Where Do We Start....
With Kit bashing, Dear Readers, as I am sure you know, it is often difficult to know where to start! If you are like me, you have long ago left any instructions behind and must invent your own procedures for every step of the build. And as I am sure you have experienced, sometimes a small amount of work makes a big difference in the project, and conversely, sometimes a large amount of work seems to not make much progress at all. Now that I am working on the "upstairs room" of the Dollmaker's Studio, I am having to deal with the "junction" of all the kit pieces I started with.... which has required a lot of "bashing"! Above you can see that I finally added primer to the wall sections which were originally the "Sugarplum" kit by Greenleaf. If you are at all familiar with the kit, you will know that it is small (which is why I chose it) and very rudimentary (it doesn't even have a staircase in spite of two floors!) and the ceiling height is a barely passable 7 and 1/2 inches! (I have lived in old RL houses with about that much head clearance... so it is doable!) But I wanted extra ceiling height, so I added the ground floor "room-box" and made it extend up into the second floor by about 2 inches. Which causes a really awkward "join" between the stories part way up the wall! Now that I have primed the walls for the kit pieces, you can see where the join is in the above picture.
Add to that challenge, the "Dollmaker's Studio Vignette" kit by Sandra Morris which inspired this whole project, and my intention to blend it into the Sugarplum kit as an alcove at the back of the main room, positioned where a window was meant to be, and you will discover lots of places requiring adjustments! In pondering the "where to start" part of the equation, I decided that I needed to get the Vignette assembled and decorated as far as possible before I could actually move forward on the rest of the room. It would be way too difficult to access the alcove once it was attached at the back of the build. Above you can see the framework of the Vignette just tucked into the "enlarged" window opening of the Sugarplum kit. (Sorry, the pictures are a bit dark... it was a gloomy day...). The vignette is framed by a nice arch of "stone" which needed to be made a little bit more three dimensional to work in this build.
Here it is separate from the main room.
I needed to trim off the "corners" of the kit
along the top of the rock arch.
Here you can sort of see I have added a cardboard strip
along the back of the stone arch.
This will allow for the "stones" of the arch to have some depth,
and to hopefully fill the gap between the arch and the wall in a realistic way.
Because the two do not meet on the same plane!
The rocks are good old egg-carton glued to the arch
and wrapped around the frame.
It required lots of testing to see if the "rocks"
were fitting the gap properly.
They have more "weight" than the simple shaped pieces of the vignette...
but that is needed here!
Sorry about the dark.... it got late
and I didn't get good pictures of the rocks before painting.
Here they have been given the basic coats of paint....
primer then two different shades of gray.
Here the rocks have been outlined with a darker gray in the cracks.
And I am test fitting the wallpaper.
I got so involved in fitting the pieces, I forgot to take pictures.
The wall paper is glued and the vignette tucked into the opening...
With the flash on is the only way to see anything back there!
(It is late and dark.....)
And another shot.... with the flash....
it starts to give a sense of the space.
The sides will have trim added below the arch...
and baseboard trim...
Once I get the alcove attached
I will be able to work on the rest of the walls.
So you can see, Dear Readers,
I did a lot of cutting and fitting paper
Hoping it turns into rocks.
And it doesn't look like much got done...
but it is a start!
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