Our regular weekly progress on the
1940's Dolls House.
Discoveries, experiments and thoughts from;
Veronica Tonge and her assistant
I am
starting to experiment making some !930s/40s stipple effect wallpaper for the
sitting room/library, and the large and small bedrooms, using textured
watercolour paper piecefound in a skip by an artist friend - make do and mend
if you can. I stretched the papers, soaking them in water and fixing the edges
with gummed tape to hopefully prevent ‘cockling’. It sort of worked. Using a
synthetic natural sponge I tried stippling brown tones of acrylic paint over a
base layer of cream. So far, so good, but I need to mix colour more subtly and
use more than one tone to get the right look. The wallpaper will be need to
appear to be a full-size piece cut down for the doll’s house and not ‘miniature
wallpaper’ as this would have been what was used originally.
Some parts of the house were hurriedly finished.
The makers were a policeman and a fireman, maybe in their precious spare
moments when not suddenly called to emergency wartime duties. Was the paint job
interrupted? Did scarce paint supplies run out? I can’t even get my hand into
this part of the house, or see what I am doing and would have to work by feel
alone, so I will not even try. Sometimes history does not want to be disturbed!
This
slightly spooky view of the interior shows the large bedroom on the left with
some the original surviving pale blue furniture - surviving wardrobe plus two
single beds. Additionally, some extra non original WW2 period furniture,
including dressing table with round mirror from a powder compact and table made
from a cotton reel. The pink set of furniture in the next door bedroom is a
gorgeous hand made quirky set of bed (with mattress and eiderdown), wardrobe,
chest of drawers, dressing table and chair from the 1940s period. I couldn’t
resist impatiently trying out the furniture in situ, even though the house is
still under restoration. The mix and match method, slowly collecting genuine
old pieces to furnish a vintage house, is part of the obsessive passion all
doll’s house collectors share. |
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made dressing table front - back, showing original vintage paper
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