What a pleasure it is to awake, waiting for something really nice in the post for your house!
I have been doing quite a bit of shopping for the house, which is, as I write, either in a container on a ship ploughing through the seas in my direction, or up in the air in the belly of a plane, winging its way through the autumn skies. As I hang the washing out I look up, half expecting it to flutter down like the best autumn leaf ever.
I have also been Internet shopping and contacting friends who make in this scale. The first thing to notice is how well the miniverse has moved on since my last completed house in 24th scale. That was the Fantasy Villa, a flat packed press-out kit that I built and chronicled for a magazine. I wrote it month by month as I built and I finished it in a few months. The wallpaper had to be wrapping paper because then there were no suppliers of 24th scale wallpaper. I’ll be using Jean Brodnax papers for this house. I stock her 24th papers and the 48th and sell them at Miniatura. They are fantastic. Jean was married to a printer. She began by begging space on the spare paper at the end of a print run for her quarter scale papers and eventually became so successful, her husband granted her a whole print run for her dolls house small scale wallpapers by which time she knew she had a business. Although you can see these up close on a computer you really need to get them in your hand and on your walls to appreciate the art in them and just how good they are. You can find Jean here www.brodnaxprints.com and you can probably find stockists in your location too. I interviewed Jean for the Dollshouse Magazine and sent them the package of papers she sent me and definitely didn’t get them all back because they are just brilliant. They are the sort of thing you stash, just to have it on hand.
Wallpapers are not the only thing to have moved on since I did the Fantasy Villa. For that I adapted fibre optic lighting, popular in other forms of modelling, by hiding the torch in the chimney and having the fibres emerge through the walls into made shades. There’s no need for that now, someone in a factory in the mysterious east has mysteriously started producing 24th scale lights. I am not planning to do these via transformer. Although they are 12 volt I shall be lighting them with a 9 volt battery because for my time period, candles are the thing and the dim light you get with a lower voltage battery replicates this wonderfully.
This wall light is 12th scale from my local dolls house shop, which is no longer just that, it stocks lots of toy-related items and a bit of dolls house but it doesn’t stock 24th scale. These wall lights are not far out of scale at all, they are Heidi Ott and are very much daintier than other brands, even though they are all probably made by the same few factories in China. Do any Chinese readers work in one of these?
I have been contacting various suppliers to see if the battery lights which are now available in 12th scale could be made for 24th. Either there isn’t the call for them or I’m ahead of my time, but I do have plans to find a way to do them.
So by the time I get to writing the magazine article I hope to have cracked the lighting problem in several different ways. I hope to have 12th scale (nominally) and twenty forth scale lights and battery powered 24th scale lights (which don’t exist yet) in the same house.
I have already been receiving furniture in the post, it’s very exciting. I found a wonderful Bespaq suite reduced, there’s a glue stain on the upholstery but as I was planning to reupholster anyway that’s fine by me. Putting my dolls next to the Bespaq, which is fine and small, they look OK but a bit overfed so I am embarking on a whole new range of dolls.
To keep the costs down they won’t be glass eyed but they will be all porcelain jointed, chiefly because I need the ladies to have full length porcelain arms for the Austen era fashions. Regency fashions were every bit as unforgiving as the leggings and pelmet stuff of today. Have you ever noticed how there’s never been an unforgiving or tricky-to-wear fashion for men? It’s always comfortable. Breeches, of which I wrote at length some years ago, stayed in fashion for over a century, because they were a brilliantly comfortable, easy-wear, hardly-ever-wash, adjustable garment that suited all men, exposing the lower leg, which is nearly always shapely but covering the too-thin or too-fat upper half, the bum of which was covered by the coat tails. Talk about getting away with murder! Women are brighter than men, why haven’t we invented something like that? The garment stayed in fashion until the prince Regent became so gigantic he bust his britches and popularised trousers instead.
Well you find me as I will leave you, half way through the modelling. I may or may not be able to show you this, my camera is on the blink and I think on the way out. As I had invested heavily in a pict bridge printer, which I really enjoy, and all the batteries and memory cards (now also obsolete) this is going to eat up my housing budget. However, listening to my feeble cries, my son generously gave me £20 towards the housekeeping, the first contribution in about a year, which should obviously keep the enemy from the barricades, so I’ll be fine for money, though there may be a conflict between buying miniatures or buying a new camera to show them to you.
I’m not going to predict the winner, but isn’t it handy I like writing the words?
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JaneLaverick.com cheerfully awaiting the post. Hooray!