Look, look!
I have managed a brushable wig on a two and a half inch doll with a head the size of a pea!
I have brushed it, so can any future owner.
Oh wow.
The head is about the size of your little finger nail and I have wigged it. With a real sewn wig you can brush like a wig for a human.
Crikey! The world is our lobster.
I’m going to have a cup of tea and see if I can do it again.
See this marvel for yourself at this show: www.miniatura.co.uk
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Despite all the everything, there will be five new dolls at Spring Min from me.
When I say new dolls I do mean absolutely new porcelain dolls that have gone through all the processes necessary to bring them to life. These are ceramic artefacts that are real heirlooms for your dolls’ house, in that the material they are made of and the traditional way in which they are made, but in miniature, will last for hundreds of years, I do not use dubious new materials or rely on glue, removable paint or anything else transitory. They are new in that each one started out as a sculpture or a collection of articulating sculpted parts that can move together and stand just as you do. Here they all are in one photo, standing on their own. They have not been glued to the floor, they stand because I build the balance in from the start.
From the ruler behind them you can see that these are twenty fourth scale or smaller. Three are dolls to be residents in your dolls’ house and two are to be dolls for your dolls.
Let’s look one by one.
Here is the lad. In real life he would be five feet tall, in 24th scale he is two and a half inches. He is a teenage boy. He is composed of fourteen pieces of porcelain internally jointed. As you can see, he can sit, he can point, he can move his head. How do you see him dressed? Do you see a mediaeval apprentice? Do you see a modern kid with a baseball cap on backwards?
Here is the toddler. This is the most articulated, internally jointed very small doll so far. He (or she) is composed of ten pieces of porcelain, at an inch and a quarter in porcelain, this small person is a toddler in 24th scale, or, if you have suddenly felt a need, a small baby in twelfth scale. He, she, or it can sit, stand and crawl. What era should this toddler live in? Is he a tiny Tudor?
Here is my new lady. I think she is gorgeous, though you may not be able to see it until she is dressed. She can sit, stand, do aerobics, turn her head and is only just under two and a half inches. That makes her a five foot woman, which many women were through history. Her face, which is easiest to see on the doll at the front, was inspired by Leonardo’s Mary, who I met in the Uffizi. She is fourteen pieces of porcelain and has bare feet, so she could live in a bedroom in night attire.
Those are the three new people. Below are the doll’s dolls. I have been making dolls’ dolls for a few years now and they are reasonably faithful to the real historic dolls they miniaturise. Both the dolls this time are recent.
The first is the jointed 1930s doll, which I have been making and shrinking for some time.
This doll is now down to one inch. Although the original was a 1930s doll, if you are not very particular about timing, this type of doll has been known throughout history. It is a simple head/body shape with arms and legs jointed by means of a hole through the body that will admit some form of stringing, whether wire, or, in some areas of the world, rope or string. This doll is one inch tall and looks good as a doll’s doll in twelfth scale and works as a larger doll in 24th scale.
Finally the one piece doll, the Frozen Charlotte. This has been a very long time in the making and is a nightmare to clean prior to firing. One slip of the scalpel, one over enthusiastic rub and it’s a dead doll in the bin. Why on earth would I want to make something as difficult? It is, of course, the historical aspect. There are quite a few of these one piece dolls surviving in museums that were made in large quantities, often by child slave labour, in Victorian factories. In large, because they are only one piece of porcelain and not quite as awful to rub down, they are cheaper to make. In a kiln, a doll of five parts takes up a lot of room. You can get about three one part dolls in the same amount of space. The hair and shoes were china painted, all that remained to make a saleable doll cheaply, was a bit of lace or gathered ribbon and there is the china doll most families could afford to buy from the pedlar’s tray.
