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Post by astudyinscarlet on Mar 27, 2020 22:06:26 GMT
I thought it might be a nice idea to post some ideas for model horse related things to make and do if people are stuck at home and not able to get out much or at all at the moment. So if anyone wants to add any crafting tips or links to tutorials for things like tack and accessories making or something like photographing models, that would be nice (especially ideas for things to do that don't involve going out to buy stuff).
I'll start with some crafting ideas using items you may be able to get hold easily.
Plastic covered paperclips can be bent and cut down into hoof picks (carefully cut and pull off a small section of the covering to make the metal hook end). Or if you only have plain paperclips/plain wire you could try dipping the handle part in paint or nail varnish.
Bath/dishwashing sponges (wash them through properly if you're using old ones) can be cut down into model grooming/tack cleaning sponges but can also be used for some painting/customising (some may have holes too big to get a neat finish on models but might be of use for painting something like textured walls on stableyard buildings)
Lollipop sticks are always useful. You can clad buildings in them, make fences from them, make things like wooden planters, stable doors (you can use cardboard as a base for those), stable nameplates, grooming brushes (always save the little bits if you cut them down, to use as brushes), jump wings, etc from them.
Felt offcuts and scraps can be used for foal rugs, dog coats, the bristle part of grooming brushes (cut thin strips, roll them into an oval and glue onto the wooden part), rider clothing, numnahs/saddle cloths, leg bandages and more.
Thin ribbon scraps, even some really tiny pieces, often can be used to make headcollars, synthetic bridles/reins/stirrup leathers, dog collars/leads and the straps on grooming brushes. Save any ribbons that come off clothing tags and fancy gift tags and that sort of thing.
Model rosettes can be made using wider scraps of ribbon or more simple ones using large round or similarly shaped sequins or circles cut from a non-fraying fabric (pinking shears are useful for that to give a more interesting shape, but they're not vital) with scraps of ribbon for the tails. If you've got a hole punch you can punch centres for them out of any interesting paper or thin card you may have (you may find metallic or other patterned paper/card in packaging or old gift tags).
Bottle caps can be used to make buckets or plant pots, and also other things such as plastic shot glasses and little plastic medicine measuring cups can be used too. Take a look at any kind of small plastic or cardboard caps and lids, small pots (like yogurt and some dessert pots) and inner packaging materials cos you may find some interesting things that you can upcycle into containers for your yard.
If you want to change the colour of a clear plastic container then paint it on the inside (so the colour shows through to the outside) for a neater finish. For buckets, pierce holes in plastic by (carefully!) heating up something pointed and metal in a flame and pushing that through the plastic to burn a hole through (drilling/piercing a hole will often just crack the plastic) and use some thin wire to make the handle. You can use plasticine or similar to partly fill it and then make soil from dried out tea leaves or coffee grounds mixed with PVA/tacky glue. You can buy lots of artificial plants but you can also make them from various materials - I've made some using green felt and from green twine and I know other people have made them out of paper (maybe look online for some tutorials). Also those little metal containers that most tea lights come in can also be used as planters (I've also cut them in half, stuck some scrap MDF on the back and turned them into wall planters).
Various things can be used to make jump poles - drinking straws especially but sometimes unwanted pencils and the plastic cases of old pens or retractable pencils can make good poles too. If you want to add coloured stripes without painting them use coloured electrical tape. Also if you can (safely) get hold of twigs currently, they can be used for more rustic poles (and very thin twigs can be used to fill brush fences).
Cardboard boxes can have lots of purposes. Big, stronger ones - stables, tack rooms, feed rooms, field shelters, store rooms, etc. Smaller ones - storage bins or chests, wall jumps, dog kennels, chicken houses, etc. For a stronger and neater finish on buildings you can clad the outside with lolly sticks or maybe try a textured paint finish so it doesn't look so 'cardboardy'.
If you have any old/unused toys stashed away maybe see if there's anything amongst those of use. Children's wooden blocks often have pieces that can be used to make wall jumps from and often you'll find useful items in amongst other toys which may well fit with Julips even if they're a different scale (some Playmobil accessories for example do fit with Julips).
Plastic push pins make decent bridle hooks and can also be used on jump wings to rest the poles on.
You can paint some items with nail varnish instead of paint. I've painted various plant pots for my Julip stableyard with nail varnish for example (some may work best with a paint base coat).
