Back to work

I am home from the big shows in Chicago and my creativity energy is all recharged. Now it is time to focus on building rather than buying. I have completed the firebrick inside the fireplace box. All that remains in there is to put a little sealer on a couple of bricks I trimmed back. I left it unsealed for the photo so you can see how the sealer really enhances the color of the clay. Look over to the left and you will see a brick at the front edge and one just behind it that look dull and pink rather than a rich terracotta.

I will also be putting "smoke" onto the bricks. It has a very specific type of pattern to the smoke application as  the fire keeps some areas clean while others get the smoke and soot. I am assigning that artistic task over to my friend Don as he is very particular in how he thinks it should look. I do trust his judgement and besides that he is an artist so he really should get out the paint brushes now and again. I will explain all about how it is done later when we get to that part of the project.

At the moment I am busy with the very tedious project of refining stucco detailing and adding some weather checking cracks into the timbers. When I got home I took a close look at the stucco and got out the artist trowel and made up some stucco paste to further refine the surface. Having several weeks off made a real difference in what I could see that looked wrong but before had become too familiar for any real objective personal opinion. That task is not photo worthy or blog time worthy so I will fill in the blog showing you items I purchased in Chicago to put in the house such as light fixtures. Or items I will put into the house when I display it at shows such as pottery and a few chairs.

Naturally being me I also bought a few tool items in Chicago so I will post about those as well.

Holding my breath

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

Have you ever been really nervous about making a part because if you messed it up there would not have been enough material to redo it? That is the case with the band that is just under the top piece of the mantel. I call it a smoke apron, usually I know the correct architectural name for such elements but this time I don't. It functions to direct the smoke up the chimney. I have not fully assembled the fireplace yet, things are just loose stacked together. I can see I need to mix up a little stone filler for some small voids between the apron piece and the mantel top. To make the filler I take stone dust and mix it with PVA glue into a thick paste. Simple to do and it is a perfect color match when it dries.

In  photos of old cottages you sometimes see that the owner has put a little fabric curtain (skirting) below the mantel in the effort to keep the smoke out of their eyes and out of the room.

Now I only have two small pieces of stone left to make and if I don't get it right the first try I still have enough stone to make them over. A little touch up here and there on the carving too. Then I have to finish the brick work inside the fireplace. There are still the chimney pieces to create but that does not worry me, it is child's play compared to cutting and carving the stone.

Brickology Part 5

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

This photo is a closeup of the herringbone pattern laid brick inside my soapstone fireplace. I am pleased with the realism of it. These are the very same miniature bricks I have shown you how to make earlier in my blog. Brickology Part 5 is on how to mortar the bricks you have made.

After your bricks have been made and glued into position they need mortar between the joints. For a dollhouse you use a method similar to putting grout between tiles. For tiles most dollhouse builders use a lightweight spackle product (Polyfilla). But in real life bricks have mortar and mortar has a different texture than grout, it is much more coarse and has a lot of sand in it. I will repeat yet again how very important texture is to creating realistic miniatures. My handmade miniature bricks have the realistic texture of real life handmade bricks so my mortar must also have the realistic texture.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

There are several choices of materials to use for this miniature mortar. Sanded grout for real tiles works nicely for this application if you are using real ceramic dollhouse bricks. But I felt it would scratch up the surface of the miniature bricks I made from Activa Plus Clay. So I have used another material, Elmer's ProBond stainable wood filler. It contains tiny bits of wood fibers. Those wood fibers give me a nice, sand like texture that does not scratch the surface of my home made bricks. The wood filler is not the correct color for the mortar, I wanted it to be more grey in tone. Therefore I have added a few drops of black, acrylic paint to the wood filler.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

I do not spread the mortar all over the surface and then wipe off the excess. That would make a mess of the project. The residual paint and wood filler would change the color of my bricks and I don't want to get water on my bricks to wash off the excess wood filler. My application tools are shown in the photo above. I use the knife blade to pick up a small amount of my mortar material and hold it over the joint I am filling. Then I use the toothpick to press the material into the space. Yes it takes a while but there is very little cleanup needed. A  toothpick can be used to finish smoothing the joint. Blunt the sharp point of a tooth pick so that it  approximately fits the width of the joint between the bricks, it should be just a little wider so it does not slip down into the gap.  for the final smoothing of the mortar line. Brick masons have special tools to dress the joints.

