Frame

Joe went antiquing again to furnish the house that he hasn't built yet, and this time he found an Arts and Crafts Movement picture frame, which is very excellent!

It didn't come with any art in it, but that's not a huge problem. Though maybe a mirror would go in there very nicely?

The frame is oak and has some simple mother-of-pearl inlays; he'll have to rig up something to hang it with in the back, as there's no wire, but you can see the old nail holes from where there used to be some:

It will be a very nice addition to Joe's (theoretical) Craftsman bungalow, I'm sure.

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It's made of mat board, of course, and is based on a real one I came across on an antique dealer's site when googling Arts and Crafts Movement library tables last night. The original one was actually just the frame for a piece of embroidery by Ann MacBeth, one of the artists of the Glasgow School if I'm remembering correctly. Here's a screencap of the original:

The 'mother-of-pearl inlays' on Joe's version are just some paper painted with iridescent white acrylic paint; I actually did cut out the bits from the frame and peeled off the outer layer to make space for the painted paper, so it's an inlay of a sort. It worked pretty well.

The finish is similar to that of the Stickley cube chair I made earlier, and it really is ridiculously easy. It's just layers of thinned down acrylic paint in several layers starting with yellow ochre, then mixing a bit of red in it to make it more orangey, then finishing with a layer or two of burnt umber. (If it's too brassy, tint the umber slightly purple). The key is to keep it pretty thin, and to use a fairly stiff brush so it makes lots of brush strokes, which will look quite remarkably like wood grain. Just make sure you don't follow the contours too much; just let it all be mostly parallel. Seriously, I kind of can't believe how realistic that looks, for so little effort.

Oh, and I didn't make the bevels; the mat board I'm using is left over from when I worked at a frame shop, and are the bits cut out of the center of other mats. So they pretty much all have beveled edges. They came in handy this time!

Anyway, if I had a working printer right now I'd totally print out Rossetti's drawing of Jane and his sainted wombat to go in it, because holy moly that thing is awesome.

Don't believe me? Like I could make that up:

Oh man.

Apples

I made some little polymer clay apples for Joe; they come to about a half inch across at one sixth scale. They look pretty good in the photos, but trust me they're covered in fingerprints because I haven't figured out how to make something like this without actually touching it. It has to be possible; other people manage, somehow. I'm still ridiculously proud of them though.

I made sure to put some bumps and bruises on them; they're also a bit misshapen, modeled after the ones we had down in the kitchen which might have been locally grown. They're cooking apples, anyway, Macouns maybe, and aren't perfect. I kept finding pictures of all these perfect little (one twelfth scale) tableaux with perfect little fruits, cut perfectly and arranged perfectly in perfect pie-making scenes, and while those are certainly nice, they kind of actually fail the realism test because no one, not even people on cooking shows who have paid stylists, can actually make anything that picturesque. I'm not knocking that sort of thing, mind you; those kind of tiny still lifes are very wonderful. But I know what reality looks like too. And it's waaaay funnier.

They're a bit shinier than I wanted them to be; even considerably watered down gloss acrylic gel medium is still really shiny, which I would not have thought. Well, live and learn.

I should probably make him some more furniture; I have an idea for the couch he's going to get, but that's a bit of a big job. I think maybe he should get a coffee table next, although that's not a type of table you'll generally find as an antique. Though the Arts and Crafts movement was big on these things called 'library tables', basically large tables appropriate for a library that you could sit and read at. I think with a bit of redesigning, mostly involving shortening the legs, I could make something like that work as a coffee table. I do think he probably ought to have one. I don't intend this doll house to be strictly period; it's in the here and now, just an old house with appropriate antiques inside, mixed with plenty of modern stuff.

Just thinking out loud.