She was called Frozen Charlotte because of a Victorian cautionary tale of proud Charlotte, who went for a sleigh ride without her shawl because she wanted everyone to see her pretty dress. Charlotte arrived at the end of the ride frozen solid. I have not been able to find out if the tale came before the doll or was invented to sell the doll, either way if you had said ‘Frozen Charlotte doll’ to any Victorian they would have known what you meant.
I may try to shrink Charlotte a bit further. The originals came in many sizes, quite a few had the legs welded together and the arms outstretched, often they were made of white glazed china. I didn’t weld the legs on my doll so that she would stand up. If I had welded the legs there would be a lot more dolls. I’m my own worst enemy, I really am.
Now it is over to you. I would like to know, if you are going to Spring Min and intend to collect one of these, how you would like a doll to be dressed. Does one of these dolls look like someone you have been looking for? Is this your housekeeper? Is this your Regency lady? Your Renaissance Mary?
There is no obligation if you do ask for a doll to be dressed, if you get to the show and the doll is not what you fancied after all. I ask because, as you can see, these dolls are difficult to make, it’s taken thirty three years, so there are not many of them. I would like to dress the doll you’d like for your house. Of course, because of they way they are made, you can dress and redress them, and so can your descendants. Do not confuse these with polymer clay dolls with the clothes stuck on, or dolls with wire bodies that have to be dressed right down to their wrists. These dolls will look as good as they do in the pictures, in very little clothing. They’ll look great in swimwear, or twenties off-the-shoulder dresses. They are just like you.
I know if you are coming to the show for the first time you’ll want to know how much. My ten part twenty fourth scale dolls are £25 dressed and these amazing fourteen part internally strung, articulated dolls will be £27, which, in a hundred years, will probably be the cost of a sandwich. (Aren’t you glad you’re living now?) I may make dolls with brushable hair, as I do in twelfth scale. These will cost a bit more if I decide to try, because each wig takes a day to make. It won’t be much more, it’s me, all my prices were fossilized, long ago.
To tell me your wishes simply click on the bit below where it says ‘leave a comment’. I will see you at the show. I have made a new box for these dolls to live in and I’ll put a sign on it saying ‘new dolls’ so you won’t have to look at all the one thousand things on the table to find them, though if you want to do so, please do. That is why I am going. Forty years ago, visiting Miniatura, I wanted a doll and could only find a few that all looked the same. I wanted a doll that looked like a doll, not like a person. In my world people were the problem, I thought the dolls’ house should have dolls in it, that looked like dolls and were art and were collectable and could be played with.
So I made them.
See you there.
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It is two weeks to Miniatura at Stoneleigh.
I am glad of that because I’ve been ill again with intestinal trouble but I’ve got enough time to get better and all I want to do is sit quietly and assemble dolls.
This is a good thing. I will have five new dolls to show, all small 24th scale and under. I am so glad I used the high temperature wire I used for the Egyptians. I wish I had used it for the kittens, but it just looked too weedy. It has to be, to enable the stringing. Stringing is still an immense difficulty.
You can see why. This is the upper arm of a doll. I do not have big hands. This arm has emerged from the mould quite soft with hopefully enough of a hole in it for the elastic to pass through. When it had dried I had to be able to hold it and rub it to remove the seam lines and imperfections, and make the end you can see round enough and empty enough for the lower arm to fit inside it. You can see how easily it could be broken, just holding it, before it had turned to stone in the kiln. There is a hole which I have made at one end which has to let the elastic out. The hole cannot be too big, if it is the next joint will not sit in place, it cannot be too small, or the jewellery elastic will not pass, the difference is fractions of a millimetre. On the mat are many arms, and some thighs, some distorted in the kiln, some I broke when cleaning, some will have fired with a hole too small to let the elastic pass.
The dolls I am making, are, like the Ancient Egyptians, composed of fourteen parts of porcelain, internally strung and moveable and poseable, their hands and feet swivel, their elbows and knees work, their heads move, they will all last hundreds of years.
