Yes, that's right, I got the dye and my husband brought me a gallon jug to use as a bucket & drainer so I stained my shingles on Saturday. Newspaper is a must when doing this, even using it to cover my counters it was still messy.
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| See how you're supposed to use the gallon jug? This gets messy pretty quick. |
I'm not precisely thrilled with how they turned out though. I'm thinking I need another batch of dye/stain and do them over again or I need to buy some grey/black stain and paint the shingles after I've glued them to the roof. But here are the shingles drying after I've stained them.
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| They look a lot darker here than they turned out. |
Here's a better picture. The grey didn't seem to cover all of the shingles with color, there's a lot of the wood tone showing through and I'm not sure I like that.
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| See what I mean about the wood tone? |
So they have to sit for almost a week, with turning and rotating so they dry completely and when we're on day five I'll see how the color looks. If I have to I'll get some stain that I can paint on and do that once the shingles are on the house. I'm a little impatient to get them actually onto the roof. Right now they're in a cabinet on the top shelf and I take them down every few hours to stir them up.
But while I was waiting for them to dry I decided I'd work on some more trim for the dollhouse. I did a lot of painting on Saturday. I mean a lot.
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| The blue looks really bright here. It's not as bright in person. |
These are all the pieces of trim that go on the corners of the house. The extra long pieces go on the tower and the shorter ones go on the side wings of the house. The two little ones go above the bay area on the tower. The effect is very cool.
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| See, the bright blue isn't so bright here. And I painted the tops of my fence posts |
I also took the opportunity to paint the edges of the roof in the blue so I wouldn't have to do it later. the tricky part was painting the edges of the trim, I hadn't done that before I glued them to the house. The second batch of trim I painted I waited a bit and then painted the edges before gluing them to the house. That worked much better and hopefully I won't have too much trouble fixing the little blue mistakes on the pale blue body of the house.
Remember last week how I was wondering what color to paint the railings? I talked it over with Rita and we looked at the original picture of the dollhouse. So I've decided to paint the spindles white and the railings blue. I'll do the same with the doors and windows, the bulk of the frames will be white with a little blue trim.
So here I've painted the spindles white. I also painted the posts of my fence posts white as well.
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| See? Nice and white. I'll probably need to give them another coat though. |
There are these cute little corbels (I think that's the word) that go under the eaves of the house and should match the trim. I painted those as well. That was tricky because they're so small, I got a lot of paint on my fingers.
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| The green background doesn't help but the little blue things are going to go on the house. |
The last thing I did for the house was to attach the bay walls with hinges. Now I just need to figure out how to place the magnet closer.
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| Nice and shiny. Might paint over those, might not. |
Of course I've been doing other things too. If I have time midweek I'll show you samples of the wallpaper I ordered and I caved in and ordered another couple of rugs because they were so pretty and I really wanted them. I'm hoping I can get the outside of the house done in the next couple of weeks and then the fun part begins.
In the mean time I need to read up on electrical systems. If I can install a ceiling fan (or three) in my actual house I should be able to deal with electric lights in a dollhouse, right?
Wow, don't all of you agree with me at once... sheesh.
Wish me luck. And if in a few weeks my hair looks a
lot curlier than usual you'll know that things they did not go smooth.
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