Monday, December 14, 2009

Molding Minus Math

I've often admired the molding and paneling details in so many dollhouses and wondered how anyone could make it look so beautiful and straight! Perfect angles too. I would still love to know from any of you who have ideas for me... please share your expertise. Since I didn't know how, I made it up!

First, I put newsprint against the wall I wanted to attach the molding to. In this case it was the wall under a staircase. Can you see the railing openings? I took a rubbing of it, just like back in elementary school when we'd make leaf rubbings!

I then drew lines with a ruler (this helped with the straight part!) wherever I wanted the moding to be attached. I needed really narrow molding which I didn't have and so decided to make my own of that too. In the picture below, you can see "ceiling and door trim" from miniatures.com. It was too wide of course so I cut strips of it. Voila...narrow molding! It's even the right size for picture framing.
The next step for me was to smear a little glue stick over the pencil lines so the molding wouldn't slip around. I laid a strip down, marked where it touched the pencil line and cut. I continued the same way on all my drawn pencil lines with a little sanding here and there and a touch of glue in the corners. I still have no idea what degree each angle is but I didn't have to using this method, thank goodness!
The fact that each piece was glued to the paper was very handy to when it came time to paint. I painted each piece and found that the paint filled in and covered up some of my poor cutting! I let it all dry and glued each square/triangle in place. I'll post the final pic in my next posting. Keep checking in! ;)

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