Betsy Ross Finally gets Started

The Betsy Ross House is a wonderful miniature kit by Debbie Young that I bought from In Some Small Way a couple of years ago. On Debbies' website she describes the house as follows:

In 1777, George Washington visited Betsy Ross in her upholstery shop in Philadelphia and asked her if she could make a flag. This reproduction of the Betsy Ross House, the place where she lived when she made the first American flag, is made of cast brick. The interior has three rooms - the first floor room was used as a workroom and showroom, while the business owner and her family lived in the rest of the house.

It is a quarter scale project and my first attempt at laying individual floorboards and working with cast resin walls - these are the two reasons why this lovely little kit has sat in its box for over a year waiting for me to take that big gulp of air and get started.

I was rather scared of the brickwork so started with the interior floorboards. They are made by laying the strips of wood in an irregular fashion onto the wooden floors. I do like my lego gluing jig!

The strips are then trimmed along the floor edges.

Then it is time to do some sanding. This worked really well, as you can see from the right hand side floor the boards are now starting to look like they have been walked over for many years.

Having done as much as I could on the floors I had to bite the bullet and start my brickwork. The first thing I did was paint the entire area of brick with the colour that I want for the mortar in-between the bricks. Making sure that the colour was not uniform but slightly darker in patches.

Then began the labour of love. I mixed up three shades of brick colours and started painting each individual brick! Yep that's right I am painting every single brick separately! Why rush?? This is where I am now, I am just hoping that when I mix up the next batch of paint it is fairly similar to this first lot. Watch this space.

I thought I had better finish with a splash of colour seeing as this has been a rather brown blog post! Here is the selection of fabrics that are going to be my next quilt and (rather scarily) a double quilt for our bed! Again with the 'labour of love' and 'watch this space!'