Creole Cottage 10: Lighting & Accessories

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Marie Laveau's cottage required some items not usually found in miniature catalogs. Voodoo dolls, for one. The photo was the inspiration. The dolls in the basket are the ones I made.

Marie's familiar, a boa constrictor, was fashioned from some printed cloth and beads over a pipe cleaner.

The shelf with coat hooks by the front door was made from a laser cut kit. The "cloaks" are bits of cloth stiffened with hairspray so they'll hold their shape.

The carpet bag was made from made from a bit of brocade from a decorator's sample book. One of our Greenleaf Forum friends was kind enough to share some with several of us when we met at the Bishop Show in Chicago a few years ago.

The picture on the wall is Our Lady of Prompt Succor. She is credited with saving New Orleans from dire flooding in years past. She is recognized in nearly every Creole household in the city, even today. The chair and table are Chrysnbom kits.

Here's the cottage tipped onto its face for the installation of the lights. There are six lights mounted on a strip of wood that go up at the ceiling level. They add light so the details can be seen. Marie's cottage had no electricity, and candles weren't an option as this scene is daylight.

The junction splice is attached to a line of tape. Two wires connect the tape to another piece of tape that runs along the wood strip. The lights are connected to the tape. The wires connecting the two pieces of tape are hidden behind the strip of wood that finishes off the edge of the central wall.

Creole Cottage 9: The Altar

Creating an altar for Marie Laveau's house was a bit of a challenge. I built the shelf unit of basswood and stained it dark. I put some trim with gold in it inside the bottom to add a little light. The small box is from a 1/2" scale kit. It probably has a rosary and cards in it.

The Mary and Joseph figures are "pocket saints" found on line. They're made of metal. I painted them with the aid of a magnifying glass. The pictures were all found on the internet and sized to fit. The cross on the top is a charm with the ring clipped off.

This is a very short post. My apologies. I've been busy baking and cooking for Mardi Gras all day. The house is fragrant with traces of gumbo ingredients and pralines. Tomorrow is King cake baking day.

Creole Cottage 8: Table & Shelves

Marie Laveau needed shelves for her bottles of herbs and potions. I built them from scraps of wood and trim and painted them. The labels on the jars were from a printie. The coal stove lacks a stovepipe in this photo.


Marie also needed a little worktable. Do you recognize the legs on this table? They were left over from a Greenleaf Orchid, the roof ridge trim bits that weren't used. With the top knob trimmed off and a couple of scraps of wood, they worked perfectly. Marie seems a bit overly pleased, but then she'd been used to a totally empty room, so any addition was for the better!

Creole Cottage 7: Fireplace Screen

My dear friend and cousin-in-law is a fine Creole lady who would not let me stray from accuracy in this project. She said I needed a proper firescreen in the fireplace. She took her camera to several architectural recycling places in New Orleans and sent me this picture for inspiration.


The rectangular part attaches to the fireplace stone or bricks. The arched part is hinged to open so you can get to the fire.




This is Marie Laveau's firescreen. The round center part is a brass jewelry finding partly painted black. The rectangle, the rope trim around the arch, the flowers and the strip across the bottom are black polyclay. The mesh at the bottom is a bit of a metallic pot scrubber painted black. Once I had an inspiration piece, it all came together.




This is what it looks like in place.

It's amazing how something even as complex as the inspiration piece can be duplicated in miniature if one keeps an open mind about how to pull it together.

Creole Cottage 6: The Fountain

Just a short post today to show you how I made the base for the fountain. It's a piece of packaging, the kind that's usually hard to open and gets thrown away. I don't remember what was in this, but it looked to me to be the perfect shape for a base.



I glued the resin fountain on the base and covered it with a thin layer of wallboard mud (aka joint compound), then used acrylic paint and pastels to age it.

Creole Cottage 5: Landscaping begins

The front garden an important part of this project, so I built a base from plywood with an edge around it, like a tray, and fitted a piece of contractor's foam into it. I painted the whole thing with black gesso as a base. When it dried, I used paperclay to lay a brick walkway.

The paperclay was painted and aged with pastels and washes, and bits of green "moss" were glued between the bricks. The moss is used by model railroaders in their layouts.

The dirt is dried, used coffee grounds. The white "oyster shells" are crushed eggshells. My family got awfully tired of eating eggs while I worked on this part of the project. Under the house, where it wouldn't be seen easily, I daubed white paint. The fencing is made from pieces of contractor's foam with purchased plastic "wrought iron" fencing.

This is an overhead view of the base with some of the plants and a couple of trees. With the foam base, it was easy to poke the greenery into the ground. I pulled it back out, dipped it in glue, and pushed it back in. You can see the bare spots where the brick pillars from the house go. I decided not to glue the house in place to facilitate moving it.

More plants will be added, but you get the general idea of how the garden grows. :)

Creole Cottage 4: About Marie Laveau and the cottage

Today we'll take a little break from building so you can meet the owner of the house. I probably should have posted this first, but better late than not at all.

