Ballroom Columns

I plan for Myrtlewood's ballroom to be quite grand and, in keeping with its general Greek revival style, wanted to include columns marking the transition from the ballroom to the music alcove. I think I've seen some for sale on specialty miniatures websites, but I'm really trying to make as much on my own as I can (and saving money never hurts, either!). So I made these columns out of some wedding cake decorations, polymer clay and wood blocks.
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I found these Wilton wedding cake columns - four for about $5.00 - and thought they were absolutely perfect! They're only 7 inches tall, however, and a quick internet search showed they're the tallest Wilton makes. I needed columns at least 8 inches tall for my plans, so I decided to raise them using wood blocks. The blocks looked a little plain, however, so I decided to glamorize them a bit.

I used polymer clay and this nifty mold to create raised flourishes for the sides of the columns. This is a great use for scrap clay, by the way; I used up a fair amount of all the scraps I had from my marbling experiments.

As you can see, I simply glued the clay (after oven hardening) to the wood blocks, glued the columns on top and painted everything white.


This worked out so well that I'm considering ways to use polymer clay for other architectural embellishments at Myrtlewood.

Ballroom Floor

It's been a while since I've posted, but I have been working on Myrtlewood. January and February, in particular, are my busiest months at work, so bulding progress has been slow, but I've tried to still work on it a little each weekend. Here you can see the fruits of my labor - the ballroom and music room floors.

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I cut every piece by hand.

Just kidding. I like to think I could have cut each piece by hand, but it probably would have taken me two years to complete instead of two months. I did stain and place each tiny piece individually, but the pieces were already cut: I found these great parquet kits for the sunburst medallion and the border at an online dollhouse shop. The kits were about $15 each, and I needed two for the border and one for the sunburst, so you're looking at a $50 floor here. Money well spent, as far as I'm concerned, considering the time it saved me and the overall results.

Here's the music room, an alcove off the ballroom:

Detail:

I've been working on a few other things off and on, and my busy period at work ends in about a week, so I should have more to show you soon.