Dollhouse Deco

"Where oh where did November go,
oh wherrrre oh where can it beeee?"

Welcome to "the Season", I guess. sigh. This will probably end up my only post for December, so ... anyway! On to whatcha came for:

Here's the most recent deco booklet I had the great fortune to work in - made by the wonderfully talented Arrow for Pequad, and currently making the rounds over at Nervousness.org ... It's a beautifully crafted dollhouse themed deco and while I usually shy away from posting other people's work, I really wanted you to see the front cover of this deco (I did ask the maker for permission first, of course!):

It's got great layers of textured and patterned paper, and there's real eyelet curtains in the windows! How cool is that?! The front doors open to reveal two sets of blank pages, for the artists to work on, which are also house shaped. The recipient for this deco, Pequad, uses a Kewpie doll image alot in her work, and it's also her icon/mascot on the Nness site, so that was my starting point for my page idea: I was going to make a Victorian inspired house and somehow incorporate little "pequad" dolls (sidenote: I remember once she told a story about how she got her user name and it involved Kewpies and how her family calls them pequads - for some reason that I forget now. Anyway that always stuck with me and so whenever I see a Kewp I automatically think "pequad") I took a sheet of patterened scrapbook cardstock weight paper that I thought looked wallpaper-y, and aged it a bit with an acrylic paint wash, then did the same thing with some scraps to make floor dividers:

I printed some vintage images of household furniture and items in greyscale - and in an effort to be unique I decided I was going to make my page interactive, so! I made little pockets on some of the furniture pieces: The chaise, chair, cushion, bathtub and even the hatbox in the attic all have little pockets to tuck the dolls into. Actually the seat area of the chair was too small for a full usable pocket so it has a strip across the front that will hold the doll in place. I made the pockets by printing a double quantity of images and once I had cut the item out I then used the second matching image to cut the pocket section from, and glued it down to the full piece, making sure to leave space for my dollies to fit into! And that brings us to:

I wanted this deco page to be very personal to the recipient, so - I actually have in my possession an old vinyl Kewpie doll that I took pics of (I got it awhile back cause I planned to make something out of it, came in extra handy for some printed projects ... ) and I used those as my dolls. What you don't see here, because like a dolt I forGOT to take pictures of this! GRRR. - is that I made a backside image to the dolls as well, mmnhmmm, with their lil beehinds showin' - then I sandwiched them together with a length of ribbon in the middle that would later be attached to the page so you could put the dollies in the various pieces of furniture, but not lose the dolls. Cute, right?! I added wings that I painted with iridecent paint (yep, those have backs too), and then as a final touch I made each dolly a crown and a party hat - one to wear, one to keep up in the hat trunk in the attic.

Once I had all the pieces done, I glued the other end of the ribbons to the backside of the room page and added a top layer of text weight paper just to cover the ribbon ends - then glued the whole thing down to the blank page in the deco booklet. (Waiting in between steps for all the glues to dry & cure, of course!) I wanted this to be a special page and I feel really lucky that I got to start the deco off, so now all i hope is that she likes it and that all the little interactive bits hold up and work as I intended ... and I know it looks a little weird with the doll's feet disappearing into the chaise, but it was the best I could do! :D

Oh yeah! And after all that, know what's my favorite part of the deco? The last-minute addition of the framed family photo in the "Parlor" - it was originally going to be an old cross stitch sampler but luckily a more creative idea surfaced before I glued it down ...

Later, I got another project I gotta get back to, so maybe I'll have something new to post in a few days after all! Seeeeeeyuh!

~ gem ~