In my Diorama Dos and Don'ts section, I mention getting your friends and families involved in the diorama process, if they are willing. This is because I've been amazed at how people have opened up to my hobby when they finally figure out what it is I'm doing.

It was actually my friend, Mary, who got got me started on dioramas.  She had seen my collection of Barbie size furniture and goodies, and my 7 foot tall Barbie house, and heard my complaints about being unable to fit more than a small part of my collection in the house.  She had also seen dioramas on the internet, so she suggested I look them up and, lo and behold, I was hooked!  Mary had no 11 1/2 inch dolls, but she was interested and now has two Poppies, a Lilith and a Momoko- and I see others in her future!

When I was setting up the 7 rooms for the Grandville Library Display  and got overwhelmed, it was Mary who came to my rescue.  She had never done dioramas before, but as we worked on it, she really got into it and was tremendously helpful with her ideas and suggestions.

And then there are my friends, Rick and Linda.  Linda has never played with or owned a Barbie, but like a lot of people, she is fascinated by small objects that look like large ones.  When she saw the little rooms on my website, she was delighted.  I was just as delighted to have her like them.  We started talking about what I was doing and a whole wonderful dialogue has come about.

Linda is one of the most creative people I have ever known and she began making suggestions and giving me ideas almost faster than I could absorb them.  When we talked the other night, I told her I was having trouble finding plants and miniature ivy for a diorama I was working on, she suggested using live plants when possible.  When I stopped at her house the next day, she had a row of lovely little floral arrangements sitting in her window sill to show me how it could be done.  They were all in little containers she had found around her house and were done with the flair and style she brings to all her creations.

Meanwhile, her husband Rick, had stopped by a place that makes signs and saw that they were discarding a number of signs printed on foam core (foam board.)  The one above was the one that caught his eye.  He has probably not done more than glance at my website, but he remembered that I did something with Barbies and thought I might be able to use the sign and also the foam core.  (The sign will hang in my doll room, of course.)  So he got permission to take it home and brought me the whole pile.  As anyone knows who has read my Diorama 101 course, I use foam core a lot.  This was wonderful quality stuff.  It all has signs on one side and is white on the other.  The pieces are about 1 1/2 X 4 feet, making it perfect for Barbie rooms.  I thought this act of kindness was above and beyond the call of duty!

My daughters, who stopped playing with Barbies when they were 11 or 12, have started showing interest in the dolls and furniture again.  Katie especially has been tremendously helpful in papering the Big Doll House that they used to play with when they were kids, and helping me set up the Grandville Library Display.

Recently, one of my daughters' friends, a college student who had seen some of my dioramas, showed up with some wallpaper border.  He'd seen it at a garage sale and thought it might work for my dioramas.

All this is really just to show that when people, who started out thinking you are a little crazy, begin to understand what you are doing they will get excited about it, too.  They may never feel quite the passion for your dolls that you do, but you may find that you have acquired a whole new set of helpers and confidants to share your joy with.

By the way, when I was visiting Linda I gave her a fashion doll because she'd never had one.  She called yesterday to tell me she'd set up her first diorama!!

Sometimes when working on something, inspiration strikes a second time.  The inspiration for the Black and White Room was a "rug" I found at a sale.  It was actually a pillow cover in white, black, gray and a bright olive green.  The design called for a very contemporary room, so I started gathering everything I could find that fit the color scheme, beginning with the black and white chairs.  Gradually, as I began to add in objects, especially the spiral staircase my daughter, Katie, threw into the mix, I began to notice that nearly everything had curves, and inspiration struck again.  Curves became the secondary theme of the room.  I changed the couch I had been using for the curved back chaise lounge and added the piano.
 
I also decided to use the black grandfather clock for the height it added, but it brought a new color in.  The red actually added some excitement to the room that it needed, so I added more.  The first picture I tried was one I really like, (a tall thin print of a woman in a red coat which you can see in the first set of pics of the black and white room in the Gallery) but the details were too subtle, so I looked for other images, this time chosen not just for the color but to match the theme of curves that had developed.  I chose the picture of the curved staircase to reflect the spiral staircase next to it for a bit of whimsy.  The large painting was the piece that was supposed to pull together the color scheme, as it had all the colors of the room in it, but unfortunately, it didn't photograph well, so some of the impact was lost.
Altogether, the room proved very difficult to photograph.  All of the black objects in the room wanted to show up as simply black shapes.  I had to play with the brightness, midtones and contrasts and I still wasn't happy with how little detail shows.

Some of the small objects I add to a room never show or don't make it into the final cut when I am choosing what pictures to use.  One of my favorites in this room was the sheet music on the piano- Dave Brubeck's "Take Five."  I felt that whoever lived in this room would like jazz.  I tried, and rejected, several posters of the Brubeck quartet as possible wall art.

In the end I was pleased with the final result, but  my photography did not do it justice, partly because I accidentally shot it with the Macro setting on my digital camera turned on.  If doing a room like this over again, I would probably not use natural lighting again, but use lights I could better control.  Though I love natural light, and always prefer to use it, in this case, it didn't light as evenly as I would have liked, leaving the right side of the room a little in shadow and overexposing the left side and the mirror table.  The contrasts can be very effective, though, as in the picture of Poppy sitting on the couch.
I learned a lot from this room.  It didn't come out quite as I had pictured it, but it was, like all my doll rooms, a learning experience.

Time to break this one down and go on to the next one.  A thousand more rooms are dancing in my head!  One of these days I'll get one of them perfect! :-)

So I start a new website and my daughter promptly shuts my hand in the car door, smashing most of the fingers on my right hand and breaking the middle finger.  Hurts unspeakably.  I am, of course, right handed. Suddenly I have to use scissors, write notes, button my blouse, and everything else either with my left hand or very gingerly with my bruised thumb and pointer finger.  This makes for some interesting spelling variations when typing. So if you see any mistakes please contact me.

It had been my hope to add to the "How To" section on a daily basis, but with the difficulty with taking pictures and manipulating small objects, this probably won't happen for a while.

On the upside, the smashed hand gets me out of a certain amount of house work which gives me more time to set up dioramas.  I have several going, but am a little stuck because, while I can move (doll) furniture around, I can't do fine work like sewing curtains.

The one I'm currently working on- pictured in the projects section- is an experiment in using a focal point to design a room.  The rug was what began it all. The colors-black, white, gray, and olive- became the inspiration.  At first I decided to limit myself only to those colors, but when I introduced the grandfather clock, which has a red interior, I decided to add a splash of red to the room to make it pop.  It is still a work in progress with many of the details still lacking, but it's halfway there.  I hope you enjoy it.  Let me know your opinion.