I did not want perfectly smooth joints. The mortar joints on my fireplace would have been subjected to the heat of the fire and the bricks would have shifted with time, the fire will have caused damage as well resulting in  some cracking and loss of  mortar.

A teaser of what comes next. As this brick is used inside a fireplace the last step for this particular brick project will be to create the smoke and soot patterns found in a real fireplace.

Miniature reward time

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

I have been working on the fireplace and needed a bit of instant gratification. You all know how that works, you just have to try fitting the parts together before it is ready to be glued together so you can see how it is going to turn out.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2010

OK now it is back to being a stack of parts, my incremental reward break is over for the moment. My reward also served to give me a little something to post on the blog today. I hope you enjoyed it too.

Brickology Part 4

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Would you look at those miniature bricks in the photo above! WOW I am so thrilled, I actually managed to achieve the look I was after. No way would anyone think these started out as a package of terra cotta, colored paper mache clay, the Plus brand from Activa, from the local hobby shop. They might even think they are real bricks. A few hundred more bricks and I will get to be an expert at making the chipped edges. Right now the chips are too similar looking. Picky, picky I am so particular I will drive myself nuts. You can't see the difference without a 10 megapixel camera aimed in as a magnifier.

So today it is time to describe how to take the bricks you made in the previous tutorial segment, using the food processor, and cut out on the board and get them to look even more realistic.

The first step is to take your scalpel and clean off any rough edges from the cutting process. Then take the scalpel and make some chips in the edges of the brick. You can chip off a corner by putting the knife against the side edge and pushing it in a bit while pulling up towards the top of the brick. A lot of the bricks are not truly straight edge so you can create a little curve by carving away some of the edge of the brick. If you want to round over the edge to soften a few here and there use some fine sandpaper. Also you might want to add a few more voids and chips into the top surface of the brick. The scalpel is also the tool for that as are fingernails.

So that is it, sandpaper, scalpel and fingernails to refine the shapes and the most important thing is to have good reference photos of real bricks. Don't go looking at my miniature bricks when you make yours or you will be making a copy of a copy and they won't look nearly as realistic as they could.

You have started out with a batch of miniature bricks that was a fairly uniform color. The color change is done with good quality water colors. You will need black, raw siena, burnt siena, yellow ochre, and white. If I had some blue on hand I would have used it to modify the black here and there, some of the burnt areas on the real bricks had a blue and purple cast to them. Next time I head to the art supply store I will pick up a tube of blue.

Looking at photos of real bricks try to copy as best you can the color variations. Water colors will blend into each other and soften the edges of color bands and that is fine. Don't forget to carry the watercolor down onto the side edges of the brick. You don't know if the grout will completely cover that edge or not. Hopefully some of your bricks are of slightly different thickness or even warped a little. On a real wall bricks are not perfectly laid with absolutely flush surfaces or even in perfectly level rows and spacing. Slight variations in your project are essential, cartoon like giant, variations will make the project look clumsy.

Next you will need to seal the bricks to keep the colors from running when you grout the wall. I have used a stone sealer on mine, it adds no gloss to my miniature bricks. The sealer I used is by Aqua Mix, Sealer's Choice 15 gold. I purchased it at either Home Depot or Lowes, sorry I don't remember which store it was. This is a water thin liquid in a bottle, you can brush it on or even air brush it on.

I have detail carved, painted and sealed my bricks as individual pieces held in hand so I had something to show you on the blog. Normally though I would first glue the bricks to the dollhouse surface and then do those tasks. It is also much faster to do these tasks when the bricks are installed than trying to hold, pick up and put down individual pieces. This method is slow enough without that!

Brickology Part 3

This Brickology lesson is for making handmade, antique style, miniature sized bricks using paper mache/clay air drying products.

The clay I am using today is Plus by Activa, their Acitv Clay formula works too. I have tried the Das brand of clay but did not like the results, it has too many paper fibers to give a clean cut. All of these clays are made from earth minerals which are the clay part and for strength they add paper fibers along with a few other ingrediants. I started with a terra cotta colored formula. If you let this product dry it won't look like terracotta, it will be a pale pink which is sad because it means more work to get the right look.

Right out of the package the Activa Plus clay is too wet to roll out with a pasta roller. If you simply take it out of the packackage and immediately roll it out with a rolling pin the surface will be very smooth and that won't look like hand made brick. So I started messing around with the clay to see if I could dry them out, improve the color and achieve the textures of hand made bricks.

