I found some printable houses on About.com. Printed without adjustment they are approximately 1:144 scale. I made a few changes with the extra components and added snow and glitter. The evergreen is curled chenille stem. I think these would make adorable tree ornaments.
I also reduced the houses by 40% to make a village for the boarding house mantle. That was a bit of a pain but it looks great now that I'm finished. I also added snow and glitter to these houses.
Here are our real stockings. Hubby and son have snowmen and the girls and I have angels. They are very oversized - about 2 1/2 feet long or so. One year my sisters-in-law and I got together and made stockings for our families. We all did different things but they all turned out really cute. :-)
This is the mini living room with stockings. I used felt to make the actual socks and scrapbook paper for the appliques. I'm having so much fun miniaturizing our special things.
We have some family decorations that are extra special for one reason or another. I am working to miniaturize them for the mini version of my real house. It's always Christmas in that dollhouse but for some reason I never thought to make minis of some of our things. The boot was my childhood stocking for almost as long as I can remember. My mom found large pressed cardboard Santa boots and we got to choose pictures from old Christmas cards for her to decoupage on to them. Mine has elves, Santas and snowmen. My sister's has pink fur and lots of glittery angels. The older of my two brothers has always been a history buff so his boot has a patriotic theme. My baby brother was too young to choose so his is red with a big Santa on it. They have held up remarkably well. I now use it to hold the pieces for the advent banner hanging above it. My mom and I made the banner for my kids. The very last thing to go on it is baby Jesus on Christmas morning. These days I'm the one putting the pieces on each day, lol.
Here are both items in mini. It's Christmas Eve in the dollhouse so everything but the baby has been put up. (Although after I took the picture I noticed that one of the angels was still in the boot - oh, well.) I also had to draw in the "R" because the pink didn't photograph well. The banner was always hung low when the children were young so that they could reach it. In the dollhouse the children are 5, 3, and 8 months old.
We traditionally decorate the house the day after Thanksgiving. We usually have 2 trees. One is upstairs in the master bedroom - that's our "big" tree with all of our family ornaments. We have our Christmas morning gift opening in our room EARLY in the morning. My kids are all young adults but they still get excited about Christmas. :) This is the downstairs tree. (It's the first year in a while that I've been able to put up a full sized one with all the pets.) This tree usually has some sort of theme based on ornaments we already have. I love vintage glass ornaments and I've collected a few vintage ones and more reproduction ones. The tree this year is all of those ornaments. The bottom few are all nonbreakable in case the pets bump them but the rest are glass. The lights are red as are many of the ornaments. I love how it turned out!
A new collection this year is this little Christmas village. My mother-in-law has a beautiful collection of larger buildings that she sets up each year - and everyone in the family has contributed to it at some time or other. I don't have that much space but when I saw a few smaller houses at Goodwill I was excited. All of these have been collected from various thrift stores in the last month or so. A few people and trees came with the first Goodwill purchase and I found a few more people at Walmart and trees at JoAnn's. I think it looks great under the tree. It has the added bonus of keeping the cat out as there's no good place for her to lie down. ;-)
Here's the finished, and much improved, stable. I did get the saw out today and shortened the overhang on the left side. I added a back and stained the whole thing with a rough coat of walnut. Oh, and I also added Fairy Dust to the star to make it glow.
So I made them a little stable. I have three different sizes of stables for my own nativities and all three are made of rough wood so I raided my scrap box last night and came up with this. It was late and I wasn't in the mood to get out the saw so if I couldn't break it over my knee and sand it smooth, I didn't use it, lol. I probably need to add some more back supports to fill it in a bit but this is how it looked last night before the glue was completely dry. I think I will dry brush some shades of brown over the wood, too, to age it. So far, so good, though.
The Jefferson was built to have the feel of my real house. The exterior is the same gray with cranberry door and shutters and the inside has similar colors to our home at the time I built the dollhouse. My dollhouse daughters had to share a room. I built this house in 1992 and some of the colors have faded a bit. It was my first big dollhouse and the only one I've electrified.
Here are my children, in dollhouse version, as they were in 1993. I built the house while pregnant for my youngest so the house represents his first Christmas. The crib and changing table were built from a kit, the dresser is a refinished dollar store purchase and the baby swing and rug were created from scratch as were the dolls. My mini family dolls were some of my first experiments - I've improved since then!
