HOW TO FURNISH A DOLL-HOUSE
Material Required to Make Furniture for a Doll-house: cardboard boxes of all kinds, especially flat letter-paper boxes, jeweler’s boxes, correspondence-card boxes. Pencils and spools may be of help in making some of the furniture.
When you look at the pictures of my boxcraft doll-house, you will see how well it was furnished. All the chairs and tables, and the bed—all the things that are in the pictures—are cut from cardboard boxes. You have just such boxes as I used, I am sure. Every home has them.
Shall I tell you how the furniture is made? First, I will tell you how I made the bedroom, shall I?
The old-fashioned canopy bedstead is made from a candy box and its cover. The four posts are long pencils. One pencil is run through each corner of the lower half of the box and glued tight. Then the cover is placed upon the upper ends of the pencils to make a canopy. Lace-paper is pasted around the rims of the cover. I made tissue-paper sheets and a lace-paper pillow. You can do that, too.
I made a tall bureau from eight empty match-boxes. The match-boxes were safety match-boxes with tiny drawers that are made to slide in and out. I saved till I had eight boxes. Then, I glued four, one on top of the other, and four others I glued in the same way. When these were dry, I pasted my two sets together. This made the upper part of the bureau. To make legs, I cut a low bench from a small box cover and pasted the boxes to its top. (For bench, see [Diagram Six, A], page 175.) I sewed shoe-buttons to each drawer to make a handle. The mirror is a piece of cardboard cut oblong and pasted at the back of the bureau so that it is upright. I painted a frame around the sides of the cardboard to make it look like a mirror. The bureau cover is a strip of lace-paper. The candle and candlestick came off a birthday cake.
The wash-stand is cut from the lower half of a box about five inches long. It is cut almost as if it were a bench, only that its legs are shorter. The “splasher” is a piece of cardboard pasted upright at the back of the box.
Boxcraft Bedroom furniture.
