Art Deco Baby House

I have to apologise because once again the Lydia Pickett Artist Studio photographs have missed their slot! Tomorrow I promise!

The reason for this is because I have to show you my Art Deco Baby House Cabinet.It has beautiful glass doors.

With four floors and a hand carved spiral staircase it will be so much fun to do. As soon as this cabinet was out of its box I had to make an immediate start.


It comes from Lady Bug who does a range of wonderful Baby Houses. At the moment however they are not on her website so you would need to contact her directly.

The first thing to do was the floor for the ground floor entrance hall. I checked that my piece of card fitted the cabinet.


Lady Bug has designed the most amazing technique for making wonderful inlaid floors. This cabinet comes with a bag of shell pieces ready to do the inlaid floor. She has very kindly given me permission to share my photographs with you as to how it was made. All of the pieces that you need to make this are available from Lady Bug on her website at www.ladybug-fairies.com .

I made my design using peel off silver stickers. A central star first.......

then lining up some swirly detailing...

almost there....

and the final design!

Then you have to add some accents with paint. I decided that I wanted to do the majority of my floor with the shell pieces, so I only painted a few tiny parts.


Here is a close up. The paint is slightly pearlised, which doesn't show up so well in a photograph.

Then I started tiny piece by tiny piece gluing the broken up pieces of shell.

I must be mad because I very carefully broke each individual piece of shell to fit the space I wanted it in. Then I added the glue with a pin. Lastly I oh so carefully pushed my piece of shell where I wanted it with my Grandmas old hat pin! Which it has to be said is my most useful and trusted piece of equipment!

Still a long way to go!

This was a long process!!!

Finally all the shells are where I want them !

Just to give you an idea of scale here is an English 10 pence piece!

A close up of the middle.

A close up of the left hand side.

A close up of the right hand side - can you tell I am rather pleased with this??

Lady Bug then suggests covering with an antiquing medium, which brings out the lovely shades of the shells.

Last of all is a thick glaze over the top. This really makes it look like an inlaid floor. It is so hard to see on the photographs but trust me the result is spectacular. Thank you so much Lady Bug for teaching such an effective technique. Here is the final floor!

It is not glued down yet so it is curling slightly but here is the floor inside the cabinet.

And how wonderful that I can still admire my hard work even when the doors are closed!