i just couldn’t resist the ripple blanket craze that’s sweeping the planet (well, here and here). but having neither the patience nor the mighty stash with which to accomplish such a feat i’ll settle for a doll-sized one.

it’s around 4″ x 5″, 4-ply cashmere, 2.5mm hook. i was surprised to be unable to easily find simple instructions for the ripple pattern online, but crochet workshop came up trumps. the diagram that explains the structure of the pattern is worth a thousand sets of written instructions where the overall pattern is a mystery until at least 2 rows in. i can see i’m going to love this book.

i didn’t have enough colours to go for the random stripe effect, so i thought i’d do a coloured stripe on the blue. when it turned out the colours in the wallpaper were pink, orange and green on blue i thought i may as well chuck them all in. i’m enjoying working with this yarn in different combinations, i find it interesting how different they can look.

the above pic is after washing you can see how much it’s bloomed compared to the stringy pre-washed pic. seeing as my motto for the dollshouse turns out to be the same as my overall parenting motto (“good enough”) there was no way i was weaving all those ends. after another wash the clipped ends will have felted into the knots completely.

now i must go and investigate that annoying smudge which appears to be on the bottom of my lens.

we have a much-played-with but sadly rather tatty dolls’ house. admittedly i never expected it to be treasured and well cared for, seeing as she was only 2 when she got it. all the soft furnishings that came with it have been shredded and it’s been repeatedly defaced too (i say rather her dolls’ house than my walls and furniture).

i thought that now she’s older, perhaps a little tlc wouldn’t be wasted. when i can work out the best way to paint it i’ll do that, but once the idea had formed i couldn’t wait to conform to proper decorating sequence – i had to paper the walls.

the scale isn’t right, but all the specifically designated dollshouse wallpaper i could find was a) stupidly expensive and b) dull dull dull, so i used scrapbooking papers from twopeasinabucket. i chose the designs and M decided where each one should go. of course that was entirely different to what i’d had in mind when choosing. i would have put the spots in the living room, the yellow flowers in the kitchen, the atomic in the kids’ (attic) room, the crosses in the adults’ room and the starburst flowers in the bathroom.

now i find myself at once drawn and repelled by the notion of adult women doing out dolls’ houses. i can really see the attraction of having *total* control over a house space. of being able to decorate and furnish it at will – without real world price restrictions – and have everything remain where you put it when you close the door. i can also understand to an extent the joy of miniature (i was stupidly taken with the mini-mac – thread). i think i’m uneasy at the implications of arrested development and – much more significantly – the utterly depressing aesthetic that appears to prevail in the 1:12 scale world. now i have to add that i’ve not looked deeply into this, but what i’ve seen in my intermittent browsing of those ebay categories has scared me off pretty effectively.

now if there were more furnishings available along these lines i could easily become hooked:

see more amazing pics and read the shopping sherpa’s spot-on discussion here.

but this dolls’ house is most definitely M’s not mine. which thankfully relieves me of the pressure of having to get the whole thing right, and allows me to just have fun with it. which is a damn good job because the papering was about as tricky as real world papering. i used watered down pva and got bubbles and creases galore. mostly they don’t show too badly, but i see them and it grates (heh, i notice i picked the creasiest corner for the closeup ). gradually i’d like to add more furnishings, carpets, curtains, etc, but i’m happy with this as a start.