I have been in such a terrible rush lately, I decided to calm myself by quickly drawing a picture of a slow loris.
Here it is
The fast loris is, as yet, uncaptured by science; the slow loris, at once inescapably cute and, probably tasty, is the only venomous mammal there is, like a fancy dress commissioning mother whose kid came last.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, writing the instructions for the smaller Tudor doll’s doll kit, in two colours, took all day. Helpfully, when I read the proofs for the second one, I discovered the typo in the first one but by then the printer had run out of ink so I had to hand correct the first, it was only two letters transposed but it made a different word, which was sense but nonsense in context. Blimey, I sound like a politician.
Anyway the destructions are done, when the new lot of ink (as the S&H informs me, printer ink is more expensive than champagne) arrives in either a gold carriage, considering the cost, or hurled in the direction of the drive, considering everything else, I’ll be able to devise and print the labels. Until then I’ll just have to assemble the components for the kit.
Wrapping the silk thread on the straws, which I’m using for miniature thread reels, is fraught with the interesting possibility of RSI of the already oldish thumbs. Even twirling, by which I mean twirling to give an even and lump-free result, is a skill that makes you realise why the spinning wheel was greeted with such joy when it finally appeared in England in the late thirteenth century, round about the same time as the Black Death.
Imagine the scene: ‘A new fangled spinning wheel! Such joy! When one has found the sparse English instructions in this brick thick manual, one will be happy for ever and ever, thank you my husband! Oh, I feel a bit off, arrgh, a bubo! Clonk, thud.’
‘Oh dammeth! One will have to puttest it on eBay.’
Or similar.
Anyway the one inch dolls are worked out, here are the demo dolls
These are just under an inch high, which is about the size of the top joint of your thumb. The one on the left, dressed in black is exactly the size of my top thumb joint.
I now want to dress a glass eyed girl who can hold the doll and I discovered, when I was rootling through a box of dolls to see if I had put the roll of lace in there, a whole load of eighteenth century doll’s dolls that I’d forgotten I’d done.
I have lorst a little roll of lace that was utterly perfect for little lace caps. Tudors did wear caps under all their head dresses. Whether or not hair washing was frequent or infrequent is debateable. There is the odd coin of Anne Boleyn in existence and a few portraits but they all show her wearing the fashionable gable hood. Contemporary writing about her is often very sneery about her long back hair, though the portraits show it as dark brown. Red hair was the colour to have right up to Elizabeth the First and beyond, so the portraits may have been taking fashion into account. I have painted many portraits and am well accustomed to sitters asking for various features to be depicted otherwise. Amazingly, in the eighteenth century age was the desirable attribute, hence all the powdered wigs. Wigless sitters are given a silver sheen to the hair regardless of the actual colour.
I wish I could find the roll of lace. It is about that big and was on the table, just there. I have cleared the table, examined the floor and emptied out every receptacle capable of emptying out that is in the vicinity. I have had to do these smaller dolls with different lace caps. If you do happen to spot the lace please let me know. Can you see it? Can you point to it?
It took much of an afternoon fruitlessly lace searching. It was authentically sixteenth century in that I was constantly declaiming my urgent need for the correct lace. In an authentic 1950s and Shakespearean mood I was obliged to do without.
‘For lo! The varlet!’
‘Where doth he parade?’
‘Without.’
For lo I shall go off and work like a fast loris, cute and almost mythic.
Also mythic, Miniatura, details here: www.miniatura.co.uk
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