Marie Laveau (1802-1881) is legendary for an unusual combination of spiritual power, beauty, charisma, showmanship, intimidation, and shrewd business sense. She is known for her kindness and charity in nursing yellow fever victims, ministering to condemned prisoners, and her devotion to the Roman Catholic Church as well as her role in the voodoo community in New Orleans. She has always held my interest.

When I saw the Adams, it occurred to me that a combination of two of the kits would make the perfect two-room Creole cottage with only minor bashing.

The cottage in New Orleans’s French Quarter was built by Marie’s grandmother in the late 1700s. It is where Marie was born, reared 15 children, was widowed, and died. The parlor and Marie’s bedroom make up the cottage; kitchen, additional bedrooms, etc., are in separate buildings at the back of the lot. The date is about 1860; the Civil War has not yet begun.

Marie (also known as the Widow Paris) and her daughter, Marie Philoméne Glapion, are at home awaiting a visit from the beautiful Sophia, a free woman of color, who is coming to consult Marie on a matter of the heart. Marie is holding two symbols of her beliefs -- a rosary and a red gris-gris bag filled with herbs and charms.

All three dolls were made and dressed by Gina Gagnon of Lone Wolf Miniature Creations <http://www.lonewolfminiaturecreations.com/>, but I changed out Marie’s original shawl and tignon (head wrap) with fabric that better suited the scene.

Bringing Marie Laveau’s house to life has given me great pleasure. As I researched the details, I came to appreciate her complicated life and the times in which she lived. Although her history in print and on the internet is filled with inaccuracies and myth, an incredibly well researched and recently published book provided solid guidance. A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau by Carolyn Morrow Long (University Press of Florida, 2006).

Creole Cottage 3: Mini craftsmen at work

The Creole community in New Orleans sported any number of highly skilled craftsmen. I think they'd roll their eyes if they saw how their skills are reproduced in miniature!

Here is a look at how the bousillage was done. In a real house, all of the spaces between the beams would have been filled with soft blobs of mud and Spanish moss and left to dry before an outer coat of plaster was applied. In mini, however, all we need is a glimpse, a place where the plaster has fallen away. All of the space between the beams was filled with wallboard mud (aka joint compound).

In the third photo, you can see the results of the painting and aging process. You can also see the oyster shells beneath the house. Crushed eggshells make a suitable stand-in. Oyster shells are a cheap commodity in New Orleans and were used around and under houses to reduce mud and dust.




The last photo today shows the "brick" pillars that the house stands are. Most houses in New Orleans are raised, both for the cooling effect of air passing beneath the floors in the summer and as a guard against flooding. These pillars are made of 1" square wood dowels painted to look like bricks.

The ceiling in the parlor shows the wood ceiling beams and the wood planking of the attic floor. It is painted Paris green, very typical of the time. The bedroom ceiling has been painted with white gesso. It will have beams added later.

Creole Cottage 2: The Pocket Door

Creole Cottages often had pocket doors that slipped into the wall instead of swinging out into a room. They are great space savers in small rooms. With the two Adams kits mounted side by side, there was a perfect place for a pocket door between the parlor and bedroom.

There are probably a lot of very elegant and craftsmanlike ways to install a pocket door, but I opted for the quick and simple. This door and some printed hardware were the basic components. The door had to have some extensions added on the top and the side that slid into the wall to keep it from falling out of the opening. I stained the parts of the extensions that might show.


Below are the two walls with doorway openings cut. Notice the die cuts for the window. No need for a window between the two rooms, so those stayed intact. Sometimes, if a die cut piece needs to stay but seems a bit loose, I'll glue a piece of paper over it to hold it in place. The next photo shows the bits of 1/4" foamcore board I used to keep the two walls straight and separated as well as stops that keep the door from disappearing entirely into the wall.




The final construction photo shows the door and trim in place. The "hardware" hasn't been added yet. It slides very smoothly.

Creole Cottage 1: It started out to be a simple cabin . . .

Hobby Builders Supply runs an annual Creatin' Contest. My entries for 2006 and 2007 were fairly complex, so I was glad to see the contest kit was Greenleaf Dollhouses Adams, a simple, one-room cottage. Aha, I thought ... this won't take any time at all! These were, of course, some of those famous last words.

Here is the kit unadorned:



I was waiting for an inspiration for a nice little one-room project, but imagination is a fickle thing. A little voice in my head suggested that it looked like part of a Creole cottage -- a single door, single window. And, the voice added, if I were to get another kit, I could put them together in mirror image and get a passable home out of it for Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Priestess of New Orleans. (More about her in another post.)

That led to a lot of research on the construction of the cottages, and I learned about bousillage, a method of stuffing soft "bricks" made of mud and Spanish moss between supporting wooden beams. And so the bashing began.



The beams for the bousillage have been installed on the side wall. I don't think you can see it in the photo, but there is a little space between the two houses, which gave me another inspiration. Why is it that each burst of inspiration leads to more complications? Beats me, but that seems to be the way it works over here, anyway!

Anyway, that space and what went in it will be the topic of the next post.