Sunflower Cottage is ready for Christmas

 

The Sunflower Cottage is my Christmas house, for no better reason than that I impulsively furnished it from my stockpile last December and it then stayed on my desk through the holiday season.

So this year... it's baaaaack!

This is one of my favorite projects ever, because while it's simple and took basically an evening, it achieves very much what I want it to do.

The inhabitant is the Tweakie Toy nurse. If you haven't seen Tweakie Toys before, they were a short-lived competitor to Fisher Price Little People. J. Chein made them for exactly one year in 1969, and my set was my favorite toy as a very small child. While the people originally came with little blocks lithographed as contemporary rooms, I never had the rooms, and my people lived in what's now the Modern Abode. I started rebuying them around 2019 and now have (I think) all of the variations, certainly enough to inhabit all of my half-scale houses.

What I loved about Tweakie Toys is that, unlike most dollhouse people who are fixated on being nuclear families, they are defined by their jobs. You can work out a multi-generational neighborhood however you like. The one downside is that they're all white. Had the line succeeded into the 1970s, this probably would have changed, but alas! Back then, it was unusual to include characters of color in an initial launch. Someday, I shall try plastic dye on some of my duplicates and get a little diversity in here.

The bathroom may be where I started, as getting the flooring and walls i wanted was a project that involved finding a "generate your sample floor tile pattern" site. The furniture is vintage Marx.

The bedroom absorbs my 2021 obsession with Marx beige furniture sets. The resident loves sunflowers, so all the major art pieces have them. She also has a Navajo rug, a souvenir of her jobs in Arizona, that matches her shades from the Dollar Tree sticker aisle. The blob on the highboy is a maneki nekko for luck.

The kitchen has (printed) authentic Armstrong vinyl flooring in the company's most popular style. The sunflower painting in the distance is off a calendar of New England photographs. When I remember where I put the double-sticky tape, I need to attach the kitchen floor better.

The actual inspiration for this house may have been the blue living room set, which is Arco and used to be an appalling shade of yellow before i hit it with the spray paint.

If you squint at the right wall, you can see the nurse has her guitar handy for party sing-alongs. Later in December, she'll be throwing a party for her community of fellow Tweakies!