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

Hello everybody

👻👻👻

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

👀👀👀

The Lavender Shop : working on the label, the boxes and making a display

Hi there

If you saw my last post (the 1st one regarding my new project, the Lavender Shop) you've seen my 1st try at making my own label for all the things that I'm going to make for this project, meaning my own label, since I don't wanna risk using one that has a copyright on it or so

The 1st time, I printed everything out on 120 gr Photopaper that was slightly 'eggshell' color (see pictures in the previous post)

It takes quite some time to make that, because, first you have to make the design, then you gotta think about what kind of packages and boxes you'll need, then you have to make those on your computer, if possible in the correct size 😉😎😁

Then comes the 1st round of printing, cutting out and gluing .... as well as the 1st round of realizing where I made mistakes, like one side to small, the label being upside down, the size not being correct etc.

OK, so let's go for the 2nd round ..... correcting my errors, printing out on 120 gr matt Photopaper, white this time (which I prefer by the way, because the nice lavender color comes out much better, although the other one looks a bit more vintage, which can be nice too) ..... hm hm ..... 😳😳 need to make up my mind about this, lol

So again, printing, cutting out, gluing to discover more details that still aren't perfect.

Tell me what you think, here's a pic of the one's printed on white paper :

As you can see, I added some new ones, like the round one, which is going to be a special "gift" box

The cute little jars on the right are filled with real lavender soap, which I grinded myself with my tiny tiny little clay grinder, lol

This is what my work table looks like right now

😱😱😱

I wanted to make some sort if display for a few of my items and started by one made with 1,5 mm thick cardboard, which can easily be painted without everything bending or so, it's just perfect and once finished, it looks almost like wood

.... and here it is : my first try at making a display for my shop

See ya soon, stay tuned for more

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Bye

D.