Although it has, rained, a lot recently. Up until yesterday the Met office was predicting today to be the only dry day this week, so I decided I would catch up with the washing, get it on the line, put the books out and then get pouring.
And then the Met office changed its mind and said it was going to rain today. Alexa and various other online agencies agreed. Bucketing down they said. So I didn’t get on with anything much except pouring porcelain.
Regular readers like you (hello, how are you? Glad we’ve got past January?) know that pouring porcelain dolls is tedious to say the least. It is highly skilled; if you are a person making jointed porcelain dolls under two inches please get in touch for a mutual complain. There might be someone in America, or Germany, maybe but I don’t know of anyone in the UK doing what I am doing currently, which is making doll’s dolls for dolls in twelfth scale and smaller.
Everything about it is difficult. Despite what will be 34 years of practice, right now, some parts of the process are still reliant on a dollop of luck along with the learned skill. This time round it has become apparent that two of the holes in two of the moulds are not quite right. The shapes do not demould easily. One of the hands, which is for a kit doll to make a Victorian doll’s doll just will not join in. I may have been too ambitious in making a holding hand. I think I thought at the time of modelling that it would be nice if you could make a kit doll and then give it a doll to hold. Well it would but a bent hand in such a tiny scale is, apparently, not easy to make a mould from.
This means that when you have poured enough for eight dolls, which is eight heads, sixteen legs and sixteen arms, you only have three arms and they are all right hands. It becomes necessary to carve the mould a bit until it will release and then just stand in the freezing kitchen and pour the missing hands one at a time, making up for the loss of detail in adapting the mould by carving it back into the wet clay. As you know, you have to wait, sometimes an hour or more, for the plaster mould to absorb the water from the clay sufficiently for the shape to release. As the mould gets wetter over time the release time changes. Occasionally you find yourself trying to carve a dollop of nothing much, occasionally you put your knife on a very dry casting which crumbles to dust. I find intuition to be the best timer.
There is a jointed doll which is easy to pour and will be quite small but it has thin ankles, which means that they are going to be difficult to rub down without breakages.
And there is a fourteen part twenty fourth small lady who turned out to have difficult shoulders. Getting the hole in the correct place so that her shoulders would sit next to her torso nicely was the problem.
Days and days standing in the freezing kitchen are not good. Also because I’m not working out, but still, foolishly eating because I am cold, I am getting fatter. Getting fatter after Christmas is just annoying.
I read somewhere about the joy of creativity. This article did not include instructions on how to get your feet warm enough to be able to go to sleep, which I feel would have been useful information.
In between the freezing hours I pop upstairs and make cards from printed scrapbook papers and similar. It is slightly creative and certainly easy and good fun but it is someone else’s art with proven and demonstrated methods of completing the task.
Herein lies the reason why I fell in love with miniaturists forty years ago. Very many of them are original artists in difficult mediums. The skill levels of some Miniatura exhibitors are off the charts. There are people who are crafty in the sense of sticking together pre-made items. Over the years there have been some of those who were hailed as the new best thing. I’d include people making up kits of various sorts, people decorating bought in items and so on. One of the wonderful things about Miniatura is that the brochure for each show does indicate which exhibitors are crafters as such and which are original artists. Over the years it has been interesting to see that the stickers together come and go but the original artists last the distance, in many cases only giving up when they actually die.
Which I am hoping will be me eventually.
Next up will be the gargoyles. These are very experimental. They are articulated, small and, naturally, never seen before, and will only be seen if they work. The first task is to find a way of creating porcelain slip of the right colour for a gargoyle. Then I have to devise a way of attaching wings.
I’ll show you all of these things if they come to fruition. Part of real creativity has to be the willingness to fail. Not knowing if I can do it at all is the engine of uncertainty that propels me into the chilly kitchen in the middle of winter.
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