Tag: Craft

Posted in Random Thoughts

The house and the doll

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

My daughter has done it again. She has amazed me with her idea and I couldn’t help but join her scheme. She has built a doll house for herself out of waste cardboard.

This one specially struck me because it looks so much like the wooden dollhouse I had loved so much. It is several stories high and, yet, it doesn’t take much space. She can simply put the lid on and slide it in a narrow space.

Note the kitchen at the bottom with open stove top and fridge. The bedroom has a 3D bed (my idea), a soft pillow and blanket. The 3D step ladder leads to a large bathroom with a toilet, bathtub and a 3D shower.

Another step ladder leads to working room with laptop and a playroom with a teddy bear and coconut tree (not sure why). The 3D stairs on the left is going up to the roof garden with miniature plants–which is my favourite place. The cardboard doll is happily sitting there among the plants.

Next to the stairs is the 3D almirah that holds dresses for the cardboard doll (my doll insisted on having a cardboard doll and cardboard detachable dresses).

So far, it is one of her best creations because it has a lot of 3D elements and because it has the potential to add so much more–door, windows, curtains, better toys, more cardboard dolls and their dresses.

The best part is that it makes my daughter proud. She lead this whole initiative. I did only bare minimum, doing as I was told. She has been bragging about it non-stop and it will push her to be even more resourceful in the future.

Posted in Random Thoughts

Working for the rich

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

Lately, I have been working as a jewellery- and dress-designer for probably the richest doll on the Earth. She is the Barbie I gifted to my daughter last summer, she is named as Elsa (after the Disney princess, of course). Ever since then, I have been hard at making dresses suitable for her station in life.

Lately, my daughter requested my help for making jewellery for Lady Elsa based on her original designs.

Within a couple of hours, we had seven new sets of necklaces and earrings, along with a tiara, made out of buttons, fake pearls from my junk jewellery and metal wire, held together with a lot of love (because love is a magic and only magic can hold these fragile things together). That, of course, excludes the four previous jewellery sets that had been lost in the previous month.

My payment was ten-kisses-a-piece, which I consider quite generous.

It is rather nice working for those rich in love. 😀

Posted in My life

Busy Bee (Part 2)

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

I mentioned a couple of projects for my daughter in my last post, but elaborated only one–the folding kitchen. Well, the other one is a jungle/zoo/farm backdrop.

Everybody at home had been complaining about how my daughter’s toy animals turn up everywhere in the house at the most inopportune moment, like on the floor under your bare feet, on the pillows when your head hits it too hard, on the chair seat when you are too tired to check before sitting, under the bed where you can’t pull them out without getting yourself dirty, behind the huge almirah which needs four grown up men to move (we have only three at home)…

I guess, the herbivores have the habit of running away to go looking for grass and plants, and the carnivores follow them to eat them…

Well, it became important to build a ranch/sanctuary/safeplace where they were allowed to roam. It also helps my daughter create stories that I could, then, publish in the blog (Hah! Mastermind me, stealing stories of the minions…).

So, I used an old flat cardboard box to build the backdrop with water colours (all that I could find at home during lockdown).

The walls have silhouette of a deep forest.

I also built a detachable cave and a hollow tree out of a plastic box. The 4-year-old Madame Leonardo Da Vinci coloured it to perfection.

The forest comes with yellow and red trees built out of old coloured cardboard boxes. It also has a fishy pond and an even fishier river that can be moved around at will. These were made of the old plastic sheets from my old organiser diary. The stones donated by an unsuspecting relative add to the effect.

To ensure flexibility to convert it to a zoo, we have combined it with a set of foldable cardboard cages and coloured by the family artist a few months earlier.

The piece is a continuous work in progress since we plan to add grass, a few more trees, a lying down hollow tree, and other cool stuff to build stories. We are gradually working towards adding farm buildings to the set as well. I’m looking forward to building a nice blue ocean out of the box top, thanks to my daughter’s new found love for water creatures.

The best part is that it also works as storage space for all these sets.

All in all the hard work seems to have paid off, considering the time my daughter spends with the set. I had too much fun…so there’s that too.

Posted in My life

Busy Bee

Posted on by Shaily Agrawal

So, you might have noticed that my posting frequency declined greatly lately. Earlier I used to write at least a couple of posts every week. But in the last month, since mid-Ramadan, I went slow, too slow actually.

No, it had nothing to do with fasting, something to do with my book–The Forest Bed–and everything to do with a couple of projects I had going on for my daughter.

As you might know, I love building things with hands. Earlier I saw on You Tube a folding kitchen that a father had created for his daughter where she could stand and cook. The kitchen was simple, clean and orderly with hangers and stands for utensils, a microwave and a working sink. I was specially struck by how everything was in place and ready to play when the girl opened it so the child doesnot spend time setting it all up.

My house doesn’t offer enough space for anything that elaborate. But setting the kitchen up is my daughter’s pain point. Usually by the time she is done with it, it is time to sleep, eat or study. So, I definitely agreed with the ready-to-play and folding kitchen part.

So I built it out of waste material.

The cardboard was home, thanks to Amazon–around 12 X 8 inches. I just cut one side to be folded up and down. Then, I used the side flaps to add to the depth. Of course, they close too when we are folding, making it a compact storage for all the things that were earlier found all over the house. Since cardsheet was not available due to lockdown, we covered it with the artsheets my daughter had already coloured. The utensil hangers are made of old buttons. The racks are made our of smaller cardboard boxes.

Since the space was too small, rather than sticking the oversized plastic stove on the counter top, we painted it on the counter…by we, I mean my humble-self and my very own four-year-old Leonardo da Vinci.

I added a bit of rough outlines for accent…”rough” being the operative word here. I didn’t want to take away the childish feeling from the paintings so I ensured that the outlines were not clean and symmetrical…they were drawn as if I didn’t have my glasses on (which I didn’t)…way off the mark but still leaving a mark (smudge, actually) on the sheet.

Closed front gates open upwards all the way back and down to form the floor.

The crazy fun I had during the process made me question my mental age…which was about five a couple of years back. I think now it has shrunk to three and a half.

I am planning to add a refrigerator and oven on the outerwalls in my next vacations. Any ideas?