Christmas Dining Room Box

A close-up photo of the Christmas tree with flashing lights and all the cards and presents made from the sheet of Christmas printies from DHEAustralia.  

Today, December 1st, I finished my Dining Room Box decorated for Christmas Dinner. The table is set and everything is ready for the family to come in, sit down and start celebrating.  The presents are piled under and around the Christmas tree and old Uncle Dave has come in early, dressed in his wonderful red Santa Claus suit and beard, all ready to start handing out the presents.  I had as much fun wrapping the mini-presents as I will have wrapping the real-life ones.  The mini-papers, Christmas cards and bunting flags all came from a fabulous sheet of Christmas Printies from Dolls House Emporium.   A lot of the furniture and the Christmas tree and lights also came from Dolls House Emporium. The rug on the floor was hand-made by my long-time friend, Jenni Kirkham and the carpet was bought to match the colour in the rug........in fact everything in the dining room was bought to match the rug even the blue and white china. I still need to add a light fitting and cornices around the ceiling but they can come later.....

This is the completed dining room with the presents piled up in front of the fireplace all ready for the family to open.  Santa Claus (aka old Uncle Dave) is surveying the scene.

Another view of the dining room showing the trifle and the Punch bowl on the sideboard. Old Uncle Dave looks as if he has already been sampling the punch!

Right-hand side of the dining room, showing the glass cabinet with my collection of miniature glassware.

Table set for Christmas Dinner

I spent the whole day working on the Christmas Dinner table for my dining room box.  There is a tropical cyclone up north of Western Australia which means that we down south get cloudy, humid weather that is perfect for staying inside and working on miniatures.  I didn't want the Christmas table to be permanent just in case I want to change it later so I devised a method of making the whole table top removable.

1. I made a template on white card by tracing around the table top.
2. Step two was to glue a piece of dark brown felt on top of the cardboard shape. I used the nearest coloured felt that I could get to the stain of the furniture.
3. I cut the table cloth from a linen handkerchief and I unpicked the lace from around the edge of a cotton handkerchief because it was exactly what was in my head for my Christmas look.  I used the cardboard shape that I traced from the actual table cloth as a template again and measured 1 1/2 inches out from the edge all the way around.  Then I hem-stitched a 1/16th inch turned hem all around the edge by hand which was more difficult than I thought it would be because of the curved ends. Lastly, I slip-stitched the lace on top of the hem.
4. I put a length of double-sided tape around the edge of the table top and then laid the felt covered card shape on top of the table.
5. Finally I laid the table cloth over the top of the felt and lightly pressed it to the double-sided tape with my fingers so that it folded over the edge of the table like a real one would and didn't stick out straight from the table edge.

Every plate, knife, fork, spoon, cracker and food is all stuck to the tablecloth with tiny pieces of double-sided tape so that I can pick the table up and nothing moves or falls off.  When I am ready to change my table, all I have to do is ease the table-cloth away from the double sided tape and the whole thing will lift off, still attached to the felt-covered cardboard.

The table looks pretty bare with only the meat and vegetables but the sideboard which will be on the side of the dining-room will have a full punch bowl with tiny glass cups, a Christmas Cake and a trifle.  There is no Christmas Pudding because personally, I hate Christmas Pudding, it's too rich, I much prefer the trifle.

Hmmm, that cyclone has caused us to have showers, the rain is bucketing down right now, I might go and do something else mini like make some jewellery on display stands for my future "Ladieswear Shop" which will sell mini dresses, underclothes, hats, accessories and perfumes.  However, that is for 2014, I need to finish the diningroom with the tree, stockings and presents first.......my brain, as usual, is racing ahead of my hands!!

FINISHED Nursery Room Box for my Sister

Here we have Nanny nursing the baby while her older siblings look on.  Over on the side of the room are her twin cousins enjoying a bottle of milk each.

Today I finished the room box for my sister's combine birthday and Christmas present.  I finally finished knitting the boy's dark green pullover and changing his flesh coloured legs with white shoes and socks to black stockings and brown boots this morning. His blue denim jeans were removed and replaced with fawn knickbockers. This room box celebrates her year  -  2013  - when the number of her grandchildren grew from two to five.  In May, her son and daughter-in-law had identical twin girls called Casey and Tessa and then in September, her daughter and son-in-law had a third child, another little girl called Madeline Grace.

In the room box, I have included the twins in their cots with a bottle each and in the centre of the room sitting comfortably in her rocking chair is the Nanny introducing little Madeline to her older siblings, Robert and Emilia (Millie).  The children have brought their favourite toys to show the baby, Millie has her Teddy bear while Robert rides his Hobby Horse and pulls his wooden train at the same time (whereas the real-life Robert is into Transformers and Angry Birds!) .

If you can see anything that I can add to this little homely scene, please leave a comment to let me know.

The room box, looking left to the twins beneath their Noah's Ark wallhanging quilt.

This is the right side of the room showing the baby Owl quilt and Madeline's overflowing toybox.

A close-up of the family in the centre.  Nanny with Robert, Emilia (Millie) and Madeline (Maddie).

Nursery Room Box for my Sister

This is the empty Nursery room box which I am making for my sister for her combined birthday and Christmas presents.  During 2013, her son and daughter-in-law presented her with identical twin girls and later on her daughter and son-in-law had a third child, another girl.  So this year my sister has gone from two grandchildren (a boy aged 6 and a girl aged 3 1/2) to having five grandchildren.  Because she is retiring to a country town in 2014 and won't be seeing so much of her littlies, I thought I would make her the room-box  to play with.

The Nursery is very pale and pastel at the moment with curtains made from very vintage Swiss voile trimmed with a miniature trim in ivory.  The fantastic windows came from The Dollhouse and Miniature Shop maintained by "dollhousebytherobinsnest" who sell the flat-backed windows on ebay especially for room boxes.  The images behind the windows were cut from a calendar of English village scenes and I managed to get both images from one page on the calendar which means that the view flows from one window across to the other. 

My new blog - Continued on from my old blog because Google made it too hard to log in with my old email addy!!

After struggling for ages to get into my previous blogger blogs mainly because I could no longer log in using my "alternate" email address which is my main, normal address, I have been obliged to give in and create this new blog using my "gmail" email addy.  Complaint over!!  This is a new start so I will so it differently - instead of lots of "look what I've done" there will be more of "this is how I did it" so I can share my ideas, my patterns and my end results.

I will copy over a lot of the stuff from my old blogs plus I will put links to them in my Blog List so that people can hop from one to the other.  I can still access my old blogs ,ie. Anlaby Dollshouse, Anlabyhouse and Anlaby Trains, I just can't log in to add any further content so here I am..........

My First Room Box - a kitchen scene which  now has a lot more utensils and cooking tools than when I took this photo.
The tiny glass jars behind the cook were full of artificially coloured fake herbs and spices so I emptied them all and filled them with the real thing - Chillies, Ginger, Curry powder, Coriander, Parsley, Turmeric, Sesame seeds, Ground cloves, Poppy seeds, Paprika and others. I think they look a lot more natural now.