Playing with dolls is very important for little princesses. In the game, they can simulate situations that occur in adult life. In order for the game to resemble reality as much as possible, it is necessary to make the space for it look like the scenery of the real world. Barbie furniture helps parents and their daughters with this. If it looks like small copies of real cabinets and sofas, then the girls will enjoy playing much more.
Separate rooms in the dollhouse perform their functions. There should be space for dolls to rest, cook, and sleep. The options don’t end there; parents and their child can come up with something new. The arrangement of rooms requires several rules:
- The furniture in each room should be made in the same style and, if possible, in the same color. This will allow you to quickly find and assemble each kit;
- Furniture for Barbie dolls should be durable so that games bring only pleasure and not grief due to broken things;
- It is not recommended to use small elements that may enter the respiratory tract. Even the smallest children will not be able to swallow large things.
Bedroom
In the bedroom, the main element will be the bed. It should be large, bright and have several pillows. The bed linen can be changed depending on the child's wishes. In addition to the main piece of furniture, the bedroom has bedside tables, a dressing table and a wardrobe with clothes. It will not be possible to store the entire wardrobe of Barbie dolls in it; clothes take up a lot of space. You will have to think of alternative storage for things not used for the game.
Children's
Just like in a real family, dolls can have children. You should come up with options for the nursery. If the doll child is still just a baby, then you can place a crib in the room. In addition, you can complement the furniture set with a box of children's toys. As this element, it is convenient to use a small cardboard box, painted or covered with fabric at the child’s discretion. The children's room can have an armchair for parents or just guests.
Design and style
The interior of a Barbie doll's house is made up of different parts, for example, legs or backs of furniture that have the same curve. This is a simplified version of the design. It is a little more difficult to assemble a set that matches a certain style, having in the basic configuration disparate things that are similar only in the material from which they are made. Textiles, lace, wallpaper, selected according to colors and other parameters, will help to combine everything into a common interior.
It is not necessary to distinguish between styles for the interior of the house to be attractive. The main thing is to adhere to similarities in the design of all rooms in the following elements:
- width, height of windows;
- the presence or absence of curtains and curtains;
- use of carpets (lint/lint-free) or rugs;
- arched or rectangular doorways.
Metal or foam parts in the design of interior doors and furniture facades, painted in the tones of noble metals, will make the decor of the house resemble the interiors of ancient buildings. The exterior of bygone times will have to be chosen carefully, even before purchasing the first set for Barbie, otherwise the discrepancy will be obvious. Using dollhouse miniature kits, you can recreate without additional study of historical accuracy:
- village hut;
- tower;
- modern interiors - art deco, industrial, Scandinavian, and Provence.
The shape, size of door and window openings in rooms is 50% of success when creating a certain style.
When using designs made in pink tones, it is very easy to furnish a house in the form of a royal palace for a caramel princess. For more realistic interiors, sets of furniture, dishes and other belongings from the category of “doll miniatures” are required. In them, wooden, porcelain, and metal parts prevail over plastic ones.
Living room
The living room, as the name suggests, is a room for meeting guests. This is where friends visiting the dollhouse are invited. It will be much more convenient to play tea drinking in a large living room with many chairs, armchairs and sofas. All the inhabitants of the dollhouse will comfortably fit here.
To create coziness, you can place a fireplace in the room. Inside there is firewood from small twigs or an artificial fire drawn on paper. The fireplace can be easily made from white cardboard and painted with a thin brush.
A living room with a beautiful shag carpet in the center will look even more realistic. It can be easily made from a piece of fabric. It is best to use material with non-fraying edges. The carpet should be bright and stain-resistant. Fleece fully corresponds to these qualities. This fabric is quite inexpensive, easy to clean, has a rich color that does not fade during use. Fleece scraps can be found in almost every home where someone does sewing.
Doll furniture made from matchboxes
The easiest way to make furniture for dolls with your own hands is from ordinary matchboxes. They are glued together using PVA glue, creating certain structures, then covered with paper or fabric, self-adhesive film, etc. You can use wooden beads as legs, handles for drawers can be made from small buttons on legs or from long beads.
Simple homemade doll furniture from matchboxes
You can make chairs, a table, a chest of drawers, a bed, and a bedside table from matchboxes. Another thing is that furniture is made for very small dolls, no more than 10 cm high. Although, you can use a larger number of boxes, gluing them into blocks, and from these blocks create furniture for dolls about 15 cm high. Also an option, but work with others materials are not much more complicated, but they are more flexible and allow you to create products of more elegant shapes.
