How Hard Can It Be....?
I Left you last week, Dear Readers, with the incomplete Settee for the Tiny Roombox, and me struggling with which fabric to use. I thought I had made a perfectly good carpet in the first attempt. At least it looked well with the colors of the room. But it was not a good match to the carpet in The Folly itself, and with the tiny roombox trying to be a copy of that room, I thought I might have to try again. And then the settee was not at all to my liking using the same fabric as the carpet, it just didn't look enough like the settee in The Folly, and the two together were all wrong! So I was back to square one seeking fabric in tiny patterns and colors similar to the one in The Folly! How hard could it be? Well, I spent a considerable amount of time pawing through my fabric stash.... Looking for tiny prints in patterns and colors even close to the Chinese red and blue in The Folly! Over and over again I found pieces that were not small enough, not the right color, too thick.... this was much harder than I thought it would be! But I got lucky! I found a piece of fabric with a tiny bit of print that would probably work for the carpet..... but only if I got creative.....
Here you can see the new carpet completed... along with the old one....
So you can see the colors are a good, almost Perfect fit!
But I had to piece this rug together from tiny pieces of patterned print...
Can you see it on the little fan in the middle...?
Fan shaped... not rectangular.......
I cut the fans out and glued them onto a piece of silk seam binding....
Here you can see some of the trimmed pieces.....
And the carpet glued together...
made up of three sections of the pattern aligned carefully!
Yes, I do like that carpet!
But the fabric on the settee is still all wrong!
I went back to searching my fabrics.
And while I was at it, I made a tiny hearth rug too.....
Which you can see in this picture...
(I know there is a lot of mess on the floor!)
And you can also see a glimpse of the settee
and the fabric I am hoping to copy.....
And while I was searching my fabrics again and again...
I also made a tiny framed picture for the wall behind the settee.
Sorry this picture is upside-down,
because the image is so small that
I had it turned the wrong way when I took the picture!
It is a Madonna and child ....
taken from a printed mini book page of a Medieval Manuscript.
The colors and subject are right, even though
it is not the same painting as the one on the wall in The Folly!
(Remember you can poke the pictures to enlarge them!)
I tried other prints from that same fabric......
But I really didn't like the way they looked at all!
This was much harder than I thought it would be!
But then, Dear Readers,
I remembered that I had (half-jokingly)
responded to a comment last week,
that I would probably end up painting some cloth....!
Well....Just How hard would That be???
Well, it turns out Dear Readers,
it was Not very hard at all!
I found two scraps of silk,
a white with a texture and an off white raw silk...
pulled out my acrylic paints
and painted a "similar" design to the fabric on the settee.
The design is so tiny, I have really only approximated it......
But it gives the stripe and medallion feel of the pattern,
and the colors are right. I even used the gold paint!
I decided to use the white textured one...
and I was so excited that I forgot to take any pictures of the process!
So you will just have to imagine the next steps.
The fabric is glued to a piece of plain paper cut to the exact shape needed,
and the edges are then turned under and glued to the back of the paper....
and then it is glued to the settee.
Basically the same method used for larger pieces, just very small!
I did my best to match the stripes and pattern.....
I really think it looks remarkable....!
(sorry it is a little blurry... so hard to photograph this small!)
Can you see it now?
And in the roombox...?
Can you see the resemblance...?
Maybe if we move some of the mess....
Now it looks like I imagined it could!
Well, Dear Readers, That is the smallest
upholstery I have ever attempted!
And it really wasn't as hard as I thought it would be!