Since I made the headboard and quilt that I showed you in an earlier post, I added the aquarium as we always had fish when the kids were young.
The kitchen is obviously in need of dusting but the table is set, the turkey is thawing in the sink and the other meal fixings are on the counter. The bib on the Renwal high chair (for some reason all of the Renwal baby furniture is 1:12 scale while the rest is 1:16!?) was made from a scrap of wrapping paper trimmed with embroidery floss.
And, finally, the living room with my first pipe cleaner tree, stockings hung on the mantel, nativity on the entertainment center(altered Michael's hutch). The paintings throughout the house were done by my mom. The quilt on the wall was a kit. Mini DH (on the left) and mini me (on the right) are enjoying pizza and coffee while the kids (supposedly) are sound asleep on Christmas Eve. Mini me has a wonderful knitted holiday sweater from Beepbeep on Etsy coming. I'll post photos when she's been re-dressed.
And I do mean simple. As you can see, I started with striped paperclips. The container I bought has many different colors but the red and green ones work best for Christmas. (Although, since my kids don't like peppermint, there are always multiple colors of candy canes on my tree.) I used heavy duty scissors to cut the clips but a wire cutter works as well or better. The big end of the clip can also be cut into canes. It just requires a bit more work to get a smaller hook. I didn't have my regular tools out when I made these.
They look great hanging on a Christmas tree, in a jar, or just lying on the kitchen counter. Have fun!
Santa's mail keeps Rudy the mailman busy this time of year. Between the letters from children and the Christmas cards from all the elves, Rudy's bag gets pretty heavy.
...cute anyway. Our family has had huge green stockings since my children were little. My husband and son have snowmen on theirs and the girls and I have angels. They were a lot of fun to make. Now my oldest daughter is engaged and I wanted to make a stocking for my almost son-in-law. I didn't think I could match the green so I went with red. I couldn't get to our stockings without taking all of the decorations out (Thursday night's project) so I guesstimated on size. I think I'm pretty close. I also think the future inlaws will benefit from my experience. Doug's is cuter than the other boys' stockings. Hope I don't get in trouble with them!
I worked on this last night while watching TV with hubby. A tray on my lap kept everything close and contained. I used Becky Windsor's tutorial in American Miniaturist issue #44. However, as usual, I didn't have everything on hand so was forced to improvise a little. Becky used a handheld oak leaf punch and the little leaves were just the right size. I don't have an oak leaf in that size but I do have one that's the size of a one inch scale oak leaf. So I punched my leaves with that and then took a small set of curved scissors to cut each pair of leaves down to size. I tried to cut the leaves freehand but that didn't work well for me. Having a basic shape to start with made a huge difference. My cactus leaves probably should be a bit smaller but that just wasn't gonna happen last night, lol. My flowers are made from tiny stars punched out of red tissue paper, again not how Becky did it but it worked. A few more stems would have looked nice but I got tired of cutting little leaves and it still looks pretty good. I don't think I'll be making any more of these in the near future but I do like this one. It looks good on top of Mrs. C's cabinets, too.
This is Alfred Eloysus Elf. His parents wanted to give him a distinguished name. Little did they know he'd end up being called Alf Elf. Alf is also for sale in my etsy shop. He was really fun to make. Adding all the little details was the best part - fancy elf shoes with curled up toes, bright red buttons holding the plaid suspenders in place and the jinglebell on the tip of his stocking cap.
That just didn't give Mrs. Claus enough room to work and move in her kitchen so I made the island with a butcher block top and two stools to replace the table and chairs. It's much more efficient now. 
That's Red behind him. Red is the elf in charge of the reindeer.
While I was working on the quilt I decided to use it in the dollhouse that represents my real house. While I liked what I had before it didn't really look like anything hubby and I have ever had in our bedroom. So I tore the entire bed apart and made a new headboard based on my real one. I also made new curtains and table cloths for the room. It looks great!
The house is a Christmas house all the time because it's my favorite holiday. Hubby plays the French horn, there's a dollhouse in the corner because most of my dollhouses are in our room. I'm so excited about how the redecorating turned out!
