JaneLaverick.com

There is a possibility that I might just have new stuff for Miniatura.  In fact the new stuff should have been the new stuff for the Spring but there was a problem.

Houston, I have an idiot. (Me.)

I did a lot of work to make two new things and a new part of an older thing ready to come out of my head and into reality.  I thought a lot, I made many, many moulds, I poured the porcelain and then I went horribly wrong –

I used the wrong wire.

I use wire of thicknesses from string thick, to finer than a hair, to make stringing hooks.  My articulated dolls have feet and hands with hooks, which I have made from wire embedded in them.  The elastic can go down an arm to a hand, through the wire loop and back up the arm.  In this way the doll is internally strung with elastic and can move.  The wire has to be made into tiny loops using the  very ends of the round nose pliers, the loop ends have to have twirly tails that can be inserted into the wet clay.  The wire has to withstand temperatures up to 1200 degrees, which is the temperature at which the porcelain clay shrinks, undergoes molecular change and turns into a sort of stone with embedded wire ends and a loop sticking out.

At least it does if you use the right wire.

If, by mistake, you go into the wrong drawer of the chest of drawers and find a reel of wire which looks like the high temperature wire but is actually a look-alike bought off the Internet, purporting to be the right wire but actually not the right stuff, but the wrong stuff and then use that to make a million stringing hooks which you subsequently bury in all the tiny hands, feet, bodies and heads then

Houston, you have a right cock up.

This will not become apparent until the second firing when the feet, etc, retrieved from the kiln will have loops that disintegrate when touched and completely jigger the kiln so that it no longer works.

And that was February.

Many years ago, nearly sixty firings, I had a problem and called in a kiln engineer who I found on the Internet.  He replaced my elements and put the control knob on the kiln upside down.  He said it couldn’t be changed and I’d get used to it.

But today the long awaited manufacturer’s kiln engineers arrived, took the kiln to bits and put it right.

I forgot to ask them to change the sensor rod, because I am an idiot and they did take with them my spare kiln which I have never fired.  I bought it from a friend and always thought it was a bit dodgy because it had spent its previous life in a wet shed.  The kiln engineers confirmed my suspicions, that it was not safe to fire.  I can’t use it and wouldn’t sell it, maybe they can take it to bits or put it in a kiln museum or use it for training.

I have spent the last three days pouring porcelain, embedding hands etc. with loops made from the right stuff (from the right drawer).  Now I shall spend a few days rubbing down and then, cautiously, fire the kiln but it won’t be until the second firing that I’ll know if it has worked.

Not exactly up and running, not even up and striding.  Edging towards success in teeny weeny steps, maybe.

The lesson to be learned is to beware of what you are getting off the Internet.  Go to the original source and the trusted name.  It is hard to see through the Internet, there is so much of it,  but it is worth spending time looking rather than quickly buying wire which you will have six months to regret.  It is worth waiting months for the right kiln engineer rather than the one who is good at advertising but can come next week and do stuff that will leave you annoyed for sixty firings, over many, many years.

I will let you know if it all works, and absolutely regardless I will be at Miniatura, maybe with new new stuff, never before thought of or seen. If not still with about a thousand original artist porcelain things to put on the table.

Watch the skies!  Or, watch this space!  Or watch this website:  www.miniatura.co.uk

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Amazingly the OH and I will have been married for 50 years on the 27th of August.

For anyone wondering how you do that, it’s like anything, you keep going and don’t give up.

Our neighbour wanted to take us to dinner in a restaurant as a thank you for his house not exploding, which is always good, so that will be the celebration.

There are ups and downs in everything.  We married in 1976 following a drought, as I came out of the church I put my parasol up and the rain came down.

He found the way to save people with Legionnaire’s Disease in a six year research post for very little money.  I wrote for magazines for twenty pounds a page and taught quite a lot of dyslexic people to read, for five pounds an hour.

He went into local government planning how to save people in a disaster, I started making miniature porcelain things, mainly dolls.

I have done a lot of gardening, he has done a crossword a day, mostly.

We were so lucky; our son did not inherit Downes Syndrome, which is in his family. I’ve had cancer twice, each time after caring for a demented family member at my own expense, in every way, but I’m still here.

We each do our own thing but we do stop to watch the TV news preceded by a quiz show together, each evening.  He now does his own cooking as he still eats meat.  I am mostly vegetarian and grateful you don’t have to cook lettuce.

For a few years we have been able to have a bathroom each; I would heartily recommend that if you can.

Fifty years has gone so fast, I feel as if we are us but the fashions and the politicians have changed round us.

He still has most of his hair, I am still on a diet.  He is still drinking and doing the latest sporty hobby, currently archery.  I am still making things, currently water colouring my drawings.

There have been ups and downs, never much money, nothing like enough holidays but shared laughter and, mostly, the same views about a lot of things.

The way to stay married is to be tolerant of each other’s foibles, and, really, just not to stop.

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Sadly the water colouring of the sketches I made in Venice has to be paused until after Miniatura.  I have really enjoyed them and would still be sitting in my shed with the paints were it not that the OH has broken my shed door.

