My daughter and I thought our dollhouse walls were looking a little bare, so we decided to create some art and flower arrangements to freshen them up for spring.
Here’s how we made them.
Paintings
Materials
- Mini Canvases (Walmart)
- Washable acrylic paint
- Maileg cardboard cutout and tag pictures
- Fairy picture canvas (Dollarama)
- Command Picture Hanging Strips
We tried a few different methods to make the paintings.
- I sketched a few bunny portraits using a Maileg bunny tag for guidance and we free-hand painted a few of the canvases.
- I am not much of an artist, unlike my daughter, so I cut out a small image from a leftover Maileg sticker. I taped the sticker to a canvas and dabbed a sponge brush around it to create a mouse silhouette and then repeated 2 more times. The sticker was too small for my daughter to manage this technique, so I went hunting for a larger image to use.
- When I saw the cardboard mouse figure in my box of Maileg things, I thought it would be perfect for this project. I traced the cardboard mouse figure (it was packaging that came with a mouse outfit) onto some cardstock, taped the cardstock on the canvas and then my daughter painted around it. Once the background was finished, she removed the cardstock stencil and painted the mouse. This was the most successful and least frustrating method, for both myself and my daughter.
- We also had a canvas (from Dollarama) with a fairy scene pre-drawn on it that we decided to add to the collection
Once the paintings were all finished and dry, we put Command Picture Hanging Strips on the back and adhered them to the dollhouse walls.
Picture Hanging Strips work like velcro – one side sticks to the canvas and the other side sticks to the wall. This way the picture can be moved around easily. I thought that it would be a fun feature for my daughter if she could rearrange the paintings. It also means we can easily create new paintings and switch them out in the future.
Flower Pots
Materials
- Wood blank flowerpots (Sewing Seeds Play)
- Washable acrylic paint
- Brown Air Dry Clay (Amazon)
- Mini flowers (AliExpress)
When I saw the little wood flower pots, I immediately thought of our dollhouse. They were very simple to decorate and put together. My daughter painted the pots with acrylic paint. Once dry, she put a little brown air dry clay in each pot and then stuck the mini flowers in each pot. We left the pots overnight to cure before putting them in the dollhouse the next morning.
My daughter and I had a lot of fun doing this project together. I think it’s very likely we will do it again.