New newness.

Posted on 12th March 2026 by admin

There will be a box of new dolls.

So far, in it are the lads, who are teenagers, and the lady, who is the doll inspired by Leonardo’s Annunciation.  On the moulds I’ve written BVM. but in the box I’ve labelled her the lady.

I wasn’t sure, last time I posted, if I could properly wig them all.  The difference between gluing hair directly to a head and sewing a proper wig cap is about a day of time but I think for some dolls the results are superior.  Here is the scruffy boy with his sewn wig

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I could not get this amount of hair, tumbling round the face if I just glued it to the head.  It moves, like real hair, is rooted (by very many tiny stitches) to the leather wig cap and can be brushed.  It is brushable with a dry toothbrush.  If the hair is a bit flyaway, you spray brush-out human hairspray on to the toothbrush bristles and brush the hair which will then lie flat but is brush out if necessary.

These dolls are all properly dressed with sewn clothing and, because of the wigs and the fourteen pieces of porcelain, are going to cost £28 each.  For something hand made, designed and brought into being by one person, I think that is reasonable.  These days if I buy a tee shirt made in a factory for that, I think I’m doing well, and I don’t expect the tee shirt to last hundreds of years, which the porcelain will do.  It’s a proper heirloom.  In the future you (or your descendants) can remove the clothing, surface wash the porcelain and redress the doll, just as two foot tall Victorian porcelain dolls in museums have been enjoyed and cared for for the last two hundred years.

Many years ago, I was very upset at a show when a visitor grabbed two of my dolls and said she was going to have ‘two of these cheapies’.  When I was a collector, going without dinners to buy something at a fair, I valued every single purchase.  Moving to the other side of the show table I priced accordingly, which does mean I’m working for 40p an hour.  Luckily I’m not doing it for the money, I’m doing it for love.

It’s love which makes the miniature world go round.

Would that reality were the same.

If you love miniatures and you love collecting and you love a lovely day out at Miniatura…

www.miniatura.co.uk

Visitors to shows do ask me, because I wrote for magazines for so long and interviewed many artisans, which miniatures are good value, and, sometimes, which are overpriced.  It’s a very interesting topic.  After Miniatura I will begin to answer the question by showing you plenty of the different ways in which you can make a doll.

One of the wonderful aspects of the hobby is the way in which it caters for all hobbyists at all levels of ability and all pockets.  I will write more of this.  Meanwhile the age old advice to buy the thing you really love is still true.

When I  was a shopper long ago, I never failed to come home from a show regretting some item I did not buy.  What you need to do to be happy, is to work out which item that is, at the show, and buy it.  If you are on a budget don’t be afraid to ask the seller if they could do a lay away plan for you so you could buy something a month at a time.  They are, after all, there to sell.  The worst they could say is no.  The great thing about Miniatura is that it is a hall filled with over a hundred hand-picked top-class artists.  There will be lots of things you love and I’m sure you will find and afford a few.  Don’t forget to invest in the brochure, it has the contact details of the exhibitors, if there was something someone else got to first, you could contact the exhibitor and ask if they could make one for you too.

See you there!

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The shoe smalls redemption.

Posted on 7th March 2026 by admin

Having escaped from shoelessness, the new fourteen part ladies all now have underwear.

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Without even brushing their hair, they all immediately started shopping for shoes.

As you can see they all have substantial knickers.  I’ve given them these because the knickers in question are pretty much all-era.

I remember, and have already recorded here, somewhere, in a visit to a Tudor property being told by the guide that Tudor ladies did not wear knickers.  This, the guide informed us, was a certainty because no knickers had been found.

This is only true in that no one has found a pair of unmentionables, labelled Tudor knickers; of course they wore them.  I am willing to suggest that you could probably see some in situ if you disinterred a few Tudor corpses.  They might be in quite a state, here we might recall Elizabeth the First being famous for having a bath once a year whether she needed it or not.  We also know that Tudor ladies wore layers and layers of clothing to keep various bodily fluids away from incredibly expensive hand-embroidered overskirts and bodices.  Clothing museums can provide evidence that sleeves were removable and ventilated under the arms and that for several centuries ladies carried, or hung from a belt, a pomander, which might be as simple as an orange stuck with cloves.  I have made these as a present for various aunties, in the 1950s, when there was a fashion for them.  As the orange withers it shrinks, holding the cloves in tightly, without the need for glue.  Decorated with ribbon and a hanging loop, this item actually looks very Elizabethan.  Hanging in an airing cupboard it does give a pleasant, slightly citrus, air freshener quality.  If you only had a bath once a year you would probably want to go around festooned with pomanders.

