Pictures
Pictures for the walls can be made very easily. The picture itself will be a scrap or tiny photograph. This is pasted on a piece of cardboard larger than itself, and round the edge of that you place a strip of whatever colored paper you want for the frame. The picture cord, a piece of cotton, can be glued on the back. More elaborate frames are cut out of cardboard and bound round with colored silk and covered with gold paint. The picture is then stuck into it.
Bookshelves and Books
The simplest bookshelves are those that hang from a nail on the wall. They are made by cutting two or three strips of cardboard of the size of the shelves and boring holes at the corners of each. These are then threaded one by one on four lengths of silk or fine string, knots being tied to keep the shelves the right distance apart. Care has to be taken to get the knots exactly even, or the shelf will be crooked.
Books can be made by sewing together a number of tiny sheets of paper, with a colored cover and a real or invented title. Sometimes these books contain real stories.
Other Articles
A dolls' house ought to be as complete as possible, and though this will take a long time it is absorbingly interesting work from start to finish. It should be the ambition of the mistress of a dolls' house to have it as well furnished as the house of a grown-up person, and if she looks round the rooms in her own home carefully she will see how many things can be copied. There will be cushions to make, fancy table-cloths for different tables, toilet-covers and towels for the bedroom, splashers to go behind wash-stands, mats in front of them, and roll-towels and kitchen cloths for the kitchen.
Everything should be made of the thinnest and finest material, cut with the greatest care and sewn with the tiniest stitches. Light and dainty colors are best for a dolls' house. If you have several rooms, it is a good plan to have a pink room, a blue room, a yellow room, and in each room to have everything of different shades of that color and white. Perhaps no material is so useful to the owner of a dolls' house as art muslin. It is soft, cheap, and very pretty.
Coming to other furniture which can be made at home, we find screens (made of cardboard and scraps), music for the piano, walking-sticks, flowers (made of colored tissue-paper and wire), flower-pots (made of corks covered with red paper), cupboards to keep linen and glass in (made out of small cardboard boxes, fitted with shelves), and many other little things which, if you look round your own home carefully, will be suggested to you. Even bicycles can be imitated in cardboard and placed in the hall.