It’s amazing the stuff you have to think about when you’re designing a doll kit for other miniaturists to make. It’s got to be sufficiently difficult and adequately interesting but absolutely not look impossible.
I have a lot of furniture kits that I never got round to and, as you know if you come here often, quite a collection of house kits that I’m going to do when I retire. But I don’t want the dolls to live forever in a kit pack undressed because not getting round to doing stuff makes some miniaturists guilty. Years ago Jayne Morrison told me that she’d worked out that shopping was part of the hobby. I think this is incredibly perceptive. Once you know that, you can let yourself off the hook. There are collector-only miniaturists and even some who commission assorted artists to make from scratch and make up kits for them. As well as everything else I’m a collector, I learned it at my father’s knee and crawling under tables in antique shops. The joy of acquisition is 99% absolute triumph, initially, and a vehicle for accelerated learning later. I know really quite a lot about the last 1200 years of British history, all because of doll’s houses. I started with an Edwardian house and needed to know what should go in it and why and then worked my way back a century at a time, absolutely fascinated. I did get stuck for a long time in the seventeenth century, which constantly draws me. Samuel Pepys, never far from the top of a reading pile, went to see Shakespeare performed by puppets because the theatres were closed as dens of iniquity during the Protectorate. Imagine that! An ancestor of Andy Pandy saved Shakespeare!
History is great and so are dolls, and so of course, are miniaturists, some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. The question, when you are designing kits for one is: what can you not do? And, how can we get round that?
I have made and dressed ’undreds of dolls. Thinking back to the first few, I remember a lot of frustration around just threading the needle. In miniature dressmaking you cannot use regular thread. Lying on the surface of the fabric, it looks as if the clothes have been cobbled together with hawsers off a dockyard. After much experimentation I have not found any thread to equal pure silk thread. It is expensive. An available brand which I find very reliable is YLI which is Japanese pure silk thread, costing round about £18 a reel. Reassuringly expensive, I believe is the term. In a matching colour you can do massive 1mm stitches on the face of the cloth and not see that they are there much, or if you do, they look in scale.
The needle has to match the thread, if you use an average hand sewing needle the holes it makes in the fabric will look as if the doll has come off worst in a joust. Size 11 or 12 sharps are thin enough to carry the silk thread, pass through with a whisper and leave no sign of their presence afterwards. When I first began to sew with such thin needles I spent many happy hours just trying to thread the needle. Many folk think that licking the end of the thread will help. If you think about a dry dishcloth and a wet one, which, if it were a single thread, would be most likely to stand to attention and march through the eye of a needle? After years of practise I found a few things that would help. Not messing around with the thread, so that it is still shiny, helps. Cutting the thread at an oblique angle so you are threading a point, helps. The one thing that would obviously help but doesn’t exist is a needle threader for silk thread and tiny eyes.
So I have developed one.
Here it is. It took ages to track down this wire, which will go double through the needle’s eye. The wire is 0.1mm wide, which by and large isn’t wide.
Of course I cannot put that loose in a kit and just tell you it’s there without sending miniaturists to the looney bin quick smart, no laughing hysterically on the way.
So
I have made very small packets for the needle threader to live in. This was not too difficult, although I have a few packets in the bin on which for some reason I was unable to spell threader.
That paper clip is the smallest I could find. If you do get one of these kits at the show, please tip the contents out on to white paper, it will save your sanity. I have not put a sanity clause in the instructions, because December is long gone.
To give you an idea of sizes, the long wiggly thing at the top is a human hair (mine), the barge pole at the bottom is the needle and the wire in the middle is the threader.
For further scale here is a pair of absolutely normal tweezers.
It’s all just miniature miniatures, for miniaturists to have a go at. More on this topic later; I still have a lot of work to do and only the first lot of dolls is designed, there will be a shorter doll, shortly.
These when made up will look like this, here is the blue one, you saw the prototype red one in the posting about the floor, so there’s not just a kit, a choice. They are slightly less than an inch and a quarter tall and are Tudor dolls that were not called dolls, they were called Bartholomew Babies and made of turned wood, of which very much more next posting.
The show is now four and a half weeks away which is horrific, as I’ve spent a couple of days this week being poorly with my rubbish intestines in the typical way, then yesterday I put my back out lugging printer paper round town, so I have no idea what I’m doing chatting to you when I could be working. I still have a few hundred yards of thread to wind.
It would have been so much quicker to make and dress Tudor doll’s dolls myself but kits were requested on several occasions, so here, kitty, kitty.
www.miniatura.co.uk is the place to go to see the details.
~~~~~~~~~~~