We do know Queen Victoria wore separate leg knickers, tied at the waist, embroidered with her monogram, because several pairs are in existence.  I have myself been offered a pair to purchase, long ago, in an antique shop, whether they were genuinely hers, I cannot say, but they were extremely substantial and had a stout band at the knee into which voluminous quantities of pale cream silk was gathered, making the whole garment resemble silk plus fours, despite being a garment of two halves.

My grandmother liked to sit by the fire in the lounge.  In the winter, when there was just me and her, she would turn her skirt up and get her knees warm, without any danger of exposing anything because of the solid nature of her directoire knickers, which were made of pink silk.  These were very obviously direct descendants of Queen Victoria’s knickers, which, as my grandmother was born in 1888, is not surprising.

Costume historians will tell you that there is a tendency for underwear to become outer wear over time and that the reverse is sometimes true, however, some arrangements are due to the shape of the body.  Women are designed to bear children, the situation of the relevant areas in context with the legs more or less making the engineering decisions for the underwear designer.  It is the fragile nature of the textiles which is partly responsible for the undergarments in question not to have survived.  Where undergarments are made of more robust materials, they have survived intact.

For hundreds of years the breasts were housed in a shift, a tubular garment, gathered round the top, usually made of linen. Few of these have survived.  Over the shift and under the breast went the leather corset, a garment with or without shoulder straps, placed round the upper torso and laced at the front.  There are examples in the costume museum at Bath and they are absolutely filthy.

The reason they are there is that for centuries from before Roman times onward, mineral springs at Bath were supposed to be efficacious in relieving many ailments.  By Tudor times and into the Regency families who had brought sickly relatives for the cure found that they could defray the cost of dealing with an unexpected corpse by selling the individual’s clothing.  Hence the area became a centre for the second hand clothing trade.

Leather corsets, even well worn, must have had a resale value to have ended up in the museum, though I personally would have shrunken from trying them on, even in the interests of costume research.

In these days of online second-hand Roses, it is easy to understand the attraction of pre-loved clothing in the past.  As a child I inherited clothing from cousins and did not feel badly done to, it was expected of a garment that had plenty of wear in it that it would be passed on.

In the present we are textile rich, for some of us clothes are almost disposable, a situation capitalised on by the clothing industry, who would like to persuade us, via a catwalk, of the absolute necessity of having new fashion every season.

In the past just having clothing at all was desirable.  My mother, winning a colouring competition before WW2, was taken by her mother to the police station to donate part of her winnings to the shoeless children’s fund that was run country-wide at the time by the Police.

Here we come closer to the reason for no knickers surviving from long ago.  Not only were textiles unlikely to escape being blasted to bits by the rigours of life, the bits that did survive were too valuable to hoard or throw away.  My mother used my father’s old string vests as polishing cloths, because her mother had done the same.  Interestingly my father handed on his vests when they developed holes.  How could he tell?  String vests are made of holes.  Inquiring, I was told that the cloth held polish well, and anyway, all old clothes eventually ended up as dusters.

You may not believe this because we live in an age where you can actually buy purpose-made dusters. In the eighteenth century they’d have thought anyone wasting time, energy and resources actually making dusters was insane.  Just a couple of centuries earlier any pieces of cloth so disintegrated as to have turned into rags and shreds, were called bombast, sold and traded and used to stuff the inflated legs of Tudor breeches, from which we get the term for puffed up with rubbish: bombastic.

This is where the remnants of the knickers ended up. If John Donne thought it was romantic that a flea who bit his girlfriend then bit him, I am willing to bet that Tudor popinjays absolutely got their rocks off striding round with their girlfriend’s old knickers stuffed up their breeches.  If they were that far out they may very well have had the stringy remnants of several previous paramours’ panties up there as well.

So pants to no knickers.  My dolls have nicely made silk knickers and lacily clad substantial knockers, because they are two and a half inch, fourteen part original artist porcelain dolls and they deserve the best of everything.

