A Cyclone and a Spiral Staircase.

Hello everyone!

As some of you may know, we had a really huge cyclone in Fiji in February. (Category 5 Tropical Cyclone Winston.) It was pretty intense and a large number of people lost their houses. We were fine at our place though, we hardly had any damage, just some leaking and a few inches of flooding from the bucket loads of rain. My dollhouse cottage was fine too. I wrapped in in a large black plastic rubbish bag and nestled it safely in my wardrobe.

This is one of the palm trees outside our house being blown around. I managed to snap this photo before the cyclone got to its worst.

After the cyclone, power was out everywhere. It was out at our place for two weeks. But we were lucky because we still had water. I was unable to continue work on my novel as I couldn't charge my laptop, so I had lots of time to work on my dollhouse cottage.

I got right into making the spiral staircase. I have to thank Mara who writes the dollhouse miniature blog Pequeneces. Thanks Mara! She created a wonderful tutorial on how to make a spiral staircase in 1:12 scale and I used a lot of her ideas to help me make this staircase. To see Mara's tutorial, click here. Maria makes lots of lovely creations in miniature and she very kindly explains all her processes.

This shows when I have stuck all the bits together and am nearly finished threading all the steps onto the kebab stick.

I tested the stairs in a few different positions. You can see in this one that the hole in the ceiling doesn't match up with the position of the stairs. This is the reason I hadn't put the floorboards in yet—just incase I wanted to make changes later.

This is the stairs matching up with the hole.

I decided I liked the stairs this way best.

This is what the stairs look like at the moment. I still need to make a railing and then paint them. 

I cut the hole in the ceiling bigger so that I could align the stairs in the way I liked best.

Then I glued down the popsicle sticks for the floorboards. 

And made a nice frame around the hole.

This is what the interior looks like at the moment. I will do the railing and painting for the stairs later.

I moved on to adding the other bit to the sides of the door to cover the join and to make the fretwork recessed.

As you can see, I don't have any small clamps in Fiji, so I make do with some wooden clothes pegs. 

Here is the little roof over the door nearly finished—now it just needs tiles.

So this is where the cottage is up to now, inside and out.

Have a lovely day!

xo Amy