Toy dressing table made from matchboxes
DIY doll desk
Dining table and chairs made from matchboxes for a dollhouse
How to glue boxes
Several design techniques for finishing a homemade toy chest of drawers from matchboxes
This may be your first experience in making doll furniture. Later you can take on something more serious.
Bathroom
In the bathroom you will definitely have to place a bathtub, Jacuzzi or shower. But the set of this room would not be complete without some additional elements:
- Toilet;
- Wash basin;
- Bedside table with bath accessories;
- Mirror. It can be made from silver cardboard or tape glued to a thick cardboard base. It will be very successful to place the mirror in a frame designed in the style of the rest of the room;
- Towel and hanger for them. Rectangular pieces of white fabric are used as towels.
If a set of bathroom furniture does not include curtains and carpets, then it is still worth hanging them, these elements create coziness, and with them the design of the room seems complete.
Furniture for a dollhouse made of cardboard
You can try your hand at making furniture for dolls using cardboard. The material is inexpensive, accessible, you can try and make mistakes, redo it. Cardboard is usually joined using PVA glue; you can use a glue gun or any universal glue that can glue cardboard, fabric, or wood. By simply making furniture for dolls with your own hands from cardboard, you will also use these materials. If we talk about convenience, then a glue gun is preferable - it glues quickly, it’s convenient to work, and the connection is reliable.
Without finishing, doll furniture made of cardboard does not look very good
To make furniture for dolls, you can use regular packaging cardboard. It is cheap, but the furniture it makes is very delicate. It is unlikely that it will be enough for a child for a long time. But, as a “first experience”, this is a good option. Cardboard products for scrapbooking are more reliable. It is more dense, homogeneous, has different thicknesses (from 2 mm and more), and can have a textured surface, embossed monochromatic patterns, or a pattern on one or both sides. The disadvantage of such cardboard is that you have to buy it, and some types of such cardboard are not very cheap.
Cardboard bed for a doll
This cardboard doll bed is designed for a large doll - up to 50 cm in height. If necessary, all specified dimensions can be reduced.
You can make such a bed out of cardboard in a few minutes
This option can be done in literally 10-20 minutes. There is no need for glue or other fixatives. The parts are held in place by grooves cut into the cardboard. The width of the groove is equal to the thickness of the cardboard, the length of the slots and the dimensions of the workpieces are indicated in the diagram.
Bed diagram for dolls
Green and yellow dots indicate compatible cuts. They are inserted one into the other, where the assembly ends. If you like this model, it can also be made from plywood.
Schemes for making cardboard doll furniture
Basically, furniture for dolls made of cardboard is glued. It is unlikely that it will be possible to make something delicate or very complex from this material, but making simple models will not take much time. Having a diagram with dimensions, you can even do without explanations. Everything is clear.
Chair diagram for dolls
Such models can be made “by eye”. Without the “upholstery” they look unsightly, but after that they look quite decent
It’s not difficult to make a bed, but with kitchen cabinets you’ll have to be a little tricky
A bedside table with doors and an open shelf - one design, different designs
Another bedside table model for making from cardboard or plywood
Making a toy table for dolls with your own hands using this scheme is not a problem
Floor lamp for dolls made of cardboard
Furniture patterns for dolls can be used not only for making from cardboard. They can be transferred to plywood and cut out using a jigsaw.
Hallway
The hallway usually houses clothes and shoes. To accommodate all the jackets and coats, you will have to place several coat hooks. To prevent them from breaking under the weight of doll things, it is necessary to come up with a very durable design. It is advisable to place a closet that includes not only clothes hangers, but also a large mirror. In order for such a craft to serve dolls for a long time, it can be made from a piece of plywood on stable legs. They should be located at the bottom of the structure perpendicular to the plane of the plywood sheet. You can secure the legs using screws, nails or strong glue.
Hooks are made from small nails that are driven into a sheet of plywood. The side with the cap should protrude about a centimeter above the surface of the plywood. This will be a clothes hanger. To prevent the child from getting hurt, the sharp parts of the nails must be bent parallel to the plane of the sheet and covered with adhesive film or strong tape. This will make the element beautiful and safe. Shoes can be placed on the floor under a hanger, but in this case they will quickly get lost. It is recommended to place it in a separate box or box. It is advisable to take care of a hook that prevents spontaneous opening of the storage unit.
Manufacturing materials
Plastic sets have an affordable price for most. They can be used to decorate a child's room. An important characteristic of such toys is the possibility of their frequent disinfection and washing with soapy water. The plastic housings of the “household appliances” built into Barbie furniture hide batteries that provide light and sound during the game. Disadvantages of original sets for a house made of this material: fragility of products, low resistance to mechanical stress. Counterfeits may contain toxic substances.
