Chess Figures

I've finished the second table and started making chess figures for it:

Read more...

It's been ages...

Oh my Goodness, I can't believe it's been almost 2 years since my last post here! But I'm still working on so many things, first my art nouveau dollshouse, one of the rooms looks like this:

I'm making my own chandeliers from scratch, using brass and Swarovski crystal beads:

Making bobbin lace mats (my new passion from the last year:)

And of course - furniture, lots of it:

 

There's even more, soo many new things to show you. 
My latest work in progress - Victorian game table, just yesterday I finished the table top, very time consuming marquetry, but totally worth it!

You are welcome to check more photos of it on my site here - http://inchscaled.com/en/ . It's both in English and Russian, only RSS feed is only in Russian, unfortunately. I'll be posting the links to my new posts here, so stay tuned! I can't wait to show you the game table all finished and done.

Art nouveau house

Hi everyone!

I'm still in the progress of making cabinets for the sofa, well, to be honest, the parts are on the workbench, and I haven't touched them in weeks.  The reason for it is quite good - I started building a house! :)  At first, I was thinking about roombox, something small, something that would be good for the sofa. And it would be art nouveau again.
Somehow, I'm building the whole house, all in art nouveau style! Isn't it fantastic? I'm making it from scratch, the first plan in Sketchup looked like this:

And it's really huge, I'm using 18mm plywood, so the walls have realistic thickness. It has four rooms, and the size of it about 90cm long and 40cm deep. That's how it looks at its current stage:

And from the back:

I'm super excited, the whole project was started only because of the sofa I made :)
Also  I'm practicing making plaster moldings:

I hope to use them for some rooms too. Besides, I tried carving on plaster, and was really inspired - you can work with tiny details, it's a very interesting material to work with. Also I'm working on lighting  and chimneys now. Hope to show you the result pretty soon! :)

Art nouveau sofa.

I've finished this sofa last week. It was a hard work, but I love the result. In fact, I need to make two side cabinets for it! :)
This project involved carving, marquetry, embroidery on silk :) 10 different types of veneer for marquetry, mahogany and pearwood for carving and a frame of the sofa. Aaand I had 3 options for upholstery - embroidered cotton fabric, velvet and silk. In the end, I used silk and Chinese silk threads for embroidery.
For cabinets - I'll make "stained glass" imitation and carving too.

Washstand

I've finished it several days ago, it was very interesting project! I saw this washstand in one of the old Sotheby's catalogues and fell in love with it. It looks quite simple, but there are some details that I really liked.
So here it is:

The tiles with flowers are made of cardboard, I painted every tile separately, watercolor is great for it. Simple green tiles on the table are made of polymer clay.

I'm already working on the next project, also very art nouveau-ish.

Measured drawings

I'm sooo excited, I bought this book yesterday, it's quite expensive and there are three more I need to buy one day (they are also not cheap - about 70$), but it's worth it.
This book called "European Furniture. Measured Drawings", originally they were published in 1940-50s in USSR and now reprinted. The main thing I'm happy about is that the authors used metric system ( to be honest, I still can't get used to inches, especially when I use projects from woodworking mags).

Anyway, the drawings are perfect - there are almost all periods you need - from viking's furniture :))) to art nouveau and 1970s furniture. There's an album with art nouveau drawings, I want it really bad, but decided against buying it for now, besides I've found four nouveau projects in my book.

I hope I'll start working on some new pieces from this book very soon.

Some new furniture, new roombox.

Busy days, I've only managed to read some of the blogs - Elga's chair is gonna be stunning, and I loved the carpet, The Old Maid - your greenhouse is going to be just fabulous! Another inspiration for me -  Natalia's fretwork shelf not to mention beautiful round footstools - I'm still struggling to finish my carpet for a new roombox, such beauty keeps me going!

In my last post I mentioned my Russian site and how it was important for me. It still is, of course, but sometimes I have second thoughts about it. I hate to admit it, but I have to, it's hard keep posting some howtos and pics in progress when you don't get feedback. I love my readers and everything, but there's one day when you want to post something and suddenly you think - "what's the point? who's gonna read it? ", and then the whole idea of the blog in Russian sounds kind of stupid to me. Well, maybe it's just me, besides, I love blogging, love sharing my thoughts, some information that might be useful. Anyway, thank you guys for your comments to my last post (esp. Karin and The Old Maid), I love Blogger, I don't want to leave it or anything, I still haven't decided if there's any need in posting "in progress" stuff (all my jigs seem so obvious to me). Oh, well, we'll see :)

Back to furniture -  I've finished two pieces of furniture for my new roombox. I'm very excited about it! It's a new project I've started with my Mom. I won't go into details by now, you'll see everything very soon. :) The walls and a floor are not ready yet, but here are the finished pieces:

 I've finished the first one some time ago, I've made the pattern for fabric too, it was very easy with textile pens. The fringe on both pieces is self made, macrame in miniature is fun!  I used embroidery color threads.

 Chaise lounge sofa was a bit of challenge, the frame was a bit hard to construct (I mean the back part). I've made several plans in Google Sketchup which helped me a lot!  So now I'm a huge fan of this software.

 I just love the colors!

 And my cat does too!:)

I still need to finish decoration of the sofa, so I'll be back soon!:)))

Victorian Wardrobe

It's been a long time since my last post, basically my blogging life moved to my site (inchscaled.com) and Facebook. Btw, I've added Translate button to my site, it appears at the end of each post and comment.  I guess I should translate all those posts about jigs and shadowboxes I've made to English, but unfortunately I don't have much time these days. Besides, I feel that there's a lot of information about miniature woodworking in English and absolutely nothing in Russian, so it's kinda important for me to post about it more.
 
Anyway, I'm happy to share with you my new piece of furniture I've made. I've been working on this wardrobe for 2 weeks, maybe 3. It was very interesting project. I was inspired by couple of wardrobes I've found on one British antiques website.

 I used mahogany and makore for it. I don't have good experience with marquetry ( I've made only 3 or 4 pieces with it), so it was a good chance for me to practice.

 It is rather big, but I actually scaled it from life-size Victorian wardrobe.

 Hope you liked it! Have a nice day!

New Year

Today I'm busy with cooking for New Year celebration, hope it's going to be fine.
I'm showing  you my last shadowbox I made for this time of year. I actually made three shadowboxes, all of them show one part of the old house - the old porch, old kitchen aaand this one:

It's already behind the glass, so I can't show all the details, unfortunately. I used the chair I made several months ago. The idea with shadowboxes was using only one piece of furniture and create the scene with it. It was fun, and I think I'll continue making these "the old house" shadowboxes, they are not that big, just about 15cm*20cm, and 10cm deep as far as I remember:)

 

 

That's it! I hope to show you the rest of the shadowboxes in January, Happy New Year!:)