The idea for the ability to make the  clay behave differently and get a different surface texture on it is based on my experiences of making the perfect pie crust. The idea there is to create crumbs and then add just enough moisture to get it to stick together. The dough has to be handled gently so you keep the crumbs, which are fat coated with flour, intact enough to create flaky layers. Too much water and it turns to mush, too little and guess what the crust is not smooth it cracks and flakes. So that is how I approached making bricks that have texture with cracks. But I will tell you up front that getting the mix just right can be frustrating and there is a learning curve to it.

I do the mixing in a small food processor. I tried it in a full sized machine and it did not work for this method, too much volume to get the clay to crumb. I got a very nice small Kitchen Aide machine that was on sale for $30.00. You don't need a high powered machine. The only speed button this machine has is for pulse.

Because the clay is too wet to start with you need to do something to dry it out. You could pinch it into lots of little pieces and let them stand for a while to evaporate some of the moisture. I added in some powdered earth pigment which soaked up the excess liquid. I also added in some PVA glue for extra strength. Adding more PVA helps moisten the clay if you get too dry of a mix. The ingredient I added to increase the strength of the color is tinting medium which I purchase at a local paint store by the ounce. I put in a terracotta color. Even with the added color the bricks will dry too light but you can paint on toning colors after they dry.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

I make up lots of smaller sized batches. If I get a batch that is too dry or too wet I set some of it aside in a lidded storage container. Those not quite right batches can be used to adjust other batches that don't have the right moisture content. Also you start to get many color variations which is perfect for a hand made brick wall.

In the photo below the clay mache has had powerded earth pigment, glue and tinting medium added to it. It is nicely crumbed but it is too dry to roll into bricks. I do try to get my mix to this stage as it is easy to add more moisture to get it to begin clumping. Be sure to set aside in a covered container some of these too dry crumbs in case you need to adjust a mix that becomes too wet.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

The photo below shows a batch that is just about right, a little more moisture is OK but not any more dry than this image shows. To the crumbs I have now added more PVA glue and also some water. Adding glue only will make the clay much too sticky to go through the rollers, it needs to be a little slick to pass through. You can tell you are at the right stage because the crumbs start to clump together, just like that pie crust making method. A perfect mix is the instant when the clay suddenly becomes a ball but it is easy to make it too wet so I stopped just before that point. A spray bottle of water is an easy way to add just a little bit of water without going too far. So it is pulse, check to see if it clumps, if not then spray some water, check again and keep going until the mix starts to bond together. My mix turned out to be a little too dry for perfection but it still worked out OK.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Now that you hope you have a workable mix you need to see if it will go through a pasta rolling machine. I am using an Atlas machine I found at a thrift shop. You can now purchase these pasta rollers for using with Fimo type clays. As seen in the two photos below first make a clay burger patty.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Now cover the patty with a piece of flexible cutting mat and take it down to about 1/4 inch or so in thickness. That will allow you to run it through the pasta machine. I am using the #3 setting on my machine. How thick you want to make your bricks is your choice, there is no rule to this game. All that matters is getting the look you want for your miniature building.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Now run the clay sheet through the pasta rollers. The sheet should just hold together. If it does not hold together and come out as a sheet because it is too dry put it back in the food processor and add more water. If it is too wet and sticks to the rollers then put it back in the food processor and mix in some of the reserved dry crumbs. The rolled clay sheet might come out pretty rough looking and it might even have long pieces flaking off the surface (or it might look perfect). Both those factors are great, you want this, you don't want a perfectly smooth surface. Mine came out pretty darned rough with a few holes, I was in doubt it would be good enough to use. Look at the photo below,I catch the dough as it comes out on that extra piece of flexible cutting board.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

