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Crafts, Free Stuff, How-to

Instructions for Free Miniature Books for Dollhouse Use Plus PSD Templates for making your own!

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So, I recently was asked some questions about the Free Printable Miniature Books for Dollhouse Use and Miniature Books Pages, but the person who wrote me had an email address that kept bouncing back the answers. So I thought I would post answers here in case others had the same question, or she returned to those pages.

She asked if I had instructions, so here are some:

The process takes about an hour per book for me, but can move faster by working on several at once. I usually work with scissors and a purple disappearing color paste glue stick. Print the books on regular cheap thin matte copy paper on one of the better quality print settings.

Use the card stock template to cut out the three little pieces of card stock to make the covers stiffer. Thin card stock (like in cheap Dollar Tree 3×5 cards) is best. It also helps to cut about a millimeter or less off outer corners of the card stock front and back cover to round them very slightly.

Leaving a 1-2mm gap between the cardstock covers and spine for flexibility, cover them with the outer cover pieces by pasting them in to the cover with those small gaps. Then fold over the outer corners and paste, then do the top, bottom and sides.

Join the long strips of pages into a longer single strip, fold and glue and flatten, and stick the spine into the cover.  Then trim and put the end papers on to hide any mess and help hold it all together. 

Finally paste on the cover image(s) and spine text. Let dry overnight.

Book by Nicolas Larmessan on Costumes Of The Trades

I like to work on several books in a row while watching TV. It helps to check the books as they dry, to separate any pages that inadvertently start sticking together from an over abundance of paste. If any book comes out too pasty, I usually can save it with a damp (not wet) q-tip and a bit of “massage” of opening and closing.

If you find you like the format, and have a version of Photoshop that allows lots of layers and want to create some of your own, I have the multilayered PSD templates I created on and use to just drop in pictures & text. You can find lots of copyright expired content online that interests you, and with practice insert and download it into the appropriate layout template in about an hour, so you can make custom books on any topic: 

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Portrait Layout Book

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Long Portrait Layout Book

Google Drive: Photoshop Template for Miniature Books: Basic Landscape Layout Book

Google Drive: Free Miniature books 1-61 as a single downloadable PDF

That way if you are making a miniature library or whole doll house you can populate it with books that make sense for an imaginary household Grandpa with old military memoirs, Grandma with knitting books, Dad with books on sailboats and the Sartorial Art Journal, Mother with some books on interior design and travel, young uncle with western dime novels and porn, Shockheaded Peter and Oz books for the kids, cookbooks in the kitchen, etc.

Or if you are like me, just pick a topic you like and make it all in miniature!

Book on the 17th Century Court Ballet costumes of Daniel Rabel
Classes, Diablo Valley College, Distance Education, Free Stuff, Workshops and Presentations

Free DISTANCE EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR COSTUME & MAKEUP CLASSES

I, like nearly everyone teaching in the US, and many around the world, started switching my classes in mid (Spring 2020) semester from face to face classes to trying to make them distance learning classes without much warning.   Costume and Makeup classes in theatre are rather spectacularly ill suited to this sort of conversion. However, I have a bit more resources built up because I have flirted with Distance Education before.  And I have been making all I can for my own classes as fast as I can.  So, what follows are links to a bunch of hopefully useful stuff for you to use in your newly online costume and makeup classes:

Video Lessons for Teaching Makeup Class (full semester of how-tos)

I also maintain Multiple YouTube playlists for my own classes of good videos for typical Makeup class projects like Age, Animal, Kabuki, Drag, FX etc. plus tutorials for dark, medium and light skin tones, makeup videos in Spanish, etc, so students can easily find a variety of tutorials to help them learn what they need to know. You can just surf through these ready-made compilations and pick the videos you want to embed in your class homework pages.

More About Drama 112 Stage Makeup, Spring & Fall, Diablo Valley College 

My Stage Makeup class pages in the Canvas Learning system can be found and auto-uploaded to your Canvas shell in their entirety on Canvas Commons, but are also mirrored here at STAGE MAKEUP CLASS PAGES in case you are using a different system than Canvas. You can copy and paste bits or all of this into your system and spare yourself the extra work.

