Little Painted Dollhouses

There are certain items out there in the world so awesome that probably any crafty parent, happening upon them, would say, "A-ha! I know just what to do with THAT!"

Such it is with a certain mass-marketed unfinished-wood CD holder shaped like a house. It cries out for, it LONGS, to be painted and decorated and turned into a child's little dollhouse. And oh, it has been. Witness the following bloggers, to name just a few:

• Chasing Cheerios
• Angry Chicken
• The Snail's Trail

There's even been some blog-sniping about who had the idea first, which is always fun (not).

However, I win, because everybody else paid around five bucks for their CD holder houses, and I found mine on clearance at Michael's for $2.49 each. So nyah.

Sometimes when I buy some art materials or a kit for the kids I'll just hold onto it for a while--perhaps they're really into some other thing at the moment so I know they can't concentrate on it, or they've gotten some other presents recently so I know they won't appreciate it, or I just feel like the timing's not right. We have several colors of polymer clay, for instance, that the kids even picked out, that I've just haven't offered them yet, and a couple of wood kits from our local history center's museum store, and even some Christmas presents (gasp!). 

These houses, however...as soon as we got home I got out our hard-core set of artist's acrylics--

--and excitedly to work they did go! The big kid left and came back to painting all evening, but the little kid sat in her chair for over two hours straight and painted:

She didn't even leave to go to the bathroom. Even I left to go to the bathroom. But her hard work really did pay off. What with the large spectrum of color in the acrylic set, and the kid's strategy of leaving one area to dry and then coming back to paint it in a different color (she basically painted the entire dollhouse three times), her entire dollhouse has a lot of depth and an interesting variety of color--it's pretty amazing, and we haven't even whipped out the book of wallpaper samples yet.

I watered down the acrylics a bit so they would flow better, and put each color in the compartment of a plastic tray that had once held miniature quiches (Matt has a weakness for you, you little egg-and-cheese confections!). And while the kids painted away, I worked on my book proposal revision.

I'm glad that we all had that really happy, creative time, since I've been off my game the past couple of days, tearing my way through a recent Steven King novel instead of writing or crafting or parenting or cleaning so much (I finished it tonight, thank god, and life can now continue as normal).

But with two dollhouses like this to play with, the kids have somehow managed to keep themselves entertained while their mama has been indulging in the Victorian sin of novel-reading.

For me, I swear, a good book is like a bad addiction.