Me and Cleopatra, just like that. Me and Mark Anthony, even closer.
The other way of finding things you have lost, for the creatives among us, is to spend sixteen years (seventeen in September) writing a blog. As you do. Well, I did.
When you are a bit short of something to write about, which occasionally occurs, write about the annoying way you are wasting your life by searching for stuff that you know is at this address, up the stairs, in the chamber (or the other chamber) amongst all the furniture, gilded, stuffed and decorated (miniature) artefacts (made and houses) and stuff (collected.) Very like entering a pyramid, in some trepidation, all alone without your mummy (or anyone else’s).
Prior to having written of the search (scroll down to the previous posting) it would be advisable to order, buy, and waste money on, a very similar die to the pyramid box die because you do need that box die.
At this point, if you have not attended Miniatura the dolls house show with more original artists than any other show, where if all the original art were full size, the show would fill an entire village or small town centre, you would be unaware of my show packaging.
Packages in miniatures are an essential part of it. A huge amount of the joy is the bit where you get home and put your feet right up and have a rummage through the packages.
As I was only a fair visiting miniaturist thirty eight years ago, prior to morphing into an exhibitor, I know the joy of the packaging. Thirty eight years ago it was mostly small pink striped paper bags, and I liked them. Every so often I bought something that came in a little box. Paper bag, good. Box, better.
Die cutting has enabled me to fit the packaging to the doll and make little boxes for every doll I sell. Some of the tiny ones were sold in transparent domes, but the domes were also nicely packaged in boxes.
The doll boxes are handed over in lovely shiny little carrier bags. I buy the carrier bags, which are quite expensive but I think, improve the whole experience.
Some visitors are organised. They arrive with wheeled suitcases. In a suitcase a doll in a box, in a carrier bag, is more likely to arrive home in a happy condition.
Some visitors are hands free, in which case a little carrier bag is essential.
I also know, being a miniaturist, that intention is everything. For many years, many years ago, people used to come up to my table and shyly apologise that they hadn’t got round to dressing the glass eyed doll which was still living in a paper bag, and, did I have any hair dressing tips? Hence the dolls in underwear with brushable hair, which can live in a bedroom until you get round to it.
Some dolls, I am aware, never get even as far as a bedroom. So they all have lovely boxes to live in until the miniaturist gets round to it. They can be retrieved in good condition, played with for a while and put safely back in the box until next time.
So the box dies are essential.
Which is why I was so annoyed when I lost the perfect die I had bought to make the boxes before I had even sculpted the dolls to go in them.
So, an hour and a half before I found the die, I went online and bought a similar one.
This is step one to finding something lost, I feel. Get another so the first one is redundant, therefore, no longer useful and more easily discovered.
Step two, as elucidated, is to write a blog posting about it, having thoughtfully started the blog nearly seventeen years ago, in order to be able to write about stuff, including missing stuff, which is writing about stuff there isn’t, which you might think is pretty clever.
Then, just before you give up and go downstairs for lunch, just check the box in the bedroom where it cannot possibly be and look in the plastic wallet labelled ‘pyramid box die’
yes it was actually in a plastic wallet, and actually labelled with a label, written on, by me,
and there it was.
It now lives in the cupboard in another wallet labelled ‘box dies’
this, naturally, will enable me to up my game by losing all the box dies at once, instead of a paltry one at a time.
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