Dolls House Making
Bigg Gernes
The first step was to design the basic build of the house. I spent a long time searching all the different kits you can buy online, but ultimately decided it would be the most fun to build it from scratch.
The easiest way to cut your plywood is to lay them on a table or work bench with part of it hanging off while using wood clamps to keep it in place. To make sure you get perfectly straight cuts, hold a speed square in place to guide your circular saw.
I love this idea and would love to do one for my children, by any chance do you have a autocad version with the layout and dimensions of this dollhouse? That I could possibly download and use?
Thank you
1. Overall, we are appreciative that these plans are made available for free. Our goal was to build something personal and sturdy rather than just buying a Barbie dollhouse which may break more easily. So having these plans as a starting point took a lot of planning out of the process (sort of).
Hi! I am making this!! I did have a question about the windows that might be silly haha but how far apart are the windows from the sides and from each other? And the same question for the doors with windows!
Also where should the pieces that hold up the floors be?
My dad & I were building a doll house together when I was a kid. Our basement flooded & it was ruined. We never ended up starting over. So now fast forward 25 years, I have a 4 year old daughter & my dad & I can now make a dollhouse for her that she will go crazy over and hopefully pass down. My dad is so excited to be doing this & so am I.
Discover our wide range dolls' houses in many styles and periods. Our dolls' house buildings are available in kit form, pre-built or fully furnished. In addition we stock many building materials to complete your perfect dolls' house.
I feel it is very much like a guilty pleasure, and I might have spent too much of my previous salary on retro and quirky vintage dolls house bits and bobs. But they are so cool. I know that there are some people out there who gets me..
It started with a new antique shop that opened in town when Jolina was quite little. They had an old Lundby Dolls house with furniture for 300 kroner, approx. 30 pounds. Obviously I got that, and the both girls have played with it a lot. Then we bought another one used, and had the two houses on the wall in perfect playing height for both girls. Since then I have always looked for old Lundby stuff at jumble sales and online. Its a great way of getting a decoration kick when you cannot redecorate your own house all the time.
A bit more than two years ago I was looking for a project family craft project that I could make with the girls. I always felt like I was doing crafty stuff on my own that they were too young to join in on, so I had the idea to build a homemade DIY doll house with accessories with them. It was a cosy project and we turned the idea into a book proposal. We also made a character called Duddi Dahrling, who lived in the house, and a little friend for her. I wrote about it here, in Danish though.
Since then the project has waited to be gathered, and now it is. In a beautiful pdf file sent out into the world. If it could turn into a beautiful little book I would be so happy. If not, it has still been a very cosy project and the girls still play with all the fun accessories and furniture we made. We all love to make fun and amazing rooms for our future dream home.
I had the good fortune to meet Jeanne Rullie at an IGMA school event in the Autumn of 2018. I saw the class was approved for beginners, but I was still terrified of making a doll that might look even half as good as what Jeanne makes.
I begged my naturally talented younger sister Jean Ricci to attend with me and she agreed, so if I failed, she would be there to cheer me up. We both found this to be a perfectly joy-filled experience. A great part of this joy came from Jeanne Rullie as the teacher. She set the atmosphere to such a relaxed state as she moved about us students constantly to ensure we were on the right track.
Each student was meant to make a grandmother or elderly woman. One of our classmates made a wonderful witch. Each doll came out radically different from the others. My grandmother doll was so strange looking, but it was actually beautiful to me.
Prior to this event with Jamie Carrington, Jeanne did not know anything about making miniatures. She was very impressed with what she saw at the IGMA school and loved being with the like-minded people she met there. She decided to return again to learn more. She returned to guild school year after year. 2019 was her eighth year, but then she attended as a teacher.
Outside of dollmaking, Jeanne works for her husband out of their home as the office manager for their small business. She only works on miniature dolls part time. It takes a full week of her spare time to make one doll.
Jeanne feels fortunate to have received so much interest in the dolls she has made. She does not feel the need to keep any for herself. It is the creative process that she enjoys, so she feels blessed that others want the dolls she creates. She does try to take a photograph of each of her dolls before she sells them. Once she is satisfied with the photo, she posts it to her Pinterest page. This helps her remember what she has made and what has garnered a lot of interest. As with many true artists, the repetition of creating the same character many times over is not as appealing as creating something new every time.
