This time next week we’ll be at Autumn Miniatura 2023, I hope this is as much your happy place as it is mine.
I have been working, except for yesterday when I took time off to have my flu jab and my Covid jab. I have been seeing people in masks in various places, if you feel happier in a mask, you wear one, no one will mind, I might do so myself. On my stand there is always hand sanitiser, which you are free to have a go of whether you are buying anything or not, or looking or not.
Unusually for Miniatura what I am doing right now is painting.
This may seem like an odd activity just before the Min but these are backgrounds for my new fairies. I have been making articulated porcelain fairies for about twenty-five years. The latest are the best, I think, here are some of them.
they are four and half inches, fourteen part, glass eyed fairies, which I think are going to fly, by which I mean I am intending to display them, flying (not me, the dolls.)
I am presenting them in domes, with back grounds, which is the purpose of the paintings. The reason I am doing this if for the fairy collectors who do not wish to put the fairy in a house but don’t want a dusty fairy. You’ll be able to take the fairy out of the dome to play with her and put her back in again.
These are the best fairies I have ever done. They are slimmer and more elegant and they are using the glass eyes which I have left, which are limited in number. There are only five of them, the problem with making something at the limits of my abilities and the ability of porcelain to do what I want, is the wastage rate. When the tolerance of the foot, for example, going in to the ankle joint is about half a millimetre and I have to make and insert in the wet clay a metal stringing loop I’ve also made, it all gets a bit exact.
The wigs, which are brushable, take a day to make each, the wings, all hand painted silk, were another couple of days and there were all the usual firings for fingernails and so on. I will not be making exorbitant charges, because it’s me, but I do have to allow for the domes, which I’ve bought and there may be lighting.
If I get a chance I’ll show you the completed effort during the week, I do have to make a stand for the domes and I still have quite a few pictures to paint of all the places in my garden and the countryside, where the fairies live.
It’s official; that Jane Laverick, she’s away with the fairies.
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There are still a few tickets for the show. Why pay more at the door when you can get a better deal here?
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