On St. Patrick's Day, all that glitters is not always gold. There are a wide range of glitters suitable for miniatures but not all of them work for the same scales. It can be tough to find the right glitter to add sparkle to small scenes.

The options include mica based powders, like the Jacquard Pearl Ex Pigments, as well as laser cut micro glitters and polyester glitters. If you want a traditional look, the finest grit of German Glass Glitter may work as well. It can be quite chunky in smaller scales as you can see with the gold glitter in the photo, so choose carefully.

Photo copyright 2010 Lesley Shepherd, Licensed to About.com Inc.

Room boxes, like their smaller cousins, window boxes, are a great way to showcase a smaller more focussed collection of miniatures. The Spring Seattle Dollhouse show again had a number of classic designs which I've set up in this Room Box Gallery. If you go back through the various years of Seattle Dollhouse show photos on this site, you'll see that the various roombox designs are used over and over again for very different subjects. Perhaps it's time to pick a design and start your own!

You can see from the examples in the gallery that a roombox doesn't only have to have a single room, and that there are lots of clever ways to suggest other parts of a scene using backdrops for windows, or by sectioning off the room box. The roomboxes are a bit deeper than a regular window box frame used for miniatures, so you can place a whole room of furniture in a room box if you wish.

Photo copyright 2010 Lesley Shepherd, Licensed to About.com Inc.

Spring means its time to dig the garden and plant. These scale miniature shovels, trowels and garden forks fit into all kinds of digging and construction scenes. There's even a barn shovel for mucking out the stable. You can make them from paper or metal recycled from cans (tins).

The barn shovel goes with the stable broom, the tack trunk and the toolbox or grooming box as parts for the stable project. They're great for a scale garage as well.

Photo copyright 2010 Lesley Shepherd, Licensed to About.com Inc.

Fans of the sadly out of print magazine, The Scale Cabinetmaker know that Helen Dorsett produced a series of Cabinet Maker's Guides For Dollhouse Furniture. The Victorian Furniture Guide 1850 - 1880 contains detailed exploded view scale drawings designed to allow anyone with a reasonable experience with woodwork to create quality scale furniture pieces based on classic originals.

These aren't How to Build Miniature Furniture books although they do contain some good basic instruction. The guides are plans shown to scale, with tips on part assembly and some techniques - miniature tufted upholstery is outlined in the Victorian Furniture Guide. If you have moved beyond simple miniature furniture, have some woodworking skills and want to start producing room sets of more realistic miniatures, the Dorsett Cabinet Maker's Guides for Dollhouse Furniture are a great resource.

More reviews of references for Miniature Furniture:
Simple Country Furniture Projects in 1:12 Scale by Allison J. White
How to Make Miniature Furniture by John Davenport