If you have any old/unwanted/broken jewellery see what you can salvage from that as things like thin chain, lobster clasps and jump rings can be used in making model horse tack, Julip dog leads, etc. If you've got loads of unwanted/old small beads you can use them as a filling for feed sacks (which you can probably easily make from fabric scraps or from paper) to give them a better weight and shape. Also see if you can salvage usable leather or fabric for tack and rug making from things like unwanted gloves, wallets, handbags and clothing.
You can make water (for water jumps, troughs, ponds etc) by using pieces of clear plastic sheeting (like the kind found on the front of Breyer boxes and in lots of sets of bubblebath and that type of thing). (You can make it more realistic by coating it in a gloss varnish).
Also not strictly model horse related but if you've got loads of craft materials and time to kill, organising your craft materials stash might be a good thing to do. Maybe you could repurpose or upcycle various containers (jewellery boxes, cardboard boxes, food tins and jars etc) to make storage containers or drawer organisers for your craft materials.
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Post by sobreiros on Mar 28, 2020 0:39:58 GMT
Egg boxes cut to size work really well for brick work or stone walls or floors. I usually just rip them into smaller chunks when doing stone floors as that looks more irregular and realistic.
If you get a long piece of green felt and rub it against itself, the fibres will come lose and it will make fairly convincing grass. You can also add some different shades of brown or green with pastels.
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Post by juliporiginals on Mar 28, 2020 10:00:05 GMT
This is a great idea for a thread, thank you for starting it Those green scratchy pad things that are used for cleaning pots (and are sometimes on the underside of a sponge) are good for making the filler of a brush fence
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Post by Wollepluis on Mar 28, 2020 11:28:38 GMT
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Post by george on Mar 28, 2020 11:53:20 GMT
My favourite freebie craft tip is to make 'wood' from the thin, smooth cardboard packaging. Things like cake or biscuit boxes, cereal boxes - flat card rather than the chunky corrugated card kind. Paint the plain side really streaky with brown paint on a bad brush (the kind you get in kiddies painting sets, or the bristly awful ones which come in the mixed pack of artists brushes in pound shops!), or use brown and black mixed roughly so you get even more streaks, then leave it to dry. Cut it into strips, and you're ready to go. You can use it to clad stable, barn or yard buildings, or you can go a bit smaller and create a home for some of your animals - a tiny box could be clad as a wooden dog kennel, your rabbit or guinea pig collection could get a nice new hutch, maybe, or I made this hen house for all my Julip chickens : The fake wood can be used to make anything that'd be wooden on a real stable yard - how about a box to store your rugs in, a nice door for a tackroom or stable, a planter for some seasonal flowers, or some pallets to keep your hay or straw bales on! But a very easy and effective thing to make is fencing - it sets your photos off perfectly, whether you want to make your horses look like they're in a paddock for one or two pictures, or as a backdrop for more elaborate photostories. And one section of fence can be mixed-and-matched with different scenery... Folly the foal in his field And with a different base and backdrop, it looks like a totally different field for Thoresby
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Post by sobreiros on Mar 29, 2020 0:26:14 GMT
Some more I thought of - Glass spice jars make good feed bins - you can paint the inside quite easily (pour a bit of paint in, a bit of water, put lid on and shake so the paint coats the sides) or sand the outside and then paint. You can make them look less like glass by sanding as well. You can use tea grounds as chaff, just break a tea bag open after it's dried. The veg bags sold at Sainsbury's are very fine mesh which makes great fly masks/rugs, and they're only 30p! But of course don't head off to Sainsbury's just for that Broken earphone wires make good hoses.
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Mar 29, 2020 11:39:58 GMT
Vitamin/supplement containers can also make good feed bins. And small bottles could be cut down to make buckets and planters even if they're too big/the wrong shape as they are.
Also various lids and tops or caps from bottles or things like glue sticks or some pens can be used as containers of horse supplements. If you have old catalogues with horse products in you can usually find some labels in those you can cut out and stick on them or if you have a printer you could look up the products online to find labels to print out.
Also if anyone is customising models using milliput, I realised last night that the boxes for milliput would be quite a nice size for making things like wall jumps from (you could fill them with something like large beads or stones to give them more weight and then paint them or cover them in some kind of paper).
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Post by sobreiros on Mar 29, 2020 17:18:32 GMT
Blister packs from meds/bubble gum etc make good plates, bowls or containers, just cut out the indented bits, sand the edges and paint! You can even change their shape a bit, by heating them up carefully.
