What do you find if you look on the floor?
If you’re a miniaturist I bet isn’t just ‘a carpet.’ As you progress in the hobby you inevitably go down scale just to see if you can do it. The joy of accomplishment does not, naturally last. Once you’ve done a twelfth and then a twenty-fourth scale house and felt very clever, forty eighth scale beckons and, before you know it you’re buying a 144th scale kit, more in hope than actual expectation.
It is usually around 288th scale that carpet phobia strikes, sometimes earlier, depending on your eyesight.
There comes a time when you know that picking up something tiny that you have dropped, is an unlikely event. It takes quite a lot of experience to realise this truth. If the hours the average miniaturist spent searching for something, either on the table or on the floor, were all added up there’d be free time to put a kit together right up to the wallpaper. You could have had something proper to eat, or, even, actually stopped and watched a television programme properly instead of out of the corner of your eye. If you are like me and have the TV on for company you’ll be no stranger to tuning in intermittently and being amazed that the Prime Minister (miniatures, miniatures) has been discovered (miniatures, miniatures) having run away in the park (miniatures, miniatures) and will be turning into steady rain later in the afternoon.
Currently I have lost three needles on the table. I looked for two and gave up on the third because it was quicker to use one hand to get another needle out of the tube whilst keeping hold of the doll in exactly the right place than it was to put the doll down and start again. Though in the end I had to, I cannot thread a needle with one hand, though with my new invention I nearly succeeded.
I am doing all the experimenting which will result in a Tudor doll’s doll kit. I poured about forty in porcelain, about thirty six in two or three sizes came through all the processes. I had separated two sizes in two small polystyrene dishes. These are soft and kind to porcelain but open and quite likely to ping.
The world is divided into things that will ping off a crowded table and things that are heavy and stable. The nature of miniatures is such that the pingable exceeds the unpingable very considerably. I know little polystyrene trays filled with dolls that weigh less than a gram are pingable. I know that a table full of liberated rolls of lace, unrolled for consideration and interview is ping city central. There was also the notebook in which I’m writing the instructions, two bags full of drinking straws, a box of dolls, a daylight lamp, a tray full of sewing essentials, two boxes of findings, two tubes of thread rolls, a plastic box of scissors, six rolls of ribbon, a ruler, knitting needles, a crochet hook, a camera, a glass mat, a foam mat, pieces of paper and numerous pens. All this on a small eighteenth century card table with dodgy legs. Did I move the dolls to somewhere safer?
Well, they finally pinged this morning. My hairdresser is getting married for the third time this autumn, proving the triumph of hope over experience, in which, when I put the little light dolls, in the little light trays, open, unprotected, I was well versed.
I am a person of relative equanimity but when the dolls, pinged, rose into the air, and, succumbing to gravity, dropped, I said a bad word.
Scrabbling upon the floor, in the fringe of the rug, I found and rescued some of the dolls but I do not think all of them. I also found a paper clip and a head from getting ready for last show. I have vacuumed at least once week since the autumn.
Here are my finds together with the prototype doll. The doll has a hole in her nose, poor thing, which is why she is the experimental doll, but the basic idea is OK, I think. This doll is about 35mm. As well as being a doll’s doll she is the right size to be a resident in 48th scale. There’s another, shorter doll to experiment with, providing I refrain from chucking all the dolls on the floor again.
Making kits is a lot more difficult than getting dolls out of my head into reality. After thirty three years I know what I can get out of my head into reality but the problem with kits is that I do not know what is in your head. Or your fingers. Can I write instructions that cater for all miniaturists? I have invented a needle threader to go with the kit and there will be a needle and thin silk thread in the kit. I’m expecting a miniaturist to have small scissors that cut up to the end, tacky glue and cocktail sticks to apply it. Everything else will be supplied, or it will if I stop nattering to you and get on with some work.
Five weeks to the show, everything you need to know about the best show in the miniverse is here: www.miniatura.co.uk
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