Stringing the arms is not too difficult. Stringing the bodies is fiendishly difficult. I make wire stringing hooks from the 32 Gauge wire I used to make earring hooks for twelfth scale dolls. It’s thin, it breaks, it has to curve in the armhole of the body and out of the neck, bending invisibly inside where I cannot see what it is doing. I am only able to do this after thirty three years of practice. Thirty three years ago there would have been swearing and giving up but I am now in the far reaches of impossibility. As I have done it once, I know I can do it. There is a huge wastage rate. I have trays of tiny bits of porcelain that are just no good.
However, there will be new dolls. Stay tuned, I’ll show you soon.
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The power of two
I have told you before; what I tell you is true.
When I said it had all gone horribly wrong
That was not the end, I should know,
Of the song.
First some idiot (yes it was me)
Used the wrong wire all over with glee.
I thought after the Min I would try once again
Who am I kidding – get out of the rain!
But oh no I didn’t. From up on my horse
I booked a kiln visit – much later of course.
To the garage I took the phone, just to see…
Without thinking the kiln was listening to me.
Did the very next firing go well?
Well nope
It just went on and on until I lost hope.
The kiln had been promised a nice engineer
Some fool made the promise where it could hear.
Is it working now? Of course it is not, it is nope
It is bust, it is sulking
It looks like it’s broke.
So the poor little kittens will just have to wait
Until well past the Min, what I’m calling too late.
I was so very excited about the gargoyles
They were beautifully gruesome and covered in boils
And, without hands and feet, just horribly spoiled.
I stupidly went and told you the tale
Will I ever learn anything, any at all?
First there’s the stumble
And then there’s the fall.
Use the wrong wire, you are wrong in the making
And the kiln thinks it’s funny and has joined in by breaking.
At last it went cold, I have retrieved the shelf,
The colours have fired, though slowly it’s true
If the hoped-for dolls work, I will show them to you.
Two, two, the power of two,
It seems you should wait for the other shoe –
On every Min table’s the stuff that got through.
There’s some other universe, deffo not mine
Where artists do art stuff quite right the first time
Where they smile and they bow – it quite gives you the pip
They don’t know of the slip twixt the cup and the lip.
After thirty three years you would think I am hot
Confident, able – apparently not.
My standards for me are impossibly high
But if they were not, I know I’d not try
The difficulty of doing it, is also the why.
I’m happy to say I know you understand me
You can make orders but cannot command me
If it were easy, there’d be nothing to do,
But you know that if you are a miniaturist too.
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Miniatura is the show where all the miniaturists meet. You can get there by car and there is free parking, you can get there by train and there is a free shuttle bus from Coventry, you can get there by plane and then train and then free shuttle bus. The journey will be the big expense because entry fees are modest, tickets are still available and most of the stands will be exhibiting the work of artisans in miniature, or things you need to do your miniaturising.
I will be taking a thousand things hand made by me and whatever has got through the current problems. To know more look here:
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This morning I got a chance to have a good look at the failures that came out of the kiln which was pretty much everything.
It was not the Chinese wire. That was in just a few dolls and it was fine. It was some other wire, slightly thicker.
I found the roll of wire. It was labelled nichrome wire, it was on a black plastic roll, it looked like all the other rolls of nichrome wire.
Or, no it didn’t. The label was subtly different and the other end didn’t say the name of the manufacturer. There was no name of manufacturer. Did I buy this years ago, thinking it was the right one and find it to be no good? Is that why I had put it in a different drawer? When you’ve been doing something for thirty four years sometimes you cannot remember the detail of every year.
I have kept a kiln book, Every firing has been documented. Not every glaze, china paint and roll of wire. If I were a very commercial maker I probably would have done so. I’m not doing it for the money, there are many ways to make money and none of them are art the way I do it.
Additionally one entire set of shoes, which means one entire doll, is no good. A failure. The glaze has bunched up into lumps. Now this I do remember happening previously. What I didn’t remember is which glaze did it.