In the photo below I have just trimmed off the dough into a rough rectangle and I have patched up the holes. Then I slid the clay dough onto my cutting board placing the flex mat on top for the next step.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Take the rolling pin and using it over the top of the flexible mat smooth out some of that rough texture that came out of the pasta roller. Your piece should look something like the photo below. Maybe it has more cracks and rough spots, maybe it is smoother. The point of making small batches is that you will need a lot of variations in textures to make a good looking brick wall. No two batches will roll out the same and that is good.
My friend Don noticed something in my finished brick samples. There was a trend for the details to run from right to left on the same direction of diagonal. Don has an incredible eye for detail, I sure did not pick up on it. This was caused because I always rolled the pin from right to left on a slight diagonal; be sure to vary the direction you do the final, smoothing with the rolling pin on each of your small batches so you get random details on the surface of your bricks.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Now things get much easier, all you have to do is make the cut lines. You need very thin blades for this, thick blades mess up the edges. So there are two tools of choice a scalpel and one of the very thin, long razor blades made for slicing Fimo type clays. The scalpel works good for the long lines and the blade is good for the short cross cuts. I find using the scalpel for the second cut leaves little pulled out of shape hooks of clay. Those can be trimmed off later if all you have is a scalpel. I tried using the long blade for the long cuts and it is hard to get it to line up if not long enough for a row. I am using a steel ruler and lining it up with the marks on the grid sheet under the cutting mat. My ruler was cork backed so I put the cork side up to keep it out of the sticky clay. Steel washes better than cork. Take any leftover scraps from around the edges and toss them back into your covered container of mix, you can add them into the next batch.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Now let your bricks dry. If I place my boards in front of a fan the air movement dries the bricks to leather hard in 10 to 15 minutes. I can then transfer them onto a baking sheet and finish the drying job in a few more minutes at low temperature, 150 degrees in my convection oven. But that is the hurry up way, you can be green and let them dry for a day or so. The sun makes a great, quick energy source for drying but that is in limited supply at the moment. If the bricks start to warp cover them with another cutting board, flex mat side down or the spare sheet of flex mat and a magazine. Let them breath once in a while to evaporate the moisture off.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

The next part of the lesson will be cleaning up the bricks, adding more texture and painting them. The long tutorial is almost over!

Brickology Part 2

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

This Brickology tutorial segment is about making the cutting boards you will be needing. While each brick will be unique there still has to be a way to control the size of the brick.

Knowing what era your dollhouse was built or remodeled is the first step in making bricks for the project. I can't tell you what size to make your bricks because depending on the date, the geographical location and sometimes the architect the standard sizes of bricks varied. During Queen Elizabeth's rein the size standard was different than the size during the rein of Charles I. These sizes were controlled by laws. Early American bricks were influenced by the British standards as the brick makers were immigrants. The modern standards in place now are created by builders associations. Tax rates were also an influence, structures might have had a per brick tax, that meant the bricks got larger so the tax would be smaller. While that brick tax was going on in England there were some really large brick sizes used on new buildings.

So do your research and find out what size the real life brick would be and then divide 12 if you are making a 1:12 project. Don't worry about rounding up to the nearest fraction, the decimal answer is better to use. The next step is to cut a brick to that dimension and find out how much it is going to shrink. Yes these clay materials always shrink so you must increase the size of your miniature brick pattern to compensate. You will only find out by experimenting what dimension you have to start with. As there is more material lengthwise in a brick it will shrink more in that dimension. Next use a program that will allow you to duplicate lines across the printed page. That creates your cutting guide.

You will need to make layout pages for the lengthwise bricks and if you want to also make them for the header courses of bricks. Header courses are where the length of the brick goes back into the wall instead of across the face. This provides greater strength for walls. So this is yet another wall detail you need to decide on, are you going to have header courses and how often will they occur? Some brick wall patterns have a lot of headers in them. There might also be decorative soldier courses. You will also see these long edges of the brick exposed in arches over windows and doors. Just running bricks lengthwise over these opening is not architecturally correct. Those are load bearing areas on a real building, the wall above the door or window would collapse into the opening if they are not properly engineered. Don't forget window sills, they too have a special pattern. Search out images and web pages that show how to build brick walls. Look closely at photos of real brick buildings from the era of your dollhouse.

Because this is a small batch method of brick making due to the width of the pasta roller machine I have made a number of cutting boards. My boards are made using some leftover plywood, I could have used pieces of melamine coated bookshelves. I adhere my guide lines to the board with 3M Super 77 spray adhesive. Next I put on the top surface also using the spray adhesive. That surface is a clear, flexible plastic cutting mat. You can find these at grocery stores or in the kitchen section of a department store, hardware store or kitchen store. I got the big ones and cut them in half. They came two per pack so that made 3 project boards. Only 3 because you will also need a piece of cutting mat that is not attached to a board. I will show you why you need it in another segment of the tutorial.

If you buy two packs you can create more cutting boards with a different grid size on the backside of the brick cutting board. I have a roof tile grid on one side of my board and a brick grid on the other side. I also have a long brick grid on one side and the header brick size on the other side of the board.

The cutting board is also the drying board.

