Miniature Monday #50: The Wooden Doll Hutch

Wow, Miniature Monday made it to no. 50! It sort of tells you how much crap I have!

...Putting that thought aside, I present to you a wooden doll hutch that I found during one of my antiquing expeditions years ago. This isn't the first time that this hutch had made an appearance in my blog. (You can find it in a post HERE.) This is, however, the first time I'm actually featuring it as how I had pictured it in my head when I decided to buy it a while back. Hallelujah, I finally stained it!

It was an antique mall find but I'm really not sure how old this thing is. It doesn't seem too old. It does look completely handmade from different scraps of wood. You can kind of tell from the photo above without the wood stain. The door knobs are actually nail screws. That tells me that this was an amateur project of sorts. There were chairs, a dining table and a small side table matching this hutch, each sold separately. I have the side table and haven't stained it yet. It's not such a pretty piece as this one. I left the table and chairs behind because I thought they were too low for my dolls. After I finished staining this piece, it made me wish I had gotten them just so I could stain them. Oh well...

Tada! Here it is all dolled up with wood stain that was already mixed with sealant. I used the same one that I had used in a project HERE. I rarely ever do such hands-on projects like this. I'm really more of a display and photograph kind of gal. This one took me a few days to finish with the resanding and the drying stages. It had been such a labor of love and I couldn't be happier with the results.

The best part about this hutch is the wood grain detail on the sides. Staining it just made the natural wood grain pop. So pretty! As you can tell, I'm super amazed at how nice it turned out.

Since this is only the second time I'd ever stained wood and the last time I did was a couple of years ago, I'd started this project using a paint brush. I realized after staining the top and the sides that instead of highlighting the natural grain of the wood, I was slightly covering it. Again, the stain I used was already mixed with sealant so it was thicker and can get clumpy with the wrong brush stroke. It had been kindly pointed out to me that using a sponge or cheese cloth was the better choice. Luckily, I still had those from last time, tucked away somewhere. I opted for the cheese cloth. It was messier but I had better control. Rubbing the stain on the wood, after resanding it, made such a difference.

I gave this baby a couple of coats, the staining process followed constantly by rubbing with the cheese cloth (...the things you learn along the way...). When everything dried up completely, after impatiently waiting, I decided to paint the nail screws in gold just so it didn't scream "NAIL SCREW!" too much. I even got fancy and lined the drawers with scrapbook paper afterwards. That's how much a labor of love this project became. I was pretty surprised at myself. I guess my lazy bones were dormant at the time...

Blythe doll, aka, Gia

Here's one of my Blythe dolls, Gia, for scale purposes. This doll hutch was definitely made for smaller dolls. I would need to give it height if I want to use this for dolls like Poppy Parker.

Well, that's this hutch's story. It was years in the making. It was more fun than I thought. It was very rewarding to see the results. I hope I made the do-it-yourselfers out there proud!