Cobweb Cottage
Note: The text here is something I wrote a number of years ago, so it is out of date - it has only been recently that I resumed work on it, so I will be updating it later! I would have liked to have shown more of my progress as I did it, but keeping the camara charged and charging it is a pain - it takes ages to charge and the battery goes flat very quickly, so I didn't bother.
Cobweb Cottage (I'm going to keep the name for it, because it reflects the subject matter!) is my first proper 24th scale dolls house - to be honest, I prefer to think of it as a miniature house, because it's unlikely that it will ever have an official occupant - dolls aren't really my thing and finding 24th scale figures is quite challenging as there aren't that many of them around. I say that it is my first proper one because I had one previously which was one of those ugly, cheap plywood things that doesn't quite fit together properly. I had planned on turning it into a haunted house and even started buying small items for it - in the end, though, I just abandoned the project but kept the accessories to be used in a different project.
Cobweb Cottage is by Petite Properties - I have done some of their houses before, mainly working in quarter scale (to date, I have Candlewick House, the Yuletide Shop and Pumpkin Cottage (the last one is my favourite, of course, because of the wonderful detail on it and I enjoyed working on it immensely.) I love the aesthetics of Tudor houses, both in the real world, and in miniature, so when I saw Cobweb Cottage and how inexpensive it is compared to 12th scale Tudor houses, I just had to have it! Of course, my birthday is coming up, so it really is a birthday present.
Although there is a lot of parts for the kit, I found it quite easy to identify the parts and separated them into groups so that when it comes to fitting them together later I will find it easy to find them. I have test built it and it seems easy to put together. One of the problems I've found with 12th scale houses is that in larger houses the parts are big and heavy and I have difficulty getting them to fit together properly. (For this reason, I prefer to work with small 12th scale buildings like the competition pieces that DHE manufactured in its heyday.) With Cobweb Cottage, I find I don't have that problem at all and once I've completed the painting stage of it, I don't think I'll have any problems at all putting it together.
So far, I've started to paint the beams, house carcass (the latter will have to be continued once I've got some more white paint!) and some small lollipop sticks I bought by accident for another project. (I thought that they were the full size ones, but they aren't - I have used them in other projects, but as I bought two packs of a thousand, there's still loads to use up and although they weren't suitable for the project I initially bought them for, they have proven to be useful else where. I suspect that it will take a while before I've used them all up!)
To decorate the house, I'm going to just use paint, the lollipop sticks and 24th scale stone from Romney Miniatures. I've looked everywhere for 'real' tiles and stone work for the house as I prefer to use 'real' materials rather than using paper. (Paper always has a flat appearance to me and I don't really like it to be honest. If I can find something more 'real' then I'll use that instead.) I've decided on the random paving for the ground floor (as it looks more realistic when you consider the haphazard way Tudor buildings were built - I've been in one and the floorboards are of different thicknesses and widths. Because of this, I don't think that you have to be 'neat and perfect' when making Tudor and country cottages - the less neat it is, the more realistic it will look.) For the roof, I will be using the grey roof tiles and the grey ridge tiles. There house also came with two fireplaces and I shall be using brick strips on that. (I had been inclined to use random rough stone to cover that as I like the look better, but they don't produce it so I shall have to compromise with it.)
(This is the progress I have so far, because I've not been able to get the tiles and bricks for it yet as our dog needed an operation and this month I decided to treat myself to 'new' books and some girly stuff which I haven't had a chance to in a while. Hopefully, I'll be able to order them next month, sometime. I am also going to get some more thin balsa wood for internal beams.)