1st sample real clay brick

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

I just rolled out and cut my first trial sample from the real clay I purchased. After they dry I will fire them in the kiln. I want to make several batches in different thickness to see what works best. Some bricks will be thin to use as a brick veneer over the plywood or other dollhouse shell materials, others will be 1:12 scale full dimensioned bricks. I also want to try making veneer corner bricks.

I loved working with this regular clay a lot more than I did working with the Das, Plus and other brands of clay/paper-mache mixes. It cuts nicer and the color is much better. The variation in color you see in the photo above is that some of the bricks are close to being dry as they were near the halogen lamp and other bricks are still pretty wet. The clay is not a bad bargain at $10.00 for 20 pounds. Of course the real expense is in the firing and the cost of the labor. But cost aside I can't purchase this product and there are no tutorials on it so I am teaching myself the skill.

So far I feel I am on a good track towards achieving a realistic texture to match that of old handmade bricks. There are definitely a few tricks up my sleeve that makes that texture happen but nothing too complex.

Brickology Part 1

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Today I started walking the immediate neighborhood taking photos of bricks on old buildings. I started making miniature bricks last night. My new dollhouse has a raised hearth fireplace, wood storage underneath, built in spice cupboard to the side. I have not gotten as much of the construction done as I hoped as I had to design the fireplace. It is not looking promising to make a 30 day completion goal but I am having a lot of fun so I don't really mind. There is a Seattle dollhouse show in March.

My roof tile method is what I will be using to make the brickwork on the hearth. This blog is a bit of a teaser in that it only contains reference photos of bricks that I took at lunch today. The how-to blog is coming later when I have the hearth finished and ready to photograph.

I am going out on a limb here and state my opinion that egg cartons do not make realistic looking bricks on dollhouses. The closest it comes to reality is where the hard kiln fired face of a brick has broken off and the soft clay inside is eroding away. Mushy rounded over edges on paperclay bricks don't work either.

Having stated that strong opinion I will soften it by saying that not all dollhouses have to be photo realistic looking, they are fun and they are a form of folk art where photo realism is not the point. The dollhouses I create are a blend of folk art and realism. So you keep right on doing what you love best because it is good and great. But if you want to try for something closer to the real thing then go and look at the real thing, look very closely, touch it, feel the surfaces, absorb the experience into your memory banks. Use a camera and record the experience to take back to your studio. Pick up a fallen brick from an old wall to use as a door stop or to weigh down something being glued together.

The photos that follow are the record I made of a late 1800's structure in the neighborhood that was built with local, hand made bricks. The color variations come from the position the bricks were stacked in the kiln. The smoke and heat creates a kind of glaze. Some of the striped color variations are from where an adjacent brick was stacked thus protecting the brick from the heat in that spot. Heat also creates cracks and spalling. Because the clay is hand packed into the molds there are often fissures in the layers of clay. The clay itself has grit and other inclusions in it and there are variation in color from the earth. When the mold is removed from the wet clay it can distort the shape of the brick. Moving the newly formed clay to the drying shelf can distort it and the person moving it might leave visible prints of their fingers. while the bricks are of similar size and the clay material is dug from the same pit there are absolutely no identical bricks unlike modern manufactured brick where they all look the same.

These brick photos do create a kind of abstract art where you look at things in detail. Don thinks I should do a gallery show of the images at a local coffee shop and sell people the prints. Who knows maybe I will give it a try sometime. I will need to shoot at the golden hour of intense sunlight from the west when there are long shadows.

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

photo copyright Karin Corbin 2009

Tile batch show

A sample section of the tiles I have been working on. They are just loosely laid out in rows on a board. I have made no calibrated attempt to get the rows even. You know how it is, you just can't wait to see how it is all going to look someday in the future. Of course they will look different when the dollhouse roof is finished. There will be more darker tiles in the mix, I have not made any of those "kiln burnt" batches yet with the black in them. There is no moss, mildew, dirt or bird droppings on this sample either. They do have some water color washes on them bringing up various shades of the terra cotta color range.

As a side note it takes about 720 tiles to cover one square foot of dollhouse roof. I will need somewhere around 2,000 tiles for my project. One reason it takes so many is there is a required triple overlap to this kind of roof covering. That means only the bottom one third of each tile is left exposed.

Now I have to quit having fun and get back to organizing the chaos that reorganizing creates. I swear that I make a bigger mess than ever when I make changes to the workshop space and it seems like I will never reach the goal.

Roof tile progress

The first batch of weathered roof tile keepers.

