The Lavender Shop : making furniture with cardboard (or mat board)

Hello everybody

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I recently re-discovered cardstock ... a very useful item to make dollhouse furniture. It's not too thick, 

(the one I'm using is about 1,5 - 2 mm) but still has enough thickness for that size of furniture (1:12th scale in my case). It can be sanded easily, cut with a simple craft knife and painted or stained in whichever way you like

So I decided to give it a try and designed one little piece, some sort of cupboard to display items in my future Lavender Shop. You know, it's not really difficult to think of a piece of furniture and make a plan with the pattern, the only thing is that the size and the measurements need to be correct.

So what I do is quite simple, after browsing a little bit through the Internet to get a more clear idea of what my piece should look like in the end (try to keep it easy in the beginning 😋)

You might wanna check out video tutorials on Youtube, it can be easier if you see for yourself how it's done before starting to make your own, but that's only a suggestion of course.

1) I make a plan on the computer, where I indicate the exact measurements for each piece, as well as the name of it (meaning where it goes when I assemble everything, lol). If you're not sure about the hight or width or so, just take a finished piece from one of your dollhouses or other miniature projects and measure that, it should give you an idea.

Most of the pieces can be drawn on your computer, this helps to get exact measurements. 

The one's that need a little "drawing by hand" are added later (I just make a copy on my printer, that's the easiest way to do that)

All this takes up a little time of course, but believe me, it's worth it

(see Pic 1 below)

2) I'm cutting out all the pieces (don't forget either to make a few extra copies or at least save the documents as a PDF on your computer before starting to cut out) and I'm transferring everything onto the cardstock. Then I cut out all the pieces of cardstock and sand everything. For the top of this little cupboard, I glued two pieces together, in order to get more thickness.

Sand everything a little and lay out all your pieces in front of you

(see Pic 2 below)

(see Pic 2 below)

3) I start to glue the cardstock pieces together (I will make a more precise tutorial for this later)

Cardstock has the advantage that it sticks very fast and very easily together, I'm using simple white glue from Elmer's or Aleene's Tacky Glue (whatever you have at hand).

Although I suggest to avoid Superglue, I tried that and there was a lot of it on my fingers and I don't even begin to tell you                                                                                           where else it ended up 😄😄, but it doesn't work very well with cardstock, cardboard, paper, etc. ..... that's my experience and just a personal opinion of course.

Starting to look like something already ... yeah 😍

(see Pics below)

And that's about it ..... of course in this stage, the piece hasn't been sanded and painted yet, but it's just to give you an idea of what you can do if you're willing to invest a little time and patience and only very little money

Here are just a couple of pics of the decorated piece ...... I just couldn't resist, lol

Stay tuned, I'll be posting the finished piece soon

See ya

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