Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Crafting with Vintage Images: Victorian Paper Doll House


My three year old daughter and I began making this paper doll house with vintage images from this post, 1903 House Beautiful today. There is no floor yet, just some incomplete walls. It's a work in progress. We may add more rooms, but for now it's just one.

Frozen store bought pizza boxes are so handy with paper crafts. We glued the printed images to these boxes, and shaped them into this house with the help of clear packing tape. The bed is made of the folded edges of the pizza box with a paper towel sheet and pillow roll.

I'm thinking about adding a fourth wall which would fold down for play, and adding some handles to the box for toting around. I'll probably rip the handles off a paper bag I am using to store the pizza boxes. I'll cover the walls with clear contact paper when I'm done so it will last a while.

What about color? I have a black and white printer, so this will either need to be colored or remain black and white. I may selectively color nature scenes on the outside.

I've already selected some more vintage images for the outside walls, a vintage family, and some more furniture pieces. The pieces aren't exactly to scale; I'm better at more abstract art! Exacting measurements and getting things to scale are not my forte. I'm lucky to get a straight line here and there.

It's been fun planning the rest of the project. I'll post more of our little house under construction as we progress. I had to stop when the little one tried to run off with the scissors and began unraveling the packing tape. Fun crafting with a three year old is about 10 minutes! She'll enjoy the finished product for longer periods of time; I'm sure.

The vintage pictures here are a few potential ideas for the outside, and family. There is a man, but I can't find him at the moment. I shrink the full page images of people and things down to wallet size, and the backgrounds to 5X7 using Google's Picasa.

All images are in public domain from Google Books.

8 comments:

P. said...

You are a gifted girl.

a soldiers wife said...

That is great! It's going to be so gorgeous. I wish I could have thought of things like that when my daughter was smaller.

Unknown said...

Love this! My daughter will love this!
How creative!
We'll have to try our hand at it, thank you so much Alexandra! :)

Alexandra said...

Thanks for your nice comments! The best part is that this is with mostly free materials. Our printer is a business laser printer, and it's very inexpensive to print b/w copies.

Kirsten said...

This is sooo creative!!. Oh, I am also drooling over your recipes that you posted above. They look great!
God Bless,
Kirsten

Alexandra said...

Thanks so much. :)

Micki said...

Speaking as a grandma with no little ones....."can I come over and play too?"

What an absolutely adorable project. Very creative on your part.

Alexandra said...

LOL, Micki, yes, please do and bring the grandchildren! Thanks for visiting. :)