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English Miniature Collector
Surprise, surprise! The roombox in the latest issue of Miniature Collector:
Third publication, first in US. As for me, I’m still sort of struggling with my marquetry project, I’m on Hinges stage right now, but the progress is slow due to real life things. ((
Cornelis De Man Chess Players Roombox.
Well, it’s all done, I’m waiting for the last third painting – the frame for it is ready. Here is the original painting:
And what we’ve done with it 🙂
Chair Upholstery.
I finished upholstering the second chair, this time I used silk taffeta.
I had to make the back of the seat twice, the veneer split, but the result is great.
Roombox. The Rug.
Another portion of the photos – this time about the rug. I’m not an expert in petit point, so when I started working on a project I decided that the rug should be commissioned to someone who’s the best at petit point. It was very important because even the back of the rug should have been perfect. And of course I was looking for someone who could chart the rug, find just the right colors, add the right mood to the whole picture. I immediately thought of Natalia Frank, I had no doubts she would do it perfectly. Natalia made several posts about this amazing rug – here, here, and here and here.
But I should add some personal thoughts about it – to see such beauty on the monitor is absolutely nothing, you should see it yourself, touch it, feel it, admire it. Natalia is a genius, I was blown away by all the details. The colors – perfect, just what I was looking for. We were all worried about the result, because we all have different monitors, so it was hard to say, how it was going to be, but here we are.
Roombox
I was going to write this post later next month, but I’m happy that I’m doing it now. All these months I was posting pictures of the furniture I made for the commissioned roombox and now I can show much more. Here’s a teaser:
Something new for the roombox and KDF
I’m very very close to finishing my part of the roombox. Foot warmer – made with boxwood.
Size – 35X 25 X20 mm.
Before that I made a cittern. It is made with cherry wood, for strings I used extra fine silk thread I ordered in Belgium some time ago.
Its length is about 7cm.
And bellows, I wish I could make them all fancy, carved, decorated, but I had to make it simple, it’s a copy, so…
I also used cherry wood, cotton and brass.
And the last but not least – yesterday I got a contract from Kensington Dollshouse Festival (May, 17 an 18 in 2014) . I just couldn’t be happier to be honest. I sent two pieces of furniture in June and very soon received the email that I was added to the list of exhibitors. I was late for Bishop Chicago Show by the way, well, still very happy to go to London next year with my family.
Now it’s time to choose the furniture, style etc. Have to make a whole collection, wow.
Dutch Chairs
I made these Dutch chairs recently, they are without textile for now, but I’ll fix it on the next week. I made both out of cherry wood, no shellac and patina yet. The main “problem” was – four lions that I needed to carve. I went through several sites and found pretty good one with 3d models, I bought one – lion’s head, basically it’s door knob, but it looked perfect for chairs, so I took it as a reference. What I like about 3d models is that you can rotate them to any angle you want, you’ll be able to see all the details. This time it was really fun to work. Here’s the result:
In my last post I wrote about poor man’s duplicator. This time I used pre-cut chisels again – but only for two shapes – round 1mm and 2mm. The rest is by hand. I’m still planning to make lathe duplicator, hopefully next month.
Now I’m moving to making quite unusual pieces for me, never made them before. I hope to show them to you soon.
Dutch Table. Poor man’s lathe duplicator.
It’s been a while since my last post, most of my work now is commissions. that I cannot show till December, sorry. I hope that in few months I’ll be able to show it all in details. I haven’t worked on my art nouveau cabinet since August, mostly because it was hard tget used to the fact that I have a baby girl, and she doesn’t really like all the noises from tablesaw and such. Then I started learning Rhino 3d program, later SolidWorks. I was so into Rhino that I actually design all the furniture pieces in it, Sketchup had to go 🙂
Well, back to work. In my last post I wrote about Dutch table that I made for commissioned roombox. So I’ve changed it, completely. The decoration part were scaled down a bit, the shape of the leg is different now. Usually I don’t mind making such changes, but this time it was very hard – it’s almost depressing to have to change things, when you have a baby (ugh, those sleepless nights:)), and I don’t have grandmas and grandpas to help me out, and you have to go back and start from scratch. grrrr. But there was no choice, the form of the legs was bad. I started with 3d model, here it is:
New commission – table WIP
As a part of the commission I had a table. Now it’s a good time to show you a couple of photos of the process of making it. Initially I was going to use mahogany for it and even made a table top and blanks for the legs, which I’ll show you below, but later on the plans got changed and I remade everything from cherry wood. Don’t be surprised 🙂
Commissions and new router fence.
Some time ago I made a post about a router and a self-made wooden fence for it, (it was three years ago, time flies!) Well, not much has changed since that time, the only thing that became worse, was the fence itself. In the place where the fence and the router bit meet you could see uneven ends. So when you were working with tiny moldings, the accuracy of the the work suffered very much. My husband offered me to make a metallic fence for the router, and here’s the result:
It’s a bit taller than the wooden one, but you can change the width of it, so you can fit any router bit neatly. The view from behind, it’s very easy to remove it.