I said I wouldn’t. I said I had no room. I wondered what I was going to do with all those I already had. I haven’t really got anywhere to display them.
Nevertheless (ever the greater) I am starting a new house!
I am pleased and happy and cheerful and excited and remember now what miniatures is all about, which must be a good thing. I knew it was acoming, I’ve felt it for months like some sort of incipient headache, nagging at the back of my mind. I’ve even been visiting the house I’m gestating, online for almost a year.
The interesting thing about houses is that they are very like babies in that you never know exactly what sort you are having until it is actually there. You can’t even guarantee it will reach fruition after inception, plenty of us have still-born kits behind the settee and quite a few have a nasty miscarriage in the loft or the garage. Then there are the sad adoptions of other miniaturists horrible mistakes, that never get done, not to mention all the abandoned orphaned quick projects.
Talking of which, if you do want a rescue house and have more love than funds, Pat Cutforth is having a sale again. Pat runs one of the most, if not the most, successful miniatures fund raising for the Cancer research charities effort in the country. She does it at Miniatura, where many of the visitors and stand holders bring miniatures donations to her stand and the rest of the visitors and exhibitors come and buy them. It’s brilliant, only limited by the floor space available for the stand. However, in her own place, in Wiltshire at Shaw Farm SN8 4LU, Pat can offer over 50 houses, old, new and every scale on Saturday November 2nd. There will also be kits, roomboxes, shops, furniture, accessories, tools, supplies, books and magazines. There are definitely magazines, over 2000 of them at 50p each, which means that every visitor can afford something and the proceeds are all going to the charity. It is an absolute miniaturesfest which you will come out of with an fantastic bargain (or several) and a wonderful glow of goodness. It’s from 10.30 to 2.30, which is four hours of doing good by shopping. If you’re anywhere near it’s unmissable. I’ll remind you nearer the time.
Back at the ranch, despite the kit behind the door and the unfinished smaller scale dwellings, I’m embarking on a new house so definitely, I have actually sent for it from overseas. Having visited the website endlessly and printed off pictures of the various candidates and narrowed my choice down to two (even though I knew which one I was going to have from the start) I still waited until I had whizzed around the hall at the Min and checked out all the offerings in the same scale, just to be sure.
I have bought the cladding for it, some at the Min, some by post afterwards, when I was utterly certain. The cladding comes from Richard Stacey, who makes claddings for dolls houses in real materials. The brick is brick, the slate is slate, the stone is stone. Once I’d bought a bag of actual bricks to build the garden wall and the slates for the roof, I was committed (and probably will be.)
The house is going to be Regency, or Jane Austen as the era is sometimes known by those hazy on history. More about the Regency (which equates to the American federal period) to come. I was fairly well au fait with it, having made dolls for other people’s houses in every scale possible for twenty years, peaking as that television series starring Colin Firth as Mr Darcy emerging hot and bothered and dripping wet from his own duck pond hit the screens. I even wrote and published my own miniature skit on the book in two scales and I think I might have one unsold one left somewhere to put in my house.
And the winner is…………………………
a 24th scale Greenleaf house, the Van Buren. You can see it on the Greenleaf site under half scale houses. This will be my third Greenleaf house, if you count the unfinished 144th scale gothic I have (somewhere), which is the miniature version of the one I first wanted when I began dollshousering quarter of a century ago. I could never afford the Beacon Hill, which I wanted to do so Gothicly, it almost hurt. I saved and saved and was nearly there when saw my antique house in a shop in town and sold everything to possess it, after which the Beacon Hill was only ever going to be a dream. Many years later, when I had partially recovered financially, I invested in the Greenleaf Glencroft, which looks so very similar to many of the Shakespearean properties in Stratford-on-Avon. I built it with great pleasure, taking it back to the seventeenth century. I started thatching the roof and was quite pleased with the result until I found a picture in a book about thatching, identical to my roof. The words underneath said ‘This very poor and haphazard effort is not likely to last more than five years at most.’ So I ripped the thatch off, chucked the hot melt glue gun in the garage and lamented throwing away the shingles that came with the kit. The house still has an unfinished roof, despite the chimney having porcelain bricks hand made by me. It has a wonderfully complex lighting scheme, diagrammatically explained in a schematic drawing in the swing-out chimney. It has priest holes and much of the furniture, in kits, waiting to be made. It has stained glass windows, added carving, panelled rooms and every authentic feature you can imagine. And it’s unfinished.
This time I have hamstrung myself from the start by offering to write it up for a magazine. Will I build it? Will I finish it? Am I crazy to start a kit house, now when I have more to do for other people and more struggle and difficulty in my life than ever before?
Stick with me as we go on this adventure together. I love 24th scale and have more finished houses and collector items (boxes and houses) in this scale (six of them, not lots but six, finished) than any other. It’s lovably small but do-able. You can get your hand in and you can properly play with the finished house. You don’t have to stick everything down and I know someone who makes great dolls in this scale.
(Me, it’s me.)
here you can see Richard Stacey’s bricks www.richardstacey.com
here you’ll find the house www.greenleafdollhouses.com click on shop and then company store to find the half scale.
I am so excited!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JaneLaverick.com – the future is back to the bricks.