Throw Back Thursday – Castle Edition
In recognition of Throwback Thursday we post this old prototype. It’s one of about a dozen attempts at creating castle themed bookends. I never figured out how to make them to the level of quality we strive for, and for the price we thought they could sell at. The idea was for the bookends to be playable toys, outfitted with simple dowel people (much like the little peg people you see everywhere).
Perhaps we need to go back a little further.
Before Happy Bungalow was Happy Bungalow it was Kiddie Kottages. When Liz and I were first dreaming up this business we were going to create playhouses for children (spurred on by the encouragement of friends, see the playhouse here). We made notes and sketches. We created 3D models of the playhouses. We thought up just the right business name and registered domains (until recently kiddiekottages.com and kiddiecottages.com redirected to happybungalow.com).
And then we thought up some little products to accompany the playhouses. The idea was that we’d make the playhouses and everything you needed to put in them. So the original Happy Bungalow product line started out as accessories to Kiddie Kottages’ big playhouses. But starting a new business and creating these multi-thousand dollar playhouses was too much, so we focused on the smaller pieces at first with the goal to move on to playhouses later.
We’ve pretty much given up on the playhouses for the immediate future, but some of those original products still hang on (our wooden animal toys being the most notable). Much like the never realized castle bookends, the dollhouse bookends below went through extensive prototyping (and before that digital models you can read about here), but end the end it was hard to find a workable price-point for them. It was also difficult to generate the level of quality (again at workable price point). Though the shop has expanded its tooling, we might take another attempt at it.
The simple little furniture did prompt a friend to ask if I could make some furniture for her daughter’s inherited dollhouse. Well, that is a product line that has done quite well (read more dollhouse furniture posts here).
So in the end the castle bookends never made it into production. The corner joints (box joints) were the problem. I was attempting to create a faux quoining (fancy architecture word for those stones that stick out on the corner of buildings). Perhaps one of these days . . .
So the stars are laid out on the wood before cutting (no, even though I’ve cut more than a thousand stars, I can’t cut them from memory). So I laid out a few stars and then measured to see how many stars would fit onto so many feet of board. It’s something like a word problem:
