Build in progress: Lady Zonneschut's dressing room, the sash window and the finishing touches.

Hello my friends, 

I started this room as a lockdown project during the first year of the Covid pandemic. And now, after almost two years I have finally time to finish building it. It is the first miniature room I have brought to completion and it has been an interesting learning curve for me. 

In this post I will show you how I made the window to fill in that huge window opening. Well not really. I got so caught up in the work itself That I forgot to take pictures. The above picture tells a lot of the story though. I cut a piece of 2 mm thick cardstock to fit the window opening and measured out where the 20 windowpanes would end up in the window frame. After marking them and cutting them out I had the rough shape of the window. I glued a piece of moulding (visualy) dividing the window in two parts. Then I painted it and and let it dry. 

While the paint was drying I cut out a piece from a clear plastic folder. I would prefer to use wood and real glass for these windows but again, this roombox started as a "lockdown project" and I limit myself to the materials I had available at that time. So cardstock and plastic it is.

And here we have a look of the window from the outside at a dry fit. The outside is not yet painted. I like the glimpse it offers of the interior of the dressing room.

But it does not end there. Because of the altered layout the four original walls no longer connect to each other. So I needed to add some wall pieces to fix the pink background of the corridor or side room to the walls of the green dressing room.

And then you get something like this in the picture above. The dark brown pieces envelop the walls and tie everything together. After I glued the different wall pieces together it became one sturdy roombox. And that is for the first time. 

Until now the walks in all pictures of the room in  previous posts were made with paint cans and whatever was at hand placed behind the loose wall pieces to keep them standing upright. Now that all the wall pieces are fixed together the visible seams needed to be filled in, smoothed and painted over to hide them. 

And that brings us to the dressing room looking like this. A window in place and no gaping gaps in the corners. We're really getting somewhere now! And now it was time to cut the floor and ceiling panel to size. 

And speaking of the floor panel, my chosen floor, the print of a highly decorative parquet floor had started to anoy me a bit. The wallpanels in this dressing room are also decorated with prints and so is the ceiling. Lockdown project or not, all these prints together are becoming a lot of prints for just one room....

So why not try an alternative for the floor?

So, with the help of the brown paint that I used for sealing off the supporting wall pieces I tried to mimic a wood grain for a plank floor. I added the paint with a large brush in a layer thin enough to let the white undercoat shine through in places.

Although the result is bit coarse for 1:12 it looks quite decent for a first try. With a sepia coloured fineliner I have given the illusion of individual planks. 

Now all this is done, it is time to furnish the room and make whatever miniatures are still missing. The picture below

is just a first set up. The "yoga mat" on the floor is just a placeholder for the Chaise longue I am making. But that will be the subject of another post. 

Little Country pleasures

Hello my friends,

Already it is the middle of january. There is some progress on the dressing room for lady Zonneschut, but I will show you that soon in another post. Today I want to show you the progress made on the first workshop I attended in 2023. And for those of you who have been following my little blog for a while, will recognise in the first picture one of the steps of painting porcelain. 

Sometimes I decorate plates and vases in freehand. But here, just like the tile tableaux of Prince Maurits and Prince Frederick of Orange, I prefer to transfer the scenes onto the tiles first. And this stage is done at home so that I can start with the actual painting as soon as possible during the workshop.

In the picture above you can see prints of designs used for painted tiles made in Rotterdam from the 17th up to the 19th century. Rotterdamse Pleziertjes (tegels-uit-rotterdam.com) These were meant for single tiles but when you reduce it 12 times little remains of the little country scenes. These scenes are called 'pleziertjes' (pleasures) and depict scens of people enjoying the good life. Either in stately gardens or in the countryside. 

I chose 3 scenes and intend to use these tableaux in the tiled kitchen. They look like an echo of the gardens and landscape that surround Huis ter Swinnendael bat are not visible. The fourth tableau is not intended for the kitchen and is not a 'pleziertje'. But more on that later. 

I colour the backs of these images with pencil, tape them onto the tiles and then draw over every line with a ballpoint pen, pressinggraphite from the back of the image onto the tiles underneath. 

When you have traced all the necessary lines of the drawings you get something like you see in the pictures above. 

You can also see the big tile with the little 'tableaux-to-be' in a blue box. This is a lunchbox that held some lovely presents I received for Christmas from Birgit of the Biwubaeries blog! I whill show you those lovely gifts she send me in the next post on the progress on the dressing room.

This picture is taken during the workshop given by Cocky Wildschut. As you know I try to attend every year one or two times. More if possible. Because I so love to do this. The first step is rather easy. Simply retracing all the pencillines with 'drawing ink' (porecelain paint in a different mixture from paint used for painting).

At this stage you can add or leave out a few details if you so wish, but you do not yet fill areas in with colour. That will be done during my second workshop of this year after these lines are fixed due to firing these tiles.

The "inked" drawings look a bit smudgy but that is the loose graphite powder of the traced drawing. That will burn away during firing making the result more crisp and smooth than it looks now.

And what about that fourth tableau? Well that is a design of my own creation. It shows you the heraldic crest of the Zonneschut family enveloped in a rococo frame and held up by two hounds. Those of you who have followed this blog for some time will know I love hounds. And therefor I only find it fitting to have them supporting the crest rather than lions or other animals. 

When you look closely you can see that one supporter is female (in honour of Tara) while the other is male (in honour of the late Bosie).

The motto written on the scroll around the base reads "Ut vitam cum grano salis" which happens to be my personal motto. (what a coincidence ) ;-)

It translates in english (litteraly) as "take life with a grain of salt", which means to me "Do not take everything too seriously". In other words a little levity from time to time makes life nicer. Do with it, or think of it, what you will. But I am happy to have this as my personal motto.

Just like the tableaux I painted earlier all will get a monochrome decoration in blue. Except this one. The two red fields in the escutcheon (and the collars as a detail) are already filled in. In the next workshop I will fill in the two yellow fields and the blue around the diamond shapes. This exception will let the coat of arms stand out from the otherwise monochromatic tableau. 

But I will have to wait until the end of march to continue on these pieces. So back to the dressing room!

Be well, 

Huibrecht