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Parents who are trying to figure out which dollhouse or playhouse to buy for their preschool or young child need to worry about safety issues, sturdiness, ‘playability’ and pricing. There is a huge variety of wooden dollhouses and playhouses to choose from if you are going to be buying one for your toddler or young child.

Safety
In picking a dollhouse for a young child you want to make sure that the dollhouse is not going to have anything dangerous about it. You don’t want to have a dollhouse that is overly ornate with sharp corners and lots of small accessories...

Collecting dollhouses and other miniature items is a very serious hobby. A dollhouse or miniature building or miniature piece of furniture can be a work of art. The hobby is also genderless many collectors and builders of both dollhouses and other miniature items are men. Historically dollhouses were first made as prestigious works that would be displayed in the front room or parlor of the house as a sign of wealth. Then dollhouses were used to instruct girls in the ways of running a household. It is really only in relatively modern time that dollhouses also became children’s...

Dollhouse furniture and other miniature items date as far back as the Egyptians. In the tombs of Egypt five thousand years ago were found miniatures of home furnishings, and other trappings of life of the well to do in Egypt. Since then almost every culture has enjoyed miniatures and miniature furnishings.

16th century dollhouse furniture
In the 16th century in Europe, dollhouse furniture was built in exacting detail by the finest craftsmen of the time. The rooms displayed in the dollhouses or baby houses as they were called, were elegant and every piece of dollhouse furniture was in itself a work...

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...

There is a dollhouse that resides as a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that was the lifetime project of librarian, Faith Bradford, who became the first woman to head up a division of the Library of Congress. Located on the first floor of the Museum in the West Wing, the dollhouse is made up of twenty three rooms featuring the family of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Doll, with their ten children, five servants and assorted pets. The home is meant to depict a home from the...