While the Children Played…

We went to the dollar store this week with Granny, and bought a mailbox to send letters to Santa. I put out paper, pens and stickers, and everything got used up the very same day!

Since Santa has appointed me his number one helper in our house, I removed the letters from the mailbox to forward them to him. I hope he won’t be too busy to read them all…

While the kids were preoccupied with letter writing, I took the opportunity to work on the Christmas dollhouse again. I had picked up a gift box at the dollar store which I thought would make a good frame for the dollhouse. With some minor adjustments, it was a pretty good fit, so I glued and taped the room boxes together, first in groups of two, then four, and finally, six.

I cut two pieces of foam board to line the back of the box, and make a plinth for the bottom of the box. I covered the plinth with card stock.

I glued and clamped the set of six rooms into the box frame. While the rooms were drying in place, I started to make two staircases for the house by using a lined index card to make a grid pattern template piece.

I used my template to trace four stair side pieces onto thin cardboard, and then used the index card to make a template I could use to cut smaller stair pieces out of.

I was hoping to use wood slats for the actual step pieces, but they would not glue to the cardboard side pieces. Instead, I cut short pieces from my long cardboard bar. and glued them to one side of a stair side. Once they dried in place, I glued the other stair side in place. Making the steps was a very tricky process, and I wished more than once that I had long nosed tweezers instead of just my clumsy fingers to work with.

When the steps were in place between the two stair sides and all the glued parts had dried, I cut bar pieces to cover the open backs of the stair sets and their tops.

The final step was to paint the stair sets to make them look better and help reinforce the flimsiness of the cardboard. They are not glued into the house yet, as I plan to wallpaper some of the rooms and floors first. I painted the floors of the bottom two rooms to look like wood, hence the messy walls. I will definitely be wallpapering those rooms soon.

In the meantime, Michael is excited! We went to the yarn shop on Friday, and he picked out this multicoloured sock yarn for his new housecoat. This week coming, will be all about knitting up a pattern for the housecoat. We can’t wait to see how it turns out!

4 thoughts on “While the Children Played…”

  1. moi aussi, je suis sur la “bonne liste” : c’est ce que mes trois petits m’ont dit … pour que je ne me décourage pas et que je leur fasse … des cadeaux de Noël !!! (je viens de recevoir le livre dont vous avez parlé… je suis ravie !”
    à bientôt !

    Reply
  2. The house is coming along nicely. The stairs turned out really good. Loved the letters to Santa! You are all on the “nice list”.

    Reply

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