I am starting to achieve the look I want for the tiles my roof, another dozen batches and I might be satisfied. I threw out the first experimental batch as the color, shape and texture were not up to my expectations. The batch in the photo above is representative of the aged and cracked end of the spectrum. I made some adjustments to my mixing and rolling methods as also added more color to the mix. I am not adding premixed paint, I am adding in the tints they put into paint cans to make it the color of your dreams. That avoids adding in excess liquid. Put in some PVA glue to give the tiles a little more strength and some powered earth pigments to keep the clay dry enough to run through a pasta roller. Whirled it up in small batches in a mini food processor, kneaded it together, rolled it with a pin to flatten the piece enough to get it go into the pasta machine.

Some of the tiles for my dollhouse roof will be worn and cracked, others will have far less texture with a much smoother surface. Different areas of a roof get different amounts of sun, wind and rain all of which damage the tiles. Remember each of the tiles on a real roof was hand made, not machine made, so each is unique. This batch has more of the weathered look, other batches will have more of the smooth tiles. That look is dependent on the variables of what I mix into the batch. More or less liquid is one factor, this batch was on the dry side. It is also dependent on how smooth I decide to roll it out, I left this one on the more highly textured side. A scale of 10 with 1 being smooth and 10 being rough this batch ranges in examples of a fairly smooth 4 through a 10 with its ragged broken edges. The cracks in the tile are not from the clay shrinking and splitting, they are created along the outside edges when it goes through the pasta machine.

But mixing and rolling is just the start, the tiles have to be cut to size without pushing the edges down leaving a rounded surface. Miniatures loose character if you loose all the crisp sharp edges that are supposed to be there, they no longer look believable.

Tiles for the roof

A lovely old building in a beautiful public garden in Cambremer, France. Great place for lunch too, they serve crepes at those tables. I went back twice and took many photos of the restored timber framed buildings on the estate. But what I am posting this photo for is the view of the charming red tile roof that covers the structure.

Tired of dealing with making timbers and sawdust today I turned to another task I need to accomplish for the new dollhouse, making roof tiles.

I had experimented with achieving the look I wanted a few years back when I first started this project so today I got out the box of materials to get back to working on achieving the perfect, flat, terracotta roof tile (tuile plate).

One thing to figure out was the dimensions of the tiles. I needed to know the height, width and thickness. For that I searched around and found some places on the internet selling antique, salvaged tiles, they listed the dimensions. Naturally there was some variation of size between lots of tiles on different web sites. These materials were not ordered from the big box stores, they were locally made products, hand crafted.

Colors vary a lot from tile to tile even on the same roof. There might have been a different batch of clay dug from another section of the pit.They might have been fired in a different section of the kiln. They could have been fired on different days at differing temperatures.

All that color variation means I can't open up a package of terracotta air dry clay, roll it out, cut to size and glue it on the roof. I have to make small batches of a wide range of terracotta colors. I am using the Plus brand of air dry clay from the Activa company. I will vary the color with universal tinting mediums from the paint store as well as natural powdered earth pigment. I make small batches of the clay and mix them in a small food processor.  I run it through a pasta roller a few times to blend it some more. If the mix does not feed through the pasta roller easily adjust the mix with more liquid or add more clay or earth pigment. It takes trial and error until you get used to the feel of what a good mix is for rolling. A little color streaking is a treasure to be enjoyed and very authentic.

After it comes out of the pasta machine I place the rolled piece between two pieces of flexible cutting board and roll it with just a little bit of pressure using a regular rolling pin. Then I cut it into tiles using a straight edge and a scalpel. The thin, very sharp scalpel leaves nice sharp edges on the tiles without rounding over the edge.

A hundred small batches of a thousand tiles and the job will still not be done. Further color variations will be added with watercolor washes. The paper-mache clays do tint nicely with watercolors. Then I will have hundreds of subtle shades of tiles on my dollhouse roof. You can understand why I have to get an early start on it, I will be making roof tiles for many weeks to come. This is a very labor intensive process but the results are totally worth it.

The next two photos show authentically aged roofs. These are photos I took on my trip to Normandy. Now if I can just achieve something even close to being as interesting. Try not to turn to other peoples dollhouses so much for your inspiration, instead do image research and try to achieve on your dollhouse a feeling of reality from life. There are thousands of these inspirational old buildings still standing in Europe although it does look like that building won't be around for long if the roof is not patched up. The sign in the dormer window say "a vendre", that means the place is for sale, what a fixer!