Craft Tutorial: Distressed Dollhouse Furniture

I have become entirely obsessed with the cigar box dollhouse I’ve been working on for about 5 days now.  (Would you believe that the entire room, floor to ceiling, is a mere 6 1/4 inches tall?)  What started as a what-if whim has become a very focused project, with new ideas being spawned at every turn.  It’s become a crusade to cram a cigar box full of as many tiny details as possible, with the ultimate goal being realism.  Freakish, breathtaking realism.

I was originally planning to make every piece in the project from scratch, until I walked through Dollar Tree the other day and saw these:

Dollhouse furniture for a buck??  Squee!  So, I figure you can do anything to dollhouse furniture that you can do to real furniture.  This is the dollhouse equivalent of buying furniture at Goodwill and refinishing it!  For the room I’m currently working on, I’m going for a flea-market-chic type of look, so I decided to do a distressed faux finish.  Here’s the piece I started with:

Just a plain little wooden dresser.  Then I gathered up some paints:  the blue and beige colors I’d already used in my dollhouse room, as well as white.

Give the dresser a whole bunch of coats of paint.  Put it on in light coats so that it doesn’t pool and obscure the details of the dresser.  Don’t worry about perfect coverage.  I gave my dresser 4 coats of paint: white, blue, beige, and white again to finish.

Once the paint is completely dry, use sandpaper (or an emery board) to remove layers of paint.  Remove some paint from the flat surfaces,  working in the same direction as the wood grain if possible.   Along any edges, sand a little more to expose more layers underneath and give the illusion of years of wear.

Use a silver Sharpie to very carefully color the knobs on the drawers.  You can also use silver  paint if you have a tiny brush.

For an optional finishing touch, add a runner across the top by Mod Podging a strip of lace to it.  (Remember, if you are going for realism, more detailed is better!)  Make sure to center the pattern of the lace and to leave equal amounts overhanging the ends.  Once the Mod Podge is dry, it’s ready to find a home in your dollhouse!

My next project (which is already partially complete, as I have been unable to stop working) is a tiny art deco table lamp for on top of the dresser.  Tee-hee!