While it is fun to collect miniature items such as furniture and miniature accessories for your dollhouse or shadowbox it can also be expensive. It is possible to create a great many miniature items from simple paper products such as wrapping paper, food packaging, magazines, candy wrappers, card stock, match boxes, cards, and aluminum foil. It just takes a little creativity and concentration.
To get started you will need a good tacky glue, glue stick, scissors, pencil, ruler, craft knife, wrapping tape, string, and felt tip pens. Make it policy to store any type of left over paper for your miniature projects.
As ideas, cardboard tubes from toilet paper, paper towels, and other items can be used to create furniture such as chairs and table bases. Candy wrappers, stamps, tea bag wrappers or boxes with small pictures can be cut out and matted to make wonderful miniature pictures for a dollhouse. Use wrapping paper or leftover wallpaper to wallpaper a room, cover a miniature box or to create a lampshade. Aluminum foil, or foil pie pans or metallic paper can be used to fashion miniature plates, pans, and even mirrors and tools. Try creating miniature Christmas cards for a holiday display by cutting out small pictures from a catalog and pasting it on to folded paper. Create miniature seed packs from cutting out small pictures of flowers from a magazine. Make it large enough so that the picture can be folded in half and glued to reinforce the packet. Add a small piece of white paper with the name of the flower written on the front and glue to the bottom of the picture.
Items such as hat boxes can be created from card stock. Start with a hexagon shape and fold in, gluing each flap as you go. Trim with flowers or ribbon. For an entrancing wall hanging in your dollhouse start with a picture of a carpet cut from a catalog or a magazine. By adding tabs and a small dowel for a curtain rod you will be amazed at how realistic it looks.