See for yourself this time next week.  Details at www.miniatura.co.uk

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Something underhand afoot.

Posted on 6th March 2026 by admin

It’s going to get quieter round here for a while as the show draws nearer and there is only a week to go.  I have spent the last few days making shoes.

My new fourteen part lady dolls have bare feet.  Like all my porcelain dolls with bare feet, they have proper toes and glazed toe nails.

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And, like any woman under  two and a half inches and any real woman of any size, they like to choose their own shoes.

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These shoes are very small, well they would have to be, to fit the feet.

They have been made just like full size shoes with parts cut out and then glued and sewn on a last, even though they are small.

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Here is the same shoe balanced on the forefinger of the maker.  They are sewn all the way round and the soles are sewn on too.  They are leather and they are very soft and comfortable.

When I was a child I had to wear Inner Raise Shoes because I had flat feet.  They were made of leather but felt like iron.  My father used to beat  the backs at the heels with a hammer but they still hurt, for the first few weeks of school I wore sticking plasters over my bleeding heels.

Therefore my doll’s shoes, though made of leather and properly sewn

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are soft and gentle and won’t hurt anyone.

See for yourself in just over a week. Details here: www.miniatura.co.uk

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Smallest yet.

Posted on 1st March 2026 by admin

Look, look!

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I have managed a brushable wig on a two and a half inch doll with a head the size of a pea!

I have brushed it, so can any future owner.

Oh wow.

The head is about the size of your little finger nail and I have wigged it. With a real sewn wig you can brush like a wig for a human.

Crikey!  The world is our lobster.

I’m going to have a cup of tea and see if I can do it again.

See this marvel for yourself at this show:  www.miniatura.co.uk

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New dolls for Spring Min 2026

Posted on 1st March 2026 by admin

Despite all the everything, there will be five new dolls at Spring Min from me.

When I say new dolls I do mean absolutely new porcelain dolls that have gone through all the processes necessary to bring them to life.  These are ceramic artefacts that are real heirlooms for your dolls’ house, in that the material they are made of and the traditional way in which they are made, but in miniature, will last for hundreds of years, I do not use dubious new materials or rely on glue, removable paint or anything else transitory.  They are new in that each one started out as a sculpture or a collection of articulating sculpted parts that can move together and stand just as you do.  Here they all are in one photo, standing on their own.  They have not been glued to the floor, they stand because I build the balance in from the start.

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From the ruler behind them you can see that these are twenty fourth scale or smaller.  Three are dolls to be residents in your dolls’ house and two are to be dolls for your dolls.

Let’s look one by one.

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Here is the lad.  In real life he would be five feet tall, in 24th scale he is two and a half inches.  He is a teenage boy.  He is composed of fourteen pieces of porcelain internally jointed.  As you can see, he can sit, he can point, he can move his head.  How do you see him dressed?  Do you see a mediaeval apprentice?  Do you see a modern kid with a baseball cap on backwards?

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Here is the toddler.  This is the most articulated, internally jointed very small doll so far.  He (or she) is composed of ten pieces of porcelain, at an inch and a quarter in porcelain, this small person is a toddler in 24th scale, or, if you have suddenly felt a need, a small baby in twelfth scale.  He, she, or it can sit, stand and crawl.  What era should this toddler live in?  Is he a tiny Tudor?

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Here is my new lady.  I think she is gorgeous, though you may not be able to see it until she is dressed.  She can sit, stand, do aerobics, turn her head and is only just under two and a half inches.  That makes her a five foot woman, which many women were through history.  Her face, which is easiest to see on the doll at the front, was inspired by Leonardo’s Mary, who I met in the Uffizi.  She is fourteen pieces of porcelain and has bare feet, so she could live in a bedroom in night attire.

Those are the three new people.  Below are the doll’s dolls.  I have been making dolls’ dolls for a few years now and they are reasonably faithful to the real historic dolls they miniaturise.  Both the dolls this time are recent.

The first is the jointed 1930s doll, which I have been making and shrinking for some time.

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This doll is now down to one inch.  Although the original was a 1930s doll, if you are not very particular about timing, this type of doll has been known throughout history.  It is a simple head/body shape with arms and legs jointed by means of a hole through the body that will admit some form of stringing, whether wire, or, in some areas of the world, rope or string.  This doll is one inch tall and looks good as a doll’s doll in twelfth scale and works as a larger doll in 24th scale.

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Finally the one piece doll, the Frozen Charlotte.  This has been a very long time in the making and is a nightmare to clean prior to firing.  One slip of the scalpel, one over enthusiastic rub and it’s a dead doll in the bin.  Why on earth would I want to make something as difficult?  It is, of course, the historical aspect.  There are quite a few of these one piece dolls surviving in museums that were made in large quantities, often by child slave labour, in Victorian factories.  In large, because they are only one piece of porcelain and not quite as awful to rub down, they are cheaper to make.  In a kiln, a doll of five parts takes up a lot of room.  You can get about three one part dolls in the same amount of space.  The hair and shoes were china painted, all that remained to make a saleable doll cheaply, was a bit of lace or gathered ribbon and there is the china doll most families could afford to buy from the pedlar’s tray.

She was called Frozen Charlotte because of a Victorian cautionary tale of proud Charlotte, who went for a sleigh ride without her shawl because she wanted everyone to see her pretty dress.  Charlotte arrived at the end of the ride frozen solid.  I have not been able to find out if the tale came before the doll or was invented to sell the doll, either way if you had said ‘Frozen Charlotte doll’ to any Victorian they would have known what you meant.

I may try to shrink Charlotte a bit further.  The originals came in many sizes, quite a few had the legs welded together and the arms outstretched, often they were made of white glazed china.  I didn’t weld the legs on my doll so that she would stand up.  If I had welded the legs there would be a lot more dolls.  I’m my own worst enemy, I really am.

Now it is over to you.  I would like to know, if you are going to Spring Min and intend to collect one of these, how you would like a doll to be dressed.  Does one of these dolls look like someone you have been looking for?  Is this your housekeeper?  Is this your Regency lady?  Your Renaissance Mary?

There is no obligation if you do ask for a doll to be dressed, if you get to the show and the doll is not what you fancied after all.  I ask because, as you can see, these dolls are difficult to make, it’s taken thirty three years, so there are not many of them.  I would like to dress the doll you’d like for your house. Of course, because of they way they are made, you can dress and redress them, and so can your descendants.  Do not confuse these with polymer clay dolls with the clothes stuck on, or dolls with wire bodies that have to be dressed right down to their wrists.  These dolls will look as good as they do in the pictures, in very little clothing.  They’ll look great in swimwear, or twenties off-the-shoulder dresses.  They are just like you.

I know if you are coming to the show for the first time you’ll want to know how much.  My ten part twenty fourth scale dolls are £25 dressed and these amazing fourteen part internally strung, articulated dolls will be £27, which, in a hundred years, will probably be the cost of a sandwich.  (Aren’t you glad you’re living now?)  I may make dolls with brushable hair, as I do in twelfth scale.  These will cost a bit more if I decide to try, because each wig takes a day to make.  It won’t be much more, it’s me, all my prices were fossilized, long ago.

To tell me your wishes simply click on the bit below where it says ‘leave a comment’.  I will see you at the show.  I have made a new box for these dolls to live in and I’ll put a sign on it saying ‘new dolls’ so you won’t have to look at all the one thousand things on the table to find them, though if you want to do so, please do.  That is why I am going.  Forty years ago, visiting Miniatura, I wanted a doll and could only find a few that all looked the same.  I wanted a doll that looked like a doll, not like a person.  In my world people were the problem, I thought the dolls’ house should have dolls in it, that looked like dolls and were art and were collectable and could be played with.

So I made them.

See you there.

www.miniatura.co.uk

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New dolls.

Posted on 26th February 2026 by admin

It is two weeks to Miniatura at Stoneleigh.

I am glad of that because I’ve been ill again with intestinal trouble but I’ve got enough time to get better and all I want to do is sit quietly and assemble dolls.

This is a good thing.  I will have five new dolls to show, all small 24th scale and under.  I am so glad I used the high temperature wire I used for the Egyptians.  I wish I had used it for the kittens, but it just looked too weedy.  It has to be, to enable the stringing. Stringing is still an immense difficulty.