How to make furniture for a dollhouse with your own hands, recommendations
Wood and plywood are the safest materials for children, but they are highly hygroscopic. They cannot tolerate prolonged contact with water, as the raw materials become deformed. The undeniable advantages of this room design:
- possibility of painting and pasting furniture;
- long service life due to resistance to shocks and falls on hard surfaces;
- The parts resemble the real ones as much as possible in functionality.
Cardboard is short-lived; in roomboxes, it can be used to make, for example, a picture that imitates the decoration of a room. It depicts wallpaper, windows and landscapes located outside the house. The disadvantage of textiles, which are also used to make toy furniture, is its ability to absorb odors and dust from the environment, but without this material it is impossible to recreate coziness.
Plastic
Tree
Plywood
Cardboard
Cabinet
The office is the place where work is done, so the environment in it must be appropriate. The main element of the furniture is a table with a computer. Around them you can begin to create a different, additional interior.
A bookcase with books will fit perfectly into the office. Small toy books can easily get lost, so you have to use a trick and put just a rectangle in the office, painted like a bookcase with drawn books. To match the entire interior, you can place a sofa, chairs and carpet in the center of the room. These elements will look good if their soft parts are made of the same fabric.
After purchasing the house, the filling process begins. To do this, you can resort to the help of a children's toy store or try to make furniture yourself. But this is a hassle, and store purchases cannot be unique. The best house for Barbie will be obtained if you combine both methods.
You can put different wallpapers in the rooms and make the rooms different from each other. This makes it easy to change the interior. The more things there are in the house, the more finished it looks. Pictures of Barbie doll furniture always suggest the presence of additional elements. They make a toy home look like a real one.
It is worth remembering the correct arrangement of doll furniture. It must correspond to the functional purpose of the room. It is necessary to accurately calculate the free space and arrange the rooms. Products should be placed facing the child, providing him with free access to any corner. Initially, you need to separate the furniture to understand whether it will fit in the right room. Then you need to take measurements. The ideal option would be to create a drawing of the house on paper with the placement of all the furniture. This way you can avoid most of the problems associated with decorating a house.
On the Internet you can find videos on how to properly care for toys. You don't have to put in a lot of effort to do this. The most important thing is that there is no dust in the house, which causes allergies in children. To do this, it is necessary to carry out wet cleaning regularly. Textile parts of the interior can become dirty over time; just like in real life, they require regular washing. In order not to waste time on hand washing, they can be washed in a machine along with other things. But you will have to place small parts in a mesh laundry bag, close it securely, and only then place the toy items in the machine.
Broken things can be fixed with tape. It’s better to buy colored tape, and then it can become a decoration for furniture. Do not forget about the various types of coatings that are used in the manufacture of factory furniture. For products made from chipboard, wet cleaning cannot be used. This leads to swelling and delamination of the material. To clean furniture coated with paint and varnish components, do not use hard brushes or chemicals.
How to decide on sizes
The dolls, their houses and furnishings are smaller copies of us and our homes. And the most reliable way to make doll furniture with your own hands and not make a mistake is to measure real objects, reduce them several times, and then work with the obtained values.
Furniture for dolls - copies of our furniture
How much to reduce the actual dimensions depends on how small or large the doll is, because they range from 7 cm to 60 cm or even higher. Accordingly, they need furniture of different sizes. To determine the number by which the actual dimensions should be divided, divide the average human height in centimeters (170 cm) by the height of the doll. Let's get some number. This is how you will need to divide the dimensions of real furniture.
For example, the height of the doll is 15 cm. We calculate: 170 cm / 15 cm = 11.3. It is by this number that we divide all the parameters of “human” furniture. It is also worth saying that 14-15 cm is the most popular size among the doll population. Therefore, most of the finished furniture is made in a ratio of 1:12. We can also use the existing dimensions, at least so that we can navigate the scale of the required parts and the amount of materials.
Approximate dimensions of furniture for doll children
So, the most common doll sizes are:
- male doll 150 mm;
- female doll - 140 mm;
- child doll - 75-100 mm;
- toy baby - 65-75 mm.
If you need furniture for dolls of similar sizes, its parameters will be as follows:
- Bed: double – 160*130 mm;
- single - 160*75 mm;
The size of the setting depends on the height of the inhabitants
If the toys you have are slightly larger/smaller, you don’t have to adjust the sizes. If the difference is large, you will have to increase or decrease (or you can calculate it yourself).