The writing is on the wall, or, to be exact, will be on the glaze pot and is already on the plastic bag in which the roll of wire now resides.
I am now china painting some of the dolls which may be alright.
I was so happy about the new things, which will not now appear.
Fortunately there are two Miniaturas a year. Amazingly some exhibitors only go to one of them and so do some visitors.
Two is my number, so I’ll see you at the next one, just three weeks away.
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Oh dear, kiln ware failure, it’s all gone horribly horribly wrong.
You cannot tell until you unpack the kiln. I carefully lifted each shelf and walked very steadily through the garage, the utility, the kitchen and the hall until I got to the dining room where I laid each shelf one at a time on an upturned box on the dining table.
When I got all the way down to the kittens, I had a feeling of dread. As I took the kittens off the wires, most of their little arms and legs just fell off and when I laid them in the tray, so did the heads.
The gargoyles have hooks in their backs for wings, as I picked the bodies off the shelf, the hooks disintegrated, as did every hook in every foot and hand.
Nearly all the wire stringing hooks that took so long to make and were so carefully embedded in the wet clay, just crumbled to dust. This was a mystery because I’d used the same wire successfully in the Egyptians. The babies seemed OK and the new dolls were too but either the placing in the kiln or the coloured slip which I had made had overheated the wires locally, which had died. Some of the eyeballs had scrunched up as if it had got a bit hot and most of the shoe soles were no good either.
Oh dear, what a waste of time and effort, what a spectacular fail.
There isn’t time to pour it all again and clean and fire it twice. I have washed and grit scrubbed the bits that look alright and I have experimentally strung a new doll to see if the hooks would hold up but there will be no gargoyles or kittens at the show.
The problem is the quality of the wire, bought through the big river retailer, arriving from China and purporting to be temperature resistant nichrome wire. I have never had problems with British made wire but cannot find it fine enough to make tiny stringing hooks.
The difficulty is a true miniature problem. As you go smaller the tools and materials have to shrink too but the strength of anything you are going to play with needs to be as good if not better proportionally than in standard twelfth scale.
I will not be appearing with an empty table. I take about a thousand items and was wondering how to fit the new stuff on the table, which singular problem has disappeared to be replaced by about two hundred useless bits of porcelain, lying in sad little heaps on the dining table.
I don’t know many 24th scale specialists; this could be the reason, the smaller you go, the harder it gets, though I last had a failure this spectacular about thirty three years ago, when the OH, trying to be helpful and manly, balanced a hard plastic tool box, with all the dolls to go to a show, on the lip of the boot of the car. It crashed on to the drive and nearly all of the dolls broke.
You may have noticed he got involved this time, commandeering the kitchen for a fortnight when I should have been in there pouring, if I had done it then I’d have found out a fortnight ago and still had time to experiment with bigger, different wire stringing hooks in a new pour.
There’s a moral here somewhere.
I still have to china paint anything that looks as if it might work but after the show I will book a kiln engineer to come and replace the elements and turn the temperature dial up the right way. The last chap put the dial on upside down, causing many years of guess work, which might be critical now.
When I tell you what I do is quite tricky, you may well have wondered how tricky it can be to make a porcelain doll with fourteen bits of porcelain invisibly strung under three inches tall. The proof of the pudding is in the failure.
On the other hand if it were easy, there would be no point in trying.
Months of work, binned.
Depressing.
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Find out what the successful exhibitors have planned at www.miniatura.co.uk
Today is the first day for about a month when it hasn’t rained.
Naturally this prompts two thoughts. The first is that it will be approximately four months before the first notification of a hosepipe ban. It might be an age thing but a hosepipe ban really annoys me. I live on an island. The UK is a group of islands, has been since the Pleistocene. We are surrounded by water. Where are the desalination plants?
