Continuing the decoration of a new-to-me dollhouse which I plan to use for my Instagram story of the Littleton Family.

I recently painted the front of the house ….

A nice lick of paint to brighten it up – the window frames had a coat of white too

I had taken some time researching how I would add the ivy, should I cut the leaves from paper? You can buy miniature cutters but as I show the house in black and white on Instagram and mostly focus on the inside; I wasn’t sure how much need there was for such painstaking precision.

Then I thought about painting, but realised that it would be again, very time consuming to paint each leaf individually…

I can’t remember how I came up with the idea but I decided to ‘carve’ an ivy leaf into an eraser on the end of a pencil, using a scalpel and ‘stamp’ the leaves on the house.

This seemed to work but my husband suggested carving one into soft wood might be better and less likely to distort. I took his advice and had a go but try as I might the wooden leaves didn’t look so good and also the printing wasn’t as effective. (I am no carver – I’m sure if you’re more used to using the tools it would have worked!)

So I used a few pencils with erasers in the ends and carved a few leaf patterns to use…

I then mixed up few shades of green acrylic paint. I also added a little gel to the paint, this helped add a little texture. The gel I had was silver but the green paint seemed to absorb it well..

and then painted the ivy …. it was with trepidation that I made the first dark green blob of paint on the newly painted wall, but once I’d started I just kept going!
and here it is all finished…

Click here to see a post featuring a little film of my ivy growing…
Thanks for reading.
Back soon, love Rosie