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Post by helen1983 on Mar 30, 2020 7:24:47 GMT
These are brilliant! What a super idea Gillette Venus shaving packages (the one the blades come in) make lovely wall mounted mangers (painted on the inside as mentioned by astudyinscarlet) Oxo stock pots make great feed buckets (those rubbery type ones that are quite shallow) Also, the necks of Yakult bottles mounted on card and painted make excellent plant pots.
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Post by juliporiginals on Mar 30, 2020 8:36:36 GMT
If you cut the little brush bit off Tepe dental brushes, the handle bit makes nice little bottles for your tack room
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Post by helen1983 on Mar 30, 2020 8:43:14 GMT
If you cut the little brush bit off Tepe dental brushes, the handle bit makes nice little bottles for your tack room *dental therapist turning a blind eye* Haha this is actually an amazing idea! *runs to cut the handles off her free samples from the rep*
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 10, 2020 17:45:04 GMT
This week I have made some metal curry combs. For these you need: the serrated cutting strip from an old cling film box small squares or rectangles of thin plastic or non-corrugated card glue silver paint or nail varnish (plus optional other colour of paint) scraps of foam sheets small pieces of wire or pins (preferably silver coloured) some kind of clay or putty that sets hard (e.g. milliput, paperclay or you could use fimo or similar) alternatively, small pieces of wood such as balsa, or short lengths of ribbon First I cut the plastic cutting strip from the cling film box into short pieces, each the width I wanted the curry comb to be. Then I used pliers to fold these along the centre (more or less) so instead of lying flat they're now in a V shape. These I then stuck onto the small square/rectangle of thin plastic. This forms the basic curry comb body. The handle I then created by sticking a piece of wire onto the back, leaving most of the wire overhanging at one end. I used superglue with baking soda to make a stronger and faster setting join but it's not vital, it's probably just a bit more fiddly to use another kind of glue. Then I sculpted handles onto the other end of the wire using milliput (but you could use another kind of air-drying clay/putty or something like tiny pieces of balsa wood, or a bakeable clay such as fimo if you make the handle separately, making sure to leave a hole to insert the wire part of the handle into). Once this was set I then used tiny pieces of the foam sheets and stuck these on over the place where the handle was stuck onto the main body. This hides any messiness from the glue and makes the join even stronger. By this point I then had something that looked like this:
Showing the V shaped teeth sections: I then painted the body silver, making sure to get the paint in as far inside the 'teeth' sections as possible, and then once that was dry I painted the handles in another colour. One of them has a hanging loop on it which I did by, when the milliput was still soft, pushing a thin piece of wire through the end of the handle to make a tiny hole. Once painted and dry I then coated a piece of embroidery thread in PVA glue, let this dry and then fed that through the hole to make a hanging loop. Also I made a couple of curry combs without the long handle and just added strap handles using small scraps of narrow ribbon so that's an alternative way to make them if you don't want to mess about too much with handles. The finished results:
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 13, 2020 11:39:29 GMT
Little trophies can be made out of buttons, charms or sequins (horseshoes, other horse themed ones, stars, etc), beads, tiny pieces of wood, tiny horse models (like those ones sold for model railway dioramas), etc. You could probably cut little horse heads or something else that's not too delicate and fiddly out of card as well. I'll have to get a picture of some of the ones I've made. I've used some rubbishy plastic horse charms that came in a bundle of models I got ages ago, as well as some silver coloured metal jewellery charms and tiny MDF shapes for the main parts, and used beads and bead caps to make the stands and bases for them, and painted them with acrylics. You could also use large flat buttons to make the plate kind of trophies (stick a circle of thin card or plastic over the buttonholes) and paint those silver or gold and then either stick them on your tack room wall or make a simple stand for them out of a piece of wire or cardboard.
Also for rugs, while those with bias binding edges and professionally made buckles/clips look the smartest, those aren't vital. If you have two different colours of felt you can make two-layer rugs where you cut the top one slightly smaller so that the under colour shows around it. You could make it fancier by cutting the top layer with wavy edges or use pinking shears if you have them. These can be stitched or glued together. (Sometimes it is best to have white felt on the inside anyway to avoid the risk of any colour transfer onto paler models, so you could have a white lining/edging and then a colour on top so it's both more decorative and practical too.) For fastenings you can also use velcro, hook and eye fastenings or buttons (make a wire or thread loop to hook over the button), you can make very simple buckles out of 2 jump rings or if you've got a pair of narrow pliers and some wire (or paperclips) you can make better buckles or hook fastenings. Also like the actual Julip rugs you can have surcingles instead of belly straps on the rug itself; those can be made out of slightly wider ribbon or strips of leather/fake leather.
