Oh, little bed: a miniature

I've been looking on Etsy and eBey for replacement pieces for my dollhouse and have been coming up empty handed for some pieces. The time period I am trying to achieve is 1800something, and I am not sticking hard and fast to the Federal or Antebellum or any other time in American history; rather, I'm trying to make the house look like a mash of times. 

The bed that I made is a little folk art, a little... I'm not certain. It is based on extant pieces that I have seen at historical sites and antiques I have seen online, and would have been meant for a child or the 'help'.

This looks like a mess, but after discovering that the C clamps and quick grip clamps I had were too strong for the wood I was using and that rubber bands alone were warping and contorting the form in all directions, I turned to a favorite childhood toy for some support. My bed was slightly too big for the clamp, making the finished project slightly distorted - not as distorted as it could have been! Next time I am going to draw the concept, build the clamp, dry clamp then glue and rubber band it up.

Out of the clamp after 14 of drying time [brick for scale purposes]

To help hide some of the imperfections, such as one of the headboard posts blowing out and needing wood filler, I painted the piece with Federal blue milk paint, completely VOC free and child/animal safe.

Then it occured to me that I needed to cut in some bed rails. Derp. 

While I was cutting rail slots with my 1/4" Irwin chisle, I started sewing a mattress and bedding - more on that later.The wood is nothing fancy, a combination of bass an balsa available in a multi-pack from an average craft store.

Sweet dreams: bedding for a tiny bed

After making a small bed out of a combination of balsa and bass and painting it a federal blue, and then making a tufted mattress for it stuffed with six layers of cotton quilt batting, I found some wool and cotton blend sock yard at the local charity shop that I knit up on 2.5mm  DP needles [I realize it's not finished, but I needed it for the pictures. It's 40 sts, done in a knit 1 purl 1 rib for 5 rows, then switches or a stockinet for 4 rows with 3 stitches of seed on each end and the 5th row is garter, knit to the desired length, which was this bed specifically. Folks kept thinking I was knitting a miniature rug or a potholder; it's such lovely yarn in person, I wouldn't want to muck it up with grease. 

The blue fabric below was labeled 'summer denim'. It's hardly what I'd call a denim; it's a straight weave and the only thing it has in common with denim is the color and the warp/weft white blue combo. Otherwise it's very light weight.

It's too big for the little blue bed, and too narrow for the double bed. I had thought to make a coverlet and double it over, but for the scale of the miniatures, I'm going to leave it alone. As a weave, the design is reversible if a little big. Color wise, it would have been appropriate for the 19th century. A turkey red would have been more difficult to accomplish, but the use of a white warp and a colored weft still might have been costly for something as large as a blanket. Not that people didn't do it.