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You can see why.  This is the upper arm of a doll.  I do not have big hands.  This arm has emerged from the mould quite soft with hopefully enough of a hole in it for the elastic to pass through.  When it had dried I had to be able to hold it and rub it to remove the seam lines and imperfections, and make the end you can see round enough and empty enough for the lower arm to fit inside it.  You can see how easily it could be broken, just holding it, before it had turned to stone in the kiln. There is a hole which I have made at one end which has to let the elastic out. The hole cannot be too big, if it is the next joint will not sit in place, it cannot be too small, or the jewellery elastic will not pass, the difference is fractions of a millimetre.  On the mat are many arms,  and some thighs, some distorted in the kiln, some I broke when cleaning, some will have fired with a hole too small to let the elastic pass.

The dolls I am making, are, like the Ancient Egyptians, composed of fourteen parts of porcelain, internally strung and moveable and poseable, their hands and feet swivel, their elbows and knees work, their heads move, they will all last hundreds of years.

Stringing the arms is not too difficult.  Stringing the bodies is fiendishly difficult.  I make wire stringing hooks from the 32 Gauge wire I used to make earring hooks for twelfth scale dolls.   It’s thin, it breaks, it has to curve in the armhole of the body and out of the neck, bending invisibly inside where I cannot see what it is doing.  I am only able to do this after thirty three years of practice.  Thirty three years ago there would have been swearing and giving up but I am now in the far reaches of impossibility.  As I have done it once, I know I can do it.  There is a huge wastage rate.  I have trays of tiny bits of porcelain that are just no good.

However, there will be new dolls.  Stay tuned, I’ll show you soon.

www.miniatura.co.uk

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Oh boo…

Posted on 22nd February 2026 by admin

The power of two
 I have told you before; what I tell you is true.
When I said it had all gone horribly wrong
That was not the end, I should know,
Of the song.

First some idiot (yes it was me)
Used the wrong wire all over with glee.
I thought after the Min I would try once again
Who am I kidding – get out of the rain!

But oh no I didn’t. From up on my horse
I booked a kiln visit – much later of course.
To the garage I took the phone, just to see…
Without thinking the kiln was listening to me.

Did the very next firing go well?
Well nope

It just went on and on until I lost hope.
The kiln had been promised a nice engineer
Some fool made the promise where it could hear.

Is it working now? Of course it is not, it is nope
It is bust, it is sulking
It looks like it’s broke.

So the poor little kittens will just have to wait
Until well past the Min, what I’m calling too late.
I was so very excited about the gargoyles
They were beautifully gruesome and covered in boils
And, without hands and feet, just horribly spoiled.

I stupidly went and told you the tale
Will I ever learn anything, any at all?
First there’s the stumble
And then there’s the fall.
Use the wrong wire, you are wrong in the making
And the kiln thinks it’s funny and has joined in by breaking.

At last it went cold, I have retrieved the shelf,
The colours have fired, though slowly it’s true
If the hoped-for dolls work, I will show them to you.

Two, two, the power of two,
It seems you should wait for the other shoe –
On every Min table’s the stuff that got through.

There’s some other universe, deffo not mine
Where artists do art stuff quite right the first time
Where they smile and they bow – it quite gives you the pip
They don’t know of the slip twixt the cup and the lip.

After thirty three years you would think I am hot
Confident, able – apparently not.
My standards for me are impossibly high
But if they were not, I know I’d not try
The difficulty of doing it, is also the why.

I’m happy to say I know you understand me
You can make orders but cannot command me
If it were easy, there’d be nothing to do,
But you know that if you are a miniaturist too.

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Miniatura is the show where all the miniaturists meet.  You can get there by car and there is free parking, you can get there by train and there is a free shuttle bus from Coventry, you can get there by plane and then train and then free shuttle bus.  The journey will be the big expense because entry fees are modest, tickets are still available and most of the stands will be exhibiting the work of artisans in miniature, or things you need to do your miniaturising.

I will be taking a thousand things hand made by me and whatever has got through the current problems.  To know more look here:

www.miniatura.co.uk

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Failure and after.

Posted on 19th February 2026 by admin

This morning I got a chance to have a good look at the failures that came out of the kiln which was pretty much everything.