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 21, 2020 22:04:50 GMT
These are the trophies and a couple of rosettes I've made recently. Some of them are going to be used in one of my bigger projects I'm working on. The far left one is a laser cut MDF shape, the others are plastic or metal charms with the rings cut off them except for the big one on the right which is a tiny model war horse (I think it was airfix or something like that) with the base cut down. Most of the bases are beads and bead end caps glued together and painted except the right one which is made from cut down sections from some broken dolls house stair spindles and a couple of scraps of balsa, and the rosettes are made pretty much like the Julip ones but I added some cheap little metal horse head buttons to them.
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Post by lydia on Apr 22, 2020 7:34:47 GMT
Wow they look amazing! What a great idea.
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 22, 2020 23:08:33 GMT
I'll make a post about my horse drawn caravan shortly but this is another smaller project I've done recently - another fish pond (modelled by Mitka because Mitka loves pet fish). This is made from a small tuna can, one which had a ring pull lid so it was ideal for making a pond as with the ring pull top it left a small lip around the top which made it far easier to add the 'water' to it. You can use containers without a lip but in those you'll need to add something round the inside edge to rest the 'water' on (they don't need to be metal - plastic containers, small ceramic or wooden containers or small cardboard/mache boxes are good too and they don't need to be completely sealed or watertight the same as resin ponds need to be, just if they do have any holes in the bottom or anything plug those up before you put in any gravel. In mache box ones I stick lolly sticks or pieces of the box's lid round the inside to create the necessary ledge for the water to rest on. By the way I don't really advise using metal cans opened with a tin opener because they'd probably be too sharp). I painted the can black inside and out then I used scenic scatter coal as the gravel but you can use any kind of scatter/gravel/grit/small stones/sand or even something like sawdust (you can add some paint to change the colour) or coffee grounds/dried tea or anything. You just want something in the bottom that looks sort of gravelly and gives you something to stick the plants and rocks into. The gravel is mixed with PVA glue so it's all firmly stuck in. The fake plants and a few larger stones are set into that while it's wet. I used some bits of fake plant which are from an artificial wreath I rescued out of the bin but you can find artificial plants online, use aquarium fake plants, reindeer moss or make them out of paper or yarn or felt or fabric or anything you can find that looks sort of plant-like really. They don't need to look really realistic as you're not going to see much of them. Then I glued the fish in. These are fish I made using a mould I got on ebay ages ago. They're mostly fimo with some made of paperclay, painted with acrylics (mostly metallic paints). For some colours you could also use nail varnish to paint them or give them a metallic sheen if you are making or painting your own. You can buy polymer clay fish from dolls house suppliers or you could just make your own freehand from some kind of clay or probably even cardboard if you layered some bits together perhaps. They need to be a bit 3D but only really need to look good from above so you don't need to mess about with fiddly tails or fins or anything, just a basic fish from above shape. By attaching them to various leaves and rocks this gives them different heights so they look like they're moving about more. Once their glue is completely dry, then the water goes in. This is a circle cut from some clear plastic sheet from some kind of packaging. It needs to be rigid enough so it doesn't just drop straight through when you knock it but doesn't need to be really thick either. And the circle needs to be smaller than the diameter of the outside edge but wide enough to fit onto the lip inside the container. Also make sure to wipe any fingerprints off the underside before you glue it in. It's stuck in with PVA glue (don't use superglue for this because it will very likely fog the plastic), then it has a layer of gloss mod podge painted on top of it, then after that was dry I added a layer of clear gloss varnish just for extra durability. If you're only doing a small area clear nail varnish can work. The mod podge/varnish layer isn't vital but it just makes it look more realistic and pond like especially if it gets a few bubbles and ripples in it. Then to finish this one off I got a piece of old aquarium tubing, slit it open all the way down its length and then glued that on around the top edge and painted that black. That kind of edging would be useful if you use something that has quite a thin edge especially but on this one it's more just decorative and to make it look a little less like a painted tuna can and a bit more pond-like. And so here we have one Julip sized mini goldfish pond
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Post by george on Apr 23, 2020 1:42:12 GMT
That looks brilliant, I'll have to see if we've got anything in a suitable sort of container, the only small tins I can think of in the cupboard are beans and that'd look very beanstinny even if repainted cos of the corrugated sides! My fish still live in a purple Julip bucket on my pets shelf, I did give them a shake a couple of weeks ago just to make sure they hadn't stuck together and they're fine, but I'm sure they'd appreciate a pond more!