Jeanne wastes a bit of time choosing the right fabric and she usually struggles with hair styles and colours. She feels that she still has a lot to learn about hair styling for dolls. Those of us in her class would disagree wholeheartedly.
I tend to describe her dolls as uniquely alive. They are all so perfectly imperfect, like humans, they are so lifelike and so different from other miniature doll makers. Yet Jeanne is always striving to improve with each doll that she makes.
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Our wide range of specialist glues and adhesives are made for purpose and come with an easy-to-decipher reference guide to help you assemble every last piece of your dolls house. Make sure all your building materials are tightly held together with their high-quality formulas.
Build or replace a totally unique roof with our roof tiles and pieces. Our range of tiles mimic the finest roofing, including stone, brick, wooden and slate. Alternatively, you could create a sturdy roof and then paint over the slabs for a finished look that feels unique to you.
This is part of an ongoing project of making props and extras for our stop motion dolls' house film. The animation centres around an Edwardian dolls' house. This contains original mainly Arts and Crafts fixtures, fittings and furniture and dolls and toys from the Victorian era and up to the 1920s. In order to supply the narrative, I am adding characters and at the moment I am using needle felting to do this. I have already made a collie cross dog, who is to be one of the major characters and his stunt double who is also the director of the film. This dog replaces the one I remember being in the dolls' house in my childhood but which over the years has 'gone walkabout'.
The technique used in needle felting is to get the wool, which is naturally barbed to pull itself together into a shape or flatten itself out with the motion of the needle thus by felting (or in the vernacular, stabbing in and out of) the wool. It is actually very much like using the pressure of your fingers to shape clay. Leaving an unfelted fringe-type end to a shape allows you to join elements of your design together, such as the head to a body but in this case I am going to 'joint' my bear by running a thread through the main elements, i.e., the body, head, arms and legs.
For the Teddy Bear I've decided to use the 'knot and wrap' method to make solid shapes for the body and head. I am then going on to make some simple individual, folded and/or rolled needle-felted shapes to construct the arms, legs and ears. This is a technique I learned from watching a needle felting professional. If you are new to needle felting, as indeed am I, then I suggest at some point you head over to the YouTube channel of Serafina Fiber Art and take a look at her tutorial 'Bunny Puff', which is a great starting point and one of her signature designs. This is the first project I tried out when I started to learn the craft/process and I liked her work because she uses the wool much as a sculpture artist uses clay. Above you can see the starting point of my bunny project: the 'knot', then the head and body wrapped and joined and the final outcome. For the bunny I used Organic Merino Top, White Jacob Sheep Top and a bag of Scoured Mixed Jacob Fleece Wool, which I sourced from Cumbria in the UK. Jacob Fleece is a great way to get some nuanced shades of natural wool.
For the above design, I used as directed, core wool, which as the name suggests is for building the interior 'skeleton' or 'carpentry' of a character or for wrapping armature, such as in the Dogs (above bottom right). However, as the Teddy is such a tiny character it needs very small amounts of wool to be easily broken off the main piece, such as in fine wool roving. I'm using what is often referred to as Fairy or Magic wool. This is organic plant-dyed wool in suitable wispy bits of carded wool that are easy to pull off in very small amounts and often used for making fairies and small dolls. I have only two colours of this which I bought in a sale years ago and have been languishing at the bottom of my wardrobe. One is a deep Burgundy red and I have used a little for the interior of my dog's mouth and the other is an eminently suitable fawn for the Teddy. As you can see from the above, I also used a little of the fawn in the Puff Bunny.
To make this project I'm using a fine, 36 gauge triangular needle felting needle held by hand but many people prefer to use a pen style needle felting tool
I am also using a home-made mat from double thickness jute sacking and filled with organic rice. You can buy these but they are really fun to make. The mat is needed for two reasons one to support the work and the other to stop you from breaking needles. When the work is felted on the mat it will start to adhere to it but you can gently prise it away. When you are needle felting you should keep lifting the wool from the mat to stop it from getting embedded too far as this could damage the work when you lift it off, in particular with a tiny object like this.
N.B. I needle felt very slowly and carefully particularly on a tiny subject like this but if you are in any way worried about hurting your fingers then you should either invest in or make some leather finger and thumb protectors.
One extra item you will probably also need is a magnifying glass on a stand. We have a simple home made one but you can get professional looking type of craft magnifying glass on a stand.