The shed door was put on at the same time as the shed was constructed but was not the original shed door. It is really a tilt and turn window that was bought from an amazing place that sold second hand, factory overstocks, wrong size, different colour and what do you mean it doesn’t fit? windows and doors.  There was a shop but through the shop there was what had once been a long, no longer than you’re thinking of, garden, chock full of every type of plastic framed door and window you can imagine.  Wooden windows and doors can be altered by any old chippy with a chisel, whereas plastic factory made windows and doors, are exactly as they come off the production line, knocked up according to the approximate measurements and notes written resting on a knee in a van, in a rush before the pubs shut.

Mine was a slim brown plastic door, really a window.  If you turned the handle one way the door opened like a door.  If you turned it up the top leaned out.  This was a very fashionable arrangement well over twenty years ago to allow warmth out and rain in.  I had a notice on the inside to remind myself not to turn the handle down while I was inside because, for some reason, that locked the door.

I obeyed my notice and all was well until the OH built his shed, storing all his stuff in my shed, meanwhile.  Every morning he flung the door open to gaze at his tools, until the top hinge gave up and hung open anyway.  This was fine as long as I remembered to support the door at the top as I opened it but inevitably the door began to pivot on the bottom hinge as soon as a hand was laid upon the handle.

The OH volunteered to fix it by securing the pivoting hinge with a screw through the top of the door.  He even checked with a local window firm to make sure this was a good idea, so it was not until a long screw had made no difference, and had had to be drilled out, leaving a handle that would not move the locking pistons, or itself,  at all, that it became apparent that the mechanism tracked right round inside the plastic frame.

With the door now propped shut with two garden chairs and a block of concrete and a tilt and turn expert muttering about the second week of September and £400 starters in the same breath, the shed is off limits for now.

I do enjoy late summer evenings in my shed, or, rather, I used to enjoy…  Big Yellow Taxi, isn’t it?  You don’t always know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

But before it went I painted this view of Venice

I quite like this, so it is now in a frame on the mantel piece.  If I were to do this view again I would do it differently in some respects but I shall leave it as it is.

What it shows is a mail order delivery in Venice.  I did not stop on the bridge long enough to watch the delivery agent in the boat putter up to one of those doorways with the stanking board keeping the canal out of the dining room, but that’s what he was doing.  I didn’t see a bell for him to ring, maybe he does the same as they do here, chucks it over the board before carefully photographing it in the wrong doorway prior to someone in really high waders coming along to nick it.

It is incredible to know a city state so picturesque that even the mail order deliveries are worth painting. I have to go back to the place where every prospect pleases and then some.

Meanwhile I am dressing dolls for Miniatura, as always if there is something you’d like to see please let me know by clicking on: Leave a comment below.

Details, tickets, information, all things bright and Minderful at: www.miniatura.co.uk

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I did not really time travel in Venice, although  by the time I have finished reading the major history of the city, I may well feel as if I have.

One day, off the beaten track, or, as it is frequently pronounced in Venice, lost, we came upon a very old bookshop.  Sitting in the very old bookshop were the kind of booksellers who would really prefer it if you did not buy the books.  On the doorstep was the sop to the tourists which had probably been there since early last century, in the form of a creaky, rusting, revolving metal postcard stand.  Fighting off the spiders I found a postcard at the back that was, in parts, not bent.  I have every confidence that it had been there since the photograph was taken, possibly in the nineteen thirties.  I have searched for the subject, Corte Della Comare and it is still there, cleaned up and now hosting Airbnb and similar touristy amenities.

I however, loved the nineteen thirties photograph and made a drawing inspired by the postcard.  I am sure much of Venice looked similar nearly a hundred years ago.  The vertiginous steps to the top floor and the well are still there.  This courtyard was apparently, associated with midwives, traditionally, though very good luck with getting the extremely pregnant up the steps to the third floor.

Here is the drawing:

The washing on the line looks odd because it has masking fluid on it so that, once the painting is done I can let the white of the paper show through.

The optimism evinced in wearing white clothes, washed in well water, in seriously grubby surroundings, is admirable, though I notice old Venice is every bit as rubbish-free as modern Venice.

Though most of modern Venice is on mains water, presumably piped under the lagoon, the wells are still omnipresent.  In centuries past, families ambitious to be known as benefactors to the city whilst booking a comfortable seat in the afterlife but not quite up to major patron of the arts status, funded wells.  Some of the wells still have crests on them and they all have fancy carving.  If you’re going to endow a well, well you would want it to look well.

Well I enjoyed drawing this, it is very much my version, though after ninety years I hope the original is out of copyright. Old photographs generally have copyright for fifty years after they were taken, though as I have not used any technical means to make my new artistic version drawn by hand, I don’t think this applies.  Venice itself is full of copies, new versions, tarted-up artworks and just about digital everything. I should think there is hardly an inch of Venice that has not been photographed, drawn, mosaiced  and generally, coloured in. I have five of my original sketches of Venice still to watercolour, which activity, I must say, is eminently suitable for a heatwave.

It is the city of art, and well, you know, water to the thirsting artist.

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