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Post by juliporiginals on Apr 23, 2020 8:02:38 GMT
I love the fish , they are just brilliant!
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 23, 2020 10:42:34 GMT
Mitka still wants me to make more ponds, he has a lot of goldfish wanting proper homes. (I'd like to make a duck pond too at some point for my Julip ducks, a more natural looking one with more wild type fish in) Unrelated to that, this isn't strictly about making stuff yourself but I just thought it would be useful to say something about lighting, for stables or tack rooms or anything like that (or maybe even pond lighting). If you don't want to mess about with proper dolls house wired up lighting (which I don't), there are some alternatives which are often easier and cheaper to get hold of. LED tealights aren't really bright but they're OK for lighting up small spaces (make sure to get the static ones not the flickering ones for just lighting, but the flickering orange or red ones can be used for fireplaces/wood burners). I've used one in my small shed as well as a couple in my caravan and I just slot them in to a circle cut in the card of the ceiling. Also battery powered mini LED fairy lights, especially the really tiny ones with the bare copper wiring (the ones with plastic coated wiring are generally bigger as well as the wiring being thicker so they won't be as easy to fit in to a small room). I've used some of those in warm white in my Julips' conservatory/greenhouse and they are bright enough to light that up fairly well. Plus you can use those as teeny christmas lights for Julips. Some have bigger batteries, some only take the thin coin batteries. Either way you can generally either leave the battery pack outside the room/building or conceal it somehow. Also you can buy self-adhesive strips of LED lights which clip on to a battery, ones like these. Again you'll need somewhere to place or conceal the battery if you use those. I've used those in my tack room and I'm about to install some in my new stable. They are very bright and though the wire isn't really long which makes it more difficult to hide the battery, in the stable I'm just hiding the battery up in the roof so it won't be visible and in the tack rooms I've made fake cupboards for the batteries to slot into. You can usually find all of those things (as well as batteries for them) on ebay or elsewhere online and they're not usually very expensive.
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Post by astudyinscarlet on Apr 23, 2020 20:14:09 GMT
And my caravan post... This has been an on and off project for ages but I've finished the roof this week. It still needs shafts, a set of harness and a few bits inside like maybe some curtains and I want to make a better mattress but the bulk of it is now complete. (The benefit of making something big over a longer time is you can accumulate little bits and pieces for it here and there and if you do have to spend money on anything then the cost is more spread out.) Here is Evie, her horses, dogs and her caravan. (She does have more cats but they'd wandered off when the pics were taken. She also originally had another horse but she proved to be unsuited to driving so has been rehomed. She now has the cob Hovis along with Sam the Shire and Corky the Shetland.) Evie is a totally made over dolls house figure with porcelain head, hands and feet. Evie's caravan base was just a cardboard box. The basic shape of it after being started looked like this: As you can see, still pretty cardboard box-like. I sealed all the edges with electrical tape which I also superglued on otherwise it tends to slide or peel off after a while (masking tape could work too, or paper glued on). Then once I'd cut out the window holes and sealed the edges of those too, the whole thing was covered in lolly sticks with narrower trim made from wooden drinks stirrers. Here window frames (plastic dolls house windows) have also been added as well as a scrap of balsa for the sink cupboard to stand on. The basic bed is also there but that is removable (that's a rectangle of MDF which I believe was the piece I found for some reason near the children's playground; I have no idea why it was there but hey, free MDF! The front of the bed is a piece cut from a scrap of thick plastic sheet I rescued from my brother's bin and the mattress base is just cut from packing foam). At this stage the inner walls hadn't been covered but I also covered those in lolly sticks after this pic was taken. For the curved bits over the door and end window I just used non-corrugated card and some is plastic (like the bed piece) and the little fence bits either side of the 'porch' area are cut from a very badly discoloured Magpie Models fence jump piece. Bed, showing the storage space beneath which is where Evie keeps her trunks and boxes for her clothing and other items. The bed supports are just cardboard layers stuck together and covered in paper. 