papier-mâché doll furniture

   Our whole family cycled through some kind of stomach flu this week so I haven't posted in many a day.  This morning though, I had this nifty craft idea.  I'm still working on the execution but I thought the notion was a good one. It's likely that there are a number of folks who can turn out something more beautiful than my first couple of tries.  (Run with it I say, if it strikes your fancy.)  The idea was papier-mâché doll furniture.

   There are a few great companies out there making cute stuff of sustainably harvested, fairly traded this and that for, I suppose, not a huge fortune.  But why not manufacture just what you need to the scale of your homemade fairies and dolls with the satisfaction of having done it yourself for only pennies from your pocket?  (And kids love to help with papier-mâché!)  Well, that's what I was thinking when I looked at some furniture in our home and tried to reproduce it in fairie size.


Naiya and I decided to start with a bed.  The framework is a reproduction of our guest bed made out of pipe cleaners.

We laid a bit of thin cardboard (cut from a cereal box) onto the raised base and then proceeded to wrap the entire thing with thin strips of paper grocery bags dipped in a mixture of white glue and water (about 4 parts glue to 1 part water).

It took about 2 hours to dry.  We glued some little beads on for bed knobs and  covered it with a little pillow and spread.

Next up, a rocking chair...