It was not the Chinese wire.  That was in just a few dolls and it was fine.  It was some other wire, slightly thicker.

I found the roll of wire.  It was labelled nichrome wire, it was on a black plastic roll, it looked like all the other rolls of nichrome wire.

Or, no it didn’t. The label was subtly different and the other end didn’t say the name of the manufacturer.  There was no name of manufacturer.  Did I buy this years ago, thinking it was the right one and find it to be no good?  Is that why I had put it in a different drawer?  When you’ve been doing something for thirty four years sometimes you cannot remember the detail of every year.

I have kept a kiln book,  Every firing has been documented. Not every glaze, china paint and roll of wire.  If I were a very commercial maker I probably would have done so.  I’m not doing it for the money, there are many ways to make money and none of them are art the way I do it.

Additionally one entire set of shoes, which means one entire doll, is no good.  A failure.  The glaze has bunched up into lumps.  Now this I do remember happening previously.  What I didn’t remember is which glaze did it.

The writing is on the wall, or, to be exact, will be on the glaze pot and is already on the plastic bag in which the roll of wire now resides.

I am now china painting some of the dolls which may be alright.

I was so happy about the new things, which will not now appear.

Fortunately there are two Miniaturas a year.  Amazingly some exhibitors only go to one of them and so do some visitors.

Two is my number, so I’ll see you at the next one, just three weeks away.

www.miniatura.co.uk

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Horribly wrong.

Posted on 18th February 2026 by admin

Oh dear, kiln ware failure, it’s all gone horribly horribly wrong.

You cannot tell until you unpack the kiln.  I carefully lifted each shelf and walked very steadily through the garage, the utility, the kitchen and the hall until I got to the dining room where I laid each shelf one at a time on an upturned box on the dining table.

When I got all the way down to the kittens, I had a feeling of dread.  As I took the kittens off the wires, most of their little arms and legs just fell off and when I laid them in the tray, so did the heads.

The gargoyles have hooks in their backs for wings, as I picked the bodies off the shelf, the hooks disintegrated, as did every hook in every foot and hand.

Nearly all the wire stringing hooks that took so long to make and were so carefully embedded in the wet clay, just crumbled to dust.  This was a mystery because I’d used the same wire successfully in the Egyptians.  The babies seemed OK and the new dolls were too but either the placing in the kiln or the coloured slip which I had made had overheated the wires locally, which had died.  Some of the eyeballs had scrunched up as if it had got a bit hot and most of the shoe soles were no good either.

Oh dear, what a waste of time and effort, what a spectacular fail.

There isn’t time to pour it all again and clean and fire it twice.  I have washed and grit scrubbed the bits that look alright and I have experimentally strung a new doll to see if the hooks would hold up but there will be no gargoyles or kittens at the show.

The problem is the quality of the wire, bought through the big river retailer, arriving from China and purporting to be temperature resistant nichrome wire.  I have never had problems with British made wire but cannot find it fine enough to make tiny stringing hooks.

The difficulty is a true miniature problem.  As you go smaller the tools and materials have to shrink too but the strength of anything you are going to play with needs to be as good if not better proportionally than in standard twelfth scale.

I will not be appearing with an empty table.  I take about a thousand items and was wondering how to fit the new stuff on the table, which singular problem has disappeared to be replaced by about two hundred useless bits of porcelain, lying in sad little heaps on the dining table.

I don’t know many 24th scale specialists; this could be the reason, the smaller you go, the harder it gets, though I last had a failure this spectacular about thirty three years ago, when the OH, trying to be helpful and manly, balanced a hard plastic tool box, with all the dolls to go to a show, on the lip of the boot of the car.  It crashed on to the drive and nearly all of the dolls broke.

You may have noticed he got involved this time, commandeering the kitchen for a fortnight when I should have been in there pouring, if I had done it then I’d have found out a fortnight ago and still had time to experiment with bigger, different wire stringing hooks in a new pour.

There’s a moral here somewhere. 

I still have to china paint anything that looks as if it might work but after the show I will book a kiln engineer to come and replace the elements and turn the temperature dial up the right way.  The last chap put the dial on upside down, causing many years of guess work, which might be critical now.

When I tell you what I do is quite tricky, you may well have wondered how tricky it can be to make a porcelain doll with fourteen bits of porcelain invisibly strung under three inches tall.  The proof of the pudding is in the failure.