'Porch' area/door end: Window end. The window ledge is from an offcut of wooden trim. And then once it was completely covered in lolly sticks and trim it was basically just a case of painting it then adding the wheels and making the roof (which is removable). The fancy wooden trim I found on ebay. The wheels are vintage meccano with rounded buttons stuck on them for hubcaps and thick metal rods for the axles, held on to basically any random bits of wood and wooden blocks I had going spare really, using large eye screws to hold the axles. The front wheels do pivot as I managed to attach them through a wooden block (from a children's wooden bricks set) which was already hollow down the centre so I was able to make a hole in that to pass a large screw bolt through to act as a pivot; the front wheels are then attached to a separate wooden bar which is held on by the bolt so that they can turn independently of the main caravan but if you want to make something similar just for display then the wheels don't have to pivot. (At some point the shafts will need to be attached to that bar but I haven't got that far yet since the shafts will be quite an awkward shape to make.) The steps are removable too and are made from jumbo lolly sticks held together using little pieces of square wooden dowel (which are actually the wooden rods from spent fireworks) and matchsticks. They attach using 2 screws underneath which slot through 2 eye screws screwed into the end of the little balcony bit. The lantern is a dolls house battery LED light which attaches magnetically (unfortunately it seems to be faulty and barely lights up but never mind, it looks nice anyway). The window boxes are made from lolly sticks and scraps of MDF, with artificial flowers in, and hooks made from thick wire so they can be removed. The metal planters are half of a metal tea light container backed with scraps of MDF and filled with 'soil' (dried tea) and fake plants and the blue plant pot is a plastic cap off something (I actually found it in the street once). The roof is made from corrugated card bent to shape, covered in wooden stirrers, then covered in foam sheets and painted black. The curved end part is made from card covered in paper. The bit in the centre I think was a playmobil tank (as in, a fish tank or something), turned upside down and stuck in a hole in the centre, then partially covered in lolly sticks and foam sheets. The chimney is a piece of drinking straw. The inside of the roof is lined with felt except for the part over the 'porch'. The shutters are made from lolly sticks with little plastic leaf decorations stuck on them to look sort of like wood carvings once painted (there's also one stuck on the bed panel as well). All the latches and hooks I made just from wire and tiny eye screws but I bought the door handles and hinges from ebay. The door is also made from lolly sticks and pieces of plastic, with a piece of plastic film for the top door window which had the pattern printed on it already. Inside: I've used a Julip sleeping bag on the bed for now but I still want to make a covered mattress and some blankets. The headboard is cardboard covered in a scrap of plush fabric. The pillow is made from a fabric scrap and stuffed with toy stuffing, as are the cushions. The rug is a scrap of upholstery fabric. The stove was made from a shaped children's wooden block with a piece of drinking straw attached for the pipe, fake doors stuck on the front made from various plastic pieces and tiny drawer handles, and with different sized jump rings stuck on top of it to form the hot plate... things, all painted black. The sink unit was built around a dolls house sink (like Julip used to sell) but I turned it into a cupboard underneath and I added a hinged lid so it can be used as a table too. The tap I bought. The red cupboard is a dolls house cupboard which I customised including adding pieces to the top to create more storage space without things falling down. The clock is a jewellery charm. The bed ladder was some kind of laser cut 'fairy garden' ladder I painted and added hooks to (so it can be removed). The little table was a Schleich one that came in one of the advent calendars and the teddy bear is also Schleich. The books are homemade from leather scraps and bits of paper and I think the little basket and contents are Sylvanian Families or similar items. The silver horse ornament in the window was made from two wooden horse buttons stuck together with the holes filled in. The kittens are resin dolls house ones I found in a basket of 'fairy garden' type stuff being sold off really cheaply in a garden centre once. The hooks for the pans to the right above the stove is a strip of balsa with tiny eye screws screwed in but opened up into tiny hooks and the mini shelves are made from balsa and lolly stick scraps. The big wicker basket and the crockery and fruit and things I bought. Under the bed there is a wooden trunk which was made from the storage box from those I Love Horses magazines, and a couple of other items I bought (a bin and a leather trunk). Lights: These are made using static LED tealights just stuck (not glued, just placed) into holes cut through the felt and cardboard layers of the ceiling. I added tiny eye screws into the plastic casings and attached various beads to those to create more interesting light fittings. And the other end: The black box underneath is for holding logs or whatever else Evie might need to store in it. It's made from a broken dolls house bread bin turned the other way up with the lid flipped around and hinged (with tape) and a couple of eye screws attached so it can hook onto two little hooks underneath the caravan, so it is removable. (Also Sam the Shire horse and his best friend Corky the Shetland are recently completed customs. Sam is made from a heavily modified Breyer traditional Clydesdale foal and Corky from a Saddle Pals Shetland.)
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