COSTUME CLASS

Conveniently, I made a free textbook in 2009 for my Costume Class which covers both Costume Design and Costume Construction which is full color downloadable and printable.  It has a bunch of How-To sections that can be broken out into take home class projects. I have also made a lot of class how tos and other handouts you can send to your distance ed students:

This was a handout and video I made for the face to face class in Spring 2020 semester so I could split the class into two rotating groups so only half the class would be sewing at once while the other got how tos and history from Youtube and me to prep them for the face to face sewing/drawing/costume crafts session for their next class.

Updated and Improved Gathered Rehearsal Skirt Instructions-2021!Download
Easy-Gathered-Rehearsal-Cape-with-Pictures-Download

You can also see here how I put together a Playlist of existing Youtube videos plus made a bunch of short connecting videos for my students to show them in the first week of the 2020 lockdown: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNQBavWhrKQxqAYAoW50eGOJ3JLyb3zch

Here is a video I made that will go into an upcoming week of class we spend on doing stuff with cheap and easy thermoplastics for costuming
This is a substitute for the buckram and hat wire millinery tutorial in the face 2 face class, because while we are on lockdown students can buy what they need for just a few $ at Dollar Tree and make this at home. There is also a step by step tutorial for making a Pool Noodle Marie Antoinette Wig:

Marie Antoinette Pool Noodle Wig Project Page

See also the PDF handout 2015-hot-glue-notes

More PDF Handouts you can use for your Costume Classes:

One-Hour-Dress-Diagrams-Sp-2021Download

As you can see above I also have posted the PDF handouts for most of my conference presentations which you can use as well:

This presentation I converted into another Youtube Video for my class to use to learn how to Distress costumes at home after Spring break 2020:

I also broke out a section of that textbook with the parts that relate to Distressing to make another PDF handout: Spray-Dyeing-Jesus-and-Other-Distressing-Thoughts-excerpt  

Drama 113 Costume Design, Spring, Diablo Valley College

I will keep posting stuff here as I create or resurrect it from my old Costumer’s Manifesto site…

Makeup History

c. 1910 Das Schminken in Theorie und Praxis (Makeup in Theory and Practice) Berlin

Full book below in gallery format, or you can jump ahead to: 

Introduction – Makeup Basics – Color Plates Pt 1 – Color Plates pt 2

Makeup History

c. 1900 The Makeup Book For Professionals, F. W. Nack

Gallery

My first eBay “find” in my study and acquisition of early stage makeup information was this tiny color lithographed pamphlet. I originally assigned a c. 1900 date to it because of the styles of women’s hair in it, (some looked 1890s to me while others seemed a bit 1910-ish, so having no other reference, I split the difference). It was made in Germany (the home of the best stage makeup and best lithography in the first decades of the 20th Century) for the US market, specifically for the Chicago firm of F. W. Nack (theatrical wig and makeup sellers) at a date unknown. Since I first obtained it, I have been able to learn that F.W. Nack was in business from at least 1917 until at least 1957 according to a few ads found in various newspapers and theatre publications. Several of the plates strongly resemble images in Das Schminken, (which appears to be a book from closer to 1910), especially the “Yankee Farmer” who closely resembles the “Schneider” (Tailor-Cutter) in that book, and the “Chinese” and “Hebrew” plates. I don’t know if this means this was partly the copy of the other or both were based on an unknown earlier German book. So the date is most probably later than 1900, but I have no definitive “hook” for a better date as yet. If you do, please let me know!

Pretty much all makeup books from this era until the 1950s had some pretty amazing racist/sexist content, though the gorgeous bright color lithography of this tiny booklet still is the most intense rendition of these jaw droppingly offensive styles I’ve ever found. The intensity of the colors is most probably not an exaggeration. Early electric stage light, especially arc light follow spots, really washed out faces. Note the intensity of color on the white characters as well. There is lots of rouge, blue shadows, and on older characters even yellow highlights are used. When I first got this little booklet, I tried doing the three ages of respectable white lady makeup from this book, (not the sexy “soubrette” or the man-in-drag comic “old maid”) and did this:

I come out looking angrier than they do but that has to do with my naturally “evil eyebrows”.