Book Review - The Doll's House Decorator by Vivienne Boulton

The Doll's House Decorator by Vivian Boulton, has clear projects designed to help children over eight, or adults with basic skills, add a number of inexpensive details to dolls house scenes. The book is largely pictorial, and uses common, inexpensive materials and common hand tools and techniques to create simple but effective additions to a range of dolls house rooms. The photos show a range of finishes easily achievable by a beginner. These are not projects intended to become heirlooms, but introductions to methods of adapting and using materials to make reasonable decorations and furniture for play or as backdrops.

The Doll's House Decorator is a good introduction to making your own dolls house furniture and accessories for beginners or school age children. The book covers a range of techniques, using fabric, card, craft wood, air drying and polymer clays. The projects are not intended to be dolls house heirlooms, but are shown as simple ways to make your own items for a dolls house or playscale setting. The templates for furnishings, soft furnishings and upholstery are given in a size suitable for 1:12 dolls house scale, but simple instructions are provided to enable the reader to scale the templates larger or smaller for other scales.

Most of the items in the book are made from air dry or polymer clay or card or paper. Simple upholstery projects for a wing chair and a sofa, made from card and upholstered, use beads or air dry or polymer clay legs or feet.

The furniture projects do not have opening drawers or long term working hinges, but use a tape or fabric hinge for doors. A range of poseable dolls with pipe cleaner bodies and heads, arms and legs made from modelling clay are illustrated along with simple Victorian or modern clothing.

Who Would Use This Book? - This book, with a few pieces of craft wood, some modelling clay and suitable scraps of fabric, would make a wonderful gift for an interested child of school age who wants to create special items for a 1:12 or 1:6 (playscale) dolls house. It is also a good reference book for anyone who wants to create simple play pieces for a school age child's collection of doll house or fashion doll accessories and details.

Adults passionate about a doll's house will not find these pieces detailed enough for most collections, although they do introduce many of the techniques used for more detailed scale miniatures. The techniques can be used as a spring board towards more detailed pieces requiring better materials or details.

Price and Availablility The Doll's House Decorator by Vivienne Boulton, Published 1992, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London. ISBN - 0-75130-000-4 Price $10 - $15