Making Miniature Furniture for My Beach House

This is the fourth in a series of posts about the charming little  Romantic Aegean Sea Beach House Kit I recently purchased on Amazon. So far, I’ve built the main deck, the walls and assembled the house.

This post will focus on making miniature furniture – the couch, chair, bed and curtains. Yes, indeed there are curtains for one of the sets of French doors.

As with any kit, I’m always paranoid that it won’t include enough supplies. The tiny rectangles of fabric had me worried. The instruction booklet has a great inventory list with metric measurements. All of my pieces of fabric were actually larger than what the instructions said they were. Even better, so far, there’s far more fabric than was needed to make the Romantic Aegean Sea Beach House.

I do think the fabric patterns are a bit oversized for making miniature furniture this small. It might look more to scale if you used a solid color quilting fabric instead. I might do something different for the pillows – to add a bit more color and make them look better.

Making Miniature Furniture – Sofa and Chairs

The sofa frame was two pieces – the seat and the back. The instructions were fairly straight-forward. Not sure if it was what they intended, but, I ended up glueing each side of the sofa to the fabric, trimming around it and then folding over the edges.

One thing I didn’t like about the instructions was that it left the back-side of the furniture unfinished. With a lot of extra fabric to play with, I made my own back. (Picture shows only first step of seat completed and how the instructions suggested ‘finishing’ the back rest.)

I traced the back part of the sofa onto a piece of paper. I then trimmed the paper to ensure it covered the already glued edges of fabric but did not extend beyond the edge of the piece. I glued the fabric onto the paper and then glued both onto my sofa back. As an added bonus, by using the paper, it kept the fabric from unraveling. For such tiny pieces, this fabric really didn’t fray that badly; as you can see in the photo.

The final step is running a folded piece of fabric over the edge and across the seat. I cut my piece a little bigger than suggested. I folded the pieces and tacked the edges with a bit of glue. Once dried, I trimmed the ends to ensure a straight edge and yo get rid of any stray threads.

Making a Miniature Chair

Assembling the chair was the same as assembling the sofa. A little more fiddly because it was about half the size but I think it was quite easy to make a miniature chair using the method from this kit, along with my addition of covering the back.

The kit comes with a chair for the living room and a chair for the bedroom. The kit used the same fabric for both. Couldn’t see having the same chair in both the living room and bedroom, so I used a bit from my stash. There’s so little fabric involved in making this miniature furniture that I think it would be so much more fun to use something of your own. I know it made it more fun for me.

Making a Miniature Bed

The pretty, shimmery blue and white checked fabric they provided to make the bedspread frays like crazy – like every time I touched it another strand came loose.

I followed the instructions and ran into some trouble in not having enough unfrayed fabric to run around the bed. Unfortunately, once I had cut out what they suggested, there was no going back – figures this piece would be the one fabric where there wasn’t almost twice what was needed.

My suggestion would be to glue the bed onto the middle of the fabric piece. That way, you’ll have plenty to wrap around onto the bottom. I would also glue a piece of white paper over the bottom to help secure the edges of fabric. Then put the headboard on. Lucky for me, there was a bit of blue and white checked fabric in my stash and I used that instead.

The picture in the instructions showed the bedspread with a bit of drape at the corners of the foot of the bed. I hadn’t a clue how to make that happen with such a short bed. I just opted for a more hospital corner style.

Check out the little bit of lace trim. That came with the kit; it wasn’t my idea. Ain’t it a sweet little detail? Oddly enough, that too was just enough for what was needed. Guess someone in China has issues with making their bed. tee hee.

Making Miniature Pillows

The instructions for the pillows basically had you fold a piece of fabric in half several times and glue it closed. I didn’t think it would look like a stuffed pillow. So, I took little bits of rectangular felt and folded and rolled them instead. I trimmed them to size – it was crazy how small they had to be to fit on the furniture. Can’t see the fabric ever working for that without turning into a frayed mess; even if it was first glued to some paper.

Making Tiny House Curtains

Can you believe the detailing in this little kit – curtains! It actually has a pair of curtains.

The instructions showed just taking rectangular pieces of fabric and glueing them to the curtain rod (made from two seed beads and a bit of white-coated wire).

Problem was, the photo showed them shaped and even sorta tied back. I suppose if I had fussed I could have done it with glue. Seemed far easier to take a bit of sewing thread and tie it around the curtains to create the tied-back look.

The curtains hang over one of the sets of French doors and you can actually see them through the windows on the door – so cool.

Other Furniture

With the Romantic Aegean Sea Beach House kit, you will also be making miniature furniture version of a make-up table and chair – wait until you see that – so cute; it even has a mirror, a knob on the drawer and perfume bottle!

There’s also pieces to make a fireplace mantle, a coffee table, a bench for the deck and a lounge chair that goes under the tiki-style umbrella.