But I’m ashamed to say that yesterday I actually took my dollhouse from one room into another when the mess became too overwhelming – even for me.

Yes, I walked away from it.

I love the concept that we create from chaos. The fact that I can take perfect lengths of fabric and cut them into hundreds of smaller pieces only to put them back together again to make a quilt has always fascinated me. That individual tubes of colour can come together to make an image that wasn’t there before is like magic, but I’ve a sneaky feeling that my creations leave more destruction in their wake than the chaos that gives life to them.

Reluctantly today will be a cleaning day.

But before that, my progress so far for those of you interested in how not to go about making a dollhouse from scratch.

I’m not going to lie, maths was never my strong suit and so mostly I have to visualize things first before I can get the numbers down.

That involves a lot of cardboard and blue painters tape.

It started off like this…

Here I will show you only two renditions as, to be honest, there were quite a few of them.

A day or two into trying to work out the structure and fiddling around with all the cardboard boxes I could get my hands on, I started to get bored and so tried my hand at making some windows and stairs.

Because it’s never not a good idea to jump ahead and waste time carving out things that you’ll probably end up not using.

Look at those teeny nails ? I didn’t need to use them because the wood glue would have been just fine on its own, but I couldn’t resist.

And so after quite a few cardboard mockups and carved out windows and doors I decided to stop procrastinating and got the wood out.

It has to be said that there has been a lot of sitting and looking.

And then getting bored with it again and making something else I probably wont use.

But just look at that dormer.

I can’t tell you exactly when the house started to morph into something larger than I’d intended, but I think the dormers had something to do with it.

Because then I had to bump out the side wall to accommodate them

And, of course, add a chimney breast.

Or two.

But really it’s the roof that’s giving me pause for concern so I’m mostly ignoring it at the moment. Adding a few sheets of cardboard here and there when I feel a moment of inspiration (albeit short lived) but I’m determined I’ll get there.

Of course an engineering degree would have come in handy at this point, but no, I just had to pursue that sculpture degree for what use that does anybody ?

To be continued…

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