I started making 1/144 scale fairy houses several years ago, but this is the very first one that I’ve made for a friend, so it’s a special one.

The underlying structure is a 1/144 scale gazebo kit from Northeastern Scale Models that, if built normally, would look something like the one pictured here.


But as a fairy house, it looks like this:

Most of the furniture is crafted from bits of scrap wood, though the bed posts are made from tooled toothpicks. And the “papasan-ish” chair is made from the smallest acorn cap I could find. The bed linens and table cover are made from dyed flower petals (snagged from a mix of dyed bits designed as inclusions in homemade paper). Here’s a look at the furniture before all the decorations go on (includes a dime for size comparison):

Another close-up of the bed and bedside table with flower petal lamp.

The landscaping is made from natural bits of dried plants, miniature landscaping materials (as used with dollhouses and toy trains), metal, no hole beads, and minerals (this piece has natural quartz crystals and slivers of kyanite (the blue glassy looking pieces)).

And that’s my fairy house for a very special friend (who really truly believes in fairies!).

Since this was my second Queen Anne Mansion, I not only wanted to furnish it, I wanted to experiment with a different paint scheme for the exterior.

Inspired by the book America’s Painted Ladies (a wonderful book with tons of pictures of houses with Victorian paint schemes), I decided on a cream base with pink and green trims. All of the window frames are double painted and additional bits of trim were added.

I also decided to shingle this house and was pleased with the N-Scale (1:160) shingles I found at Laserkit. Because “real size” shingles vary in size and and shape, there really isn’t an issue in the scale discrepancy (the dollhouse being 1:144).

I thought I was finished when I painted the wooden tower topper green. I was wrong. My husband (the former carpenter) informed me that the tower top should either be shingled or copper. Well, I thought the shingles would be “too much”, so I opted to take some thin copper sheeting and cover the tower top.

But first I found a chemical recipe to speed-up the patina process — I didn’t want bright shiny copper, but nice weathered copper. The recipe worked and within a few hours I had too much patina. I lightly sanded the piece to get it back to a “weathered, but not decrepit” look.

In the image below, the wee birds in the bird bath were carved from toothpicks — an experiment inspired by the carving work of micro-mini artist Frances Armstrong.

This miniature house is now in a private collection.

The furniture and accessories are a combination of scratch-built and painted mini-metal furnishings.