On the other hand if it were easy, there would be no point in trying.

Months of work, binned.

Depressing.

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Find out what the successful exhibitors have planned at www.miniatura.co.uk

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Rainless, and, possibly, having kittens.

Posted on 17th February 2026 by admin

Today is the first day for about a month when it hasn’t rained.

Naturally this prompts two thoughts.  The first is that it will be approximately four months before the first notification of a hosepipe ban.  It might be an age thing but a hosepipe ban really annoys me.  I live on an island.  The UK is a group of islands, has been since the Pleistocene.  We are surrounded by water.  Where are the desalination plants?

The second thought is that as the sun is shining today magazine writers everywhere will be polishing up their dreadful articles about getting ‘beach body ready.’  This is also annoying on several levels.  The first is that if you had a real beach body you would have a rocky bottom, sandy footings and a seagull standing on your moss covered beach head.  The second is that they are only writing this rubbish to make you feel inadequate so that they can tell their advertisers, who would like to sell you slimming injections, muscle building supplements, tanning lotion and sunblock that they have done their best to help spin the wheels of commerce.

For me I would have been torn between gardening or shopping in the luxurious dryness had it not been for Miniatura, now less than four weeks away.  Today  finally, after weeks of work, including weeks modelling, and moulding just after the last show, and pouring and rubbing down and a first firing, I got the kiln on for the second time.

Making ceramics of any variety is quite a complicated business.  I would like to have been there when the first caveman found out that the mud he had put in the fire, or, possibly, the mud on which he had built the fire, had gone all hard.

Matters have become quite refined and highly specialised since then.  I would have to describe myself as an amateur mud baker really.  The only formal training I had in doll making was thirty five years ago, when I went without dinners for quite a while to afford to  attend a porcelain doll making morning, to see what was involved.  I appreciated the basics and ever since then have been making it up, in every sense of the expression.

I keep wanting to make things that I have no idea how to fire in the kiln. My kiln is a top loading septagonal device, encased in metal, lined with grooved firebricks in which sit the elements which heat up electrically.  The kiln is thoroughly insulated so that with each heating of the elements, the heat builds until it reaches a temperature that will bend a small ceramic rod which will activate the switch to switch the kiln off.

The parts of the dolls sit on removable shelves.  The shelves are round and have just enough space to admit a pair of hands between the shelf and the kiln wall to lower the shelf into position on the shelf below.  Between each shelf are cylindrical props.  Each shelf has a wash painted on to prevent doll parts welding themselves to the shelf.  Additionally each shelf is covered with a thin layer of kiln sand at each firing.  The doll parts have to shrink to their final size, the kiln sand is there to help them move.

However, some of the things I want to make are glazed.  The glaze cannot lie on the kiln sand; it would stick and emerge gritty.  Gritty dolls are no good.  Currently I am making kittens, because the cats were so popular.

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As you can see the cats are coloured with glazes all over. These are specialist velvet glazes, which fire slightly furryish.  It took me a while to work out how to glaze fire the cats without them going gritty.  Each cat has a hollow body, into each hole of which fits a wire stringing hook which I have made and embedded in the arm, leg or head.  To fire the glazed cats I insert a temperature proof wire through either a body hole or a stringing hook.  Either end of the wire is then suspended from a concoction of shelf support towers.

This is fraught with danger.  The hooks can fail and the part drop off, leaving a one legged cat and four other parts that match nothing.  The wires can relax, dangling cat parts in the sand, the parts can slide together and stick.  I could simplify matters and ensure some matches by colouring the cats all the same.  I like cats, the whole point of them is that they are all different and, anyway if I made them all the same it would no longer be arty, I’d be verging on commerce, perish the thought.

I’ll be lucky to have one whole cat to my name and I will not know if I do until the kiln has turned itself off, everything has gone cold overnight and most of tomorrow and, at last I can open the kiln.  Even then I have put the cats at the bottom of a stack of three and a half shelves, all of which I will have to rescue before I find if I have cats or if I am several kittens short of a posse.

And I haven’t even told you about the very experimental gargoyles.

If you want to see what all the other crazy Miniatura artists are up to, you can find out here  www.miniatura.co.uk

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