The Miniature Dream Room Gets Dreamy

Ohboyohboyohboy…the dream room is finished! Ready for a tiny tour?

First, though, here are more details about the museum exhibit, which the room will be a part of. If you’ll be in the Washington, D.C. area between May and January, be sure to check it out at the National Building Museum.

All right, on to the tour! To start, here’s a zoomed-out view of the room as a whole.

To give you perspective, here’s the third wall that you can’t see in the above photo.

Diving into the details now, let’s start with the bedside wall. The solar system poster I designed from scratch, and later this week I’ll be offering a downloadable, free version here on the blog if you want to use it in your own tiny scenes.

There’s a happy, little sandwich friend on the bedside table, along with a diary and one of my favorite childhood books, The Little Fur Family, which also made an appearance in my Marshmallow Moon bakery room box. 😉

The lamp on the bedside table, and below on the dresser, was made from a wooden base found in the wood craft section at Michaels, a strip of paper cut from a cupcake wrapper, and little piece of necklace chain.

I decorated the mirror with stickers, something I loved to do as a kid, and there’s a cute sock monster escaping the sock drawer. She’s made from a piece of textured fabric cut into a sock shape, and I used a toothpick dipped in red paint to add the stripes before gluing on polymer clay eyes. The dresser is from my mini supplier, and I painted each of the drawers a different color. (Need miniature furniture? Contact me for special orders.)

The bookcase is filled with books that I loved as a child. The fish bowl is filled with resin “water,” the rocks are glass microbeads (you can find these at many craft stores) with fake flower stamens that I painted in bright colors to simulate coral (the stamens can be found in the floral or wedding department at Michaels or online). The little crab is sculpted from polymer clay.

The desk is situated under a window with a full moon scene, and I made the curtains by sewing fabric rectangles, ironing them into an accordion shape, and using a homemade starch spray (glue and water) to hold the folds in place. On the desk is the board game Candy Land, another childhood favorite of mine, with a family of gingerbread people helping each other escape.

I was always into art as a kid, so I had to include a little easel. The glass is filled with resin swirled with pigment, and there’s a polymer clay paint brush sticking out of it. Peeking out behind the upper corner of the painting, you can a tiny dollhouse–a dollhouse in a dollhouse! And in the background of the photo, you can just see a tiny red door, a window, and a line of washing out to dry–signs of the room’s even tinier inhabitants.

On the wall above the easel are shelves with games and toys. I chose games from my childhood, including games that my cousins and I unearthed in our grandparents’ closets, games from my parents’ childhood. I love vintage games!

The image that sparked my idea for this entire room is the scene below. I had envisioned a child reading in bed, something I spent a lot of time doing as a kid, and the story they’re reading has come to life, and it’s spilling out of the wardrobe in front of them.

My aim was to capture that sense of childlike wonder, that belief that your imagination really could create the reality around you, if only you believed hard enough. This attitude has shaped so much of my adult life, including the work I now do through The Mouse Market, and this room is a call to never lose that sense of wonder.

A few more details: a box of dust bunny chow spilled near the bedside table feeds an adorably fuzzy bunny.

An aerial view of the room. Whoops! I just realized you can see the cutout in the leftover fabric I used for the rug, something that won’t be visible in the final piece because there will be a lid on the room. Ah well… 😉

That’s all, folks! Tune in later this week to download a free version of the solar system poster to use in your own projects. And now that I’ve finished this room, I can get back to work on the woodland mouse house. 🙂