research

I don't know a thing about building a tree house!

First thing I did was Googled tree house images. After scrolling for what seemed like hours I found a photo from Pirates of the Caribbean, perfect inspiration. Then I looked at how to build a tree house. I often look at life size techniques to give me a clue of how to proceed, so I headed to YouTube to watch videos on building a tree house. There are some really awesome tree houses out there, modern engineered with everything you could want, but it wasn't the look I was after. Then I stumbled upon 'Brave Wilderness Life'. This was what I was looking for, a more wild, back to nature look.

Building the tree

Tedious branch painting

I started off with tin foil and wire (quite thick wire, it's got to hold a fair bit of weight), held together with masking tape. I found an old chopping board to mount it on and I drilled holes to glue the wire into. Then came Paper mache 'clay'. This is made using cheep toilet paper, shredded with a paper shredder, soaked in water, blended in an old blender, I squeezed as much water out as I could then added PVA glue. That dealt with the trunk, roots and main branches. The smaller branches I made with florists wire and attached them to the bigger branches. I disguised the joins with light modelling paste. Then painted it all with acrylic paints. Painting the smaller branches was sooooo tedious and there were so many of them! I couldn't wait to get started on the tree house itself, but you can't have a tree house without a tree!

A firm foundation

Adding the paper mache

Nearly finished

Building the House

The exciting bit

At last the tree was done, now I could get down to the nitty gritty. The first stage is to build a platform. I really didn't watch the videos close enough, if I had, this stage would have been a whole lot easier. Oh well, you live and learn. As it was, starting off the platform was really tricky, and wobbly, but as I attached more twigs it became a bit more stable. Next, I built a framework for the walls. Now my ADHD started to get the better of me.

Heidi keeping a close eye on progress

Starting the walls

Project on hold

Taking a break

Getting ready for a fair

I'd been doing really well up to this point but I felt I needed a break from it. I'm looking at doing a fair with dollysdaydreams so I've started making some stock for my stall. I will finish the tree house and hopefully it'll be hell of a crowd puller on my stall.

An abacus for my stall

To see what I'm upto now goto my Facebook page or my Instagram

Thanks for reading x

Project - miniature rug for Dr Muffet's study

I decided I needed a rug for Dr Muffet's study AKA Little Miss Muffet diorama project. I have the ideal book to look at for instruction, Dolls' House Needlecrafts by Venus A. Dodge. I've never made a rug before - let alone in miniature!

Flicking through the book I found the one that I wanted to do. The instructions carry a warning "designed for experienced needlewomen", pfft I think, I'm sure I can do this. I found some material, threads of suitable colours and photocopied the pattern and away I went. After 3 or 4 hours work I realised that, if I was interpreting the pattern correctly it wasn't going to fit on my fabric!

First attempt, on the wrong fabric (25 count evenweave linen), starting in the wrong place

You guessed it, I wasn't interpreting correctly, (groan). I had to start again! At the same time I've fixed my smart phone. It froze on me when I was taking these photos, completely, I couldn't even switch it off 'n' on again. I joked to my Mum that it was going to be very posh brick that I was going to throw through the window.

Progress on second attempt, on the right fabric (22 count canvas) starting in the right place

I think the sewing, petit point to be precise, has helped me today, it's quite a calming and rythmic process, I recommend it (although maybe start of with something easy). By the way I also recommend the frame that I'm using for the second attempt, it's called a Q-Snap frame. It's much chunkier and more comfortable to hold than the traditional embroidery hoop.

Hopefully it goes smoothly from here on in.

The long and winding road to recovery

I've suffered with my mental health since I was a teenager. When I was 13 I started to wake up in the night and see really scary things, spiders a foot across, etc. By the time I was 15 I would regularly take small overdoses to make myself ill so I could have time out (it didn't occur to me to just fake it, I couldn't lie anyhow). Then when I was 17 I went too far and ended up in hospital, on the cardiac ward, just for a few days (phew!). I don't really remember why I couldn't cope with life, I think I just found everything overwhelming. Life was too much for me, my brain kept crying out - OVERLOAD.

It wasn't until I was about 27 that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). These are the symptoms from the NHS website:-

• emotional instability – the psychological term for this is "affective dysregulation" (my husband calls this sudden mood swings)
• disturbed patterns of thinking or perception – ("cognitive distortions" or "perceptual distortions") (mainly paranoid thoughts)
• impulsive behaviour (overdoses, self harm and climbing on a tank once, a military one (sorry))
• intense but unstable relationships with others (been married 3 times)

There's a lot more info out there now, when I was diagnosed all I had from my community psychiatric nurse (CPN) was a badly photocopied leaflet with a very scary face on the front (like something out of a horror movie). 

For me, the main problem with BPD is that "I CAN'T RELY ON ME". I never know what the day is gonna bring. It can start out great (I tend to wake up happy) then come crashing down around me because of some seemingly insignificant event (insignificant to others anyhow, quite significant to me). 

My Ballpoint pen drawing - eyes are the window to the soul. I love drawing eyes, weirdly though, I can't make eye contact in real life.

I've just found the spell checker on Blogger, awesome because I have dyslexia. (please don't comment that you can't have it because you can write, it's due to the disparity between my verbal and spacial abilities, I can think a lot more than I can express verbally).


I've also got ADHD (inattentive type) but I'll write about that in another post :-)

The start of my journey to .... ???

Miniature madness 

The miniature madness all started one day when me and my husband had some time to kill in town. We went into the library and, as usual, I browsed the craft books. There was a book on miniature quilts, and I thought I'd love to have a go at that. From there the ideas mushroomed in my head like an atomic bomb... boom.

So I made a quilt and it would have been a real shame for it to be stuck in a drawer or box gathering dust. So I made some little rabbits to snuggle up underneath it. Then they needed a bed and before I knew it I was working on a whole bedroom in minature. My local art group leader asked me to put it in our yearly exhibition. So then it became a diorama/roombox. Along the way I had the idea of depicting the nursery rhyme "There were ten in the bed". So along came more rabbits and a lot of research into the origins of the nursery rhyme. My conclusions were that it was a Victorian warning against the dangers of communal sleeping. So then came research into Victorian bedrooms and what they contained. I ended up making everything in the bedroom apart from the brass door knob!

Adjusting the curtains so the bunnies can have a good nights sleep.










The project was completed all in the space of three months. It's totally unknown for me and my ADHD(innatentive type) and BPD(screw your head up type) to be able to complete something so quickly, usually it takes me forever, feels like it, to finish a picture. The picture of Einstien, that you can see over my right shoulder, took 6 months!

For more photos of this project click here