child's loft bed, wash basin

I don't ordinarily look through RL furniture flyers but did yesterday and spotted this child's bed which would be SO wonderful in miniature (especially since dollhouse rooms tend to be so small). It comes in two options: with the shelving or with a trundle bed.

If I were doing a child's bedroom, I'd make this for it in a heartbeat...and with little Houseworks casters on the trundle bed. And pretty simple to make - especially if you made faux drawers rather than real ones under the steps.

It's really tempting to make it anyway just for the fun of it. But at this point I better just concentrate on finishing the Bombay house.

I took President's Choice salmon  mini-wellington's to the MEE Christmas party (more about that later). They're very tasty. AND the packaging has great mini possibilities.

They come in a clear plastic tray with insets for holding the tarts. The ones marked with an 'X' have a little scooped section along the top edge so I ignore those.

But I cut apart the other six. Below you can see where I've trimmed the edges around the top of two of them and I've coloured one with a red felt marker.

The're 2" in diameter across the top and 3/4" high so make a nice dishpan.

Although marker works well to colour this (and copper or some of the more gray silver nail polish would probably work), don't think the plastic would take paint unless it was primed. Another possibility would be to give it a thin layer of gesso, then paint it blue or red and give it a spackleware enamel finish like this:

To get the spackleware look, dip an old toothbrush in a bit of white paint and run your thumbnail over it so the paint spatters in small drops. You may want to practice a bit on a scrap of paper until you get the direction and size of your spatter right.