The furniture for the quarter-scale Arthur Dollhouse has finally arrived. With tweezers and a lot of patience, I started placing the tiny pieces. Although the furniture is plastic, it resembles wood and comes with many accessories. Everything fit perfectly, despite my concerns about the three partitions I made on the top floor. I was worried that the furniture wouldn’t fit in the smaller rooms, but it did. Each room received its own furniture set, so I didn't have to move any pieces to larger rooms.
Once I confirmed that all the furniture fit well, I decided to add some Christmas spirit to the dollhouse. I printed out some Christmas decorations from the internet and placed a runner on the fireplace mantel. I also printed a rug for in front of the fireplace and added a Santa Claus picture above it. To give the rug a finished look, I fringed it with scissors. The tiny paper pieces look like fabric. I even printed some Christmas cards and placed them on the desk in the study.
My favorite part is the Christmas tree. Making it was quite challenging, but I'm proud of how it turned out. It took several hours under a spotlight using tweezers, but it came out perfectly. I started with a half-scale pine tree that was just the right size for the dollhouse. I hot-glued golden jewelry beads around it, which have a filigree design that adds extra decoration. I also printed tiny Christmas images and glued them onto the tree as ornaments. The scale is so small that they look like three-dimensional items rather than printouts. Cutting out these tiny pieces was difficult, requiring fine-point scissors. I used hot glue sparingly and cleaned up any stray webs after attaching each ornament. There are even tiny candy canes on the tree that are too small for the camera to capture. Once all the ornaments were in place, I added a larger filigreed bead to the top of the tree. I took a golden bow from my real Christmas tree and unraveled one of its strings, creating very thin golden curly strands that I wrapped around the tree as tinsel. They were just the right size for this little tree.
To complete the scene, I printed a Christmas rug for under the tree, placing it in the corner of the living room in front of the window so it will be visible when I light up the Village. Additionally, I added doorknobs to all of the doors using half-scale knobs that fit well with this scale.