The second thought is that as the sun is shining today magazine writers everywhere will be polishing up their dreadful articles about getting ‘beach body ready.’ This is also annoying on several levels. The first is that if you had a real beach body you would have a rocky bottom, sandy footings and a seagull standing on your moss covered beach head. The second is that they are only writing this rubbish to make you feel inadequate so that they can tell their advertisers, who would like to sell you slimming injections, muscle building supplements, tanning lotion and sunblock that they have done their best to help spin the wheels of commerce.
For me I would have been torn between gardening or shopping in the luxurious dryness had it not been for Miniatura, now less than four weeks away. Today finally, after weeks of work, including weeks modelling, and moulding just after the last show, and pouring and rubbing down and a first firing, I got the kiln on for the second time.
Making ceramics of any variety is quite a complicated business. I would like to have been there when the first caveman found out that the mud he had put in the fire, or, possibly, the mud on which he had built the fire, had gone all hard.
Matters have become quite refined and highly specialised since then. I would have to describe myself as an amateur mud baker really. The only formal training I had in doll making was thirty five years ago, when I went without dinners for quite a while to afford to attend a porcelain doll making morning, to see what was involved. I appreciated the basics and ever since then have been making it up, in every sense of the expression.
I keep wanting to make things that I have no idea how to fire in the kiln. My kiln is a top loading septagonal device, encased in metal, lined with grooved firebricks in which sit the elements which heat up electrically. The kiln is thoroughly insulated so that with each heating of the elements, the heat builds until it reaches a temperature that will bend a small ceramic rod which will activate the switch to switch the kiln off.
The parts of the dolls sit on removable shelves. The shelves are round and have just enough space to admit a pair of hands between the shelf and the kiln wall to lower the shelf into position on the shelf below. Between each shelf are cylindrical props. Each shelf has a wash painted on to prevent doll parts welding themselves to the shelf. Additionally each shelf is covered with a thin layer of kiln sand at each firing. The doll parts have to shrink to their final size, the kiln sand is there to help them move.
However, some of the things I want to make are glazed. The glaze cannot lie on the kiln sand; it would stick and emerge gritty. Gritty dolls are no good. Currently I am making kittens, because the cats were so popular.
As you can see the cats are coloured with glazes all over. These are specialist velvet glazes, which fire slightly furryish. It took me a while to work out how to glaze fire the cats without them going gritty. Each cat has a hollow body, into each hole of which fits a wire stringing hook which I have made and embedded in the arm, leg or head. To fire the glazed cats I insert a temperature proof wire through either a body hole or a stringing hook. Either end of the wire is then suspended from a concoction of shelf support towers.
This is fraught with danger. The hooks can fail and the part drop off, leaving a one legged cat and four other parts that match nothing. The wires can relax, dangling cat parts in the sand, the parts can slide together and stick. I could simplify matters and ensure some matches by colouring the cats all the same. I like cats, the whole point of them is that they are all different and, anyway if I made them all the same it would no longer be arty, I’d be verging on commerce, perish the thought.
I’ll be lucky to have one whole cat to my name and I will not know if I do until the kiln has turned itself off, everything has gone cold overnight and most of tomorrow and, at last I can open the kiln. Even then I have put the cats at the bottom of a stack of three and a half shelves, all of which I will have to rescue before I find if I have cats or if I am several kittens short of a posse.
And I haven’t even told you about the very experimental gargoyles.
If you want to see what all the other crazy Miniatura artists are up to, you can find out here www.miniatura.co.uk
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I could never be in the SAS. Aside from the fact that I am short, fat and old and for most of my life couldn’t see further than the end of my nose, literally, I am not very good with things going wrong unexpectedly. This week being a case in point.
Batteries, mostly and, as usual because it was me, happening in twos. I have a wireless mouse for the laptop on which I’m writing this. I like a mouse. My mouse went on strike, showing upon the screen no pointer of any variety. I had to use the track pad until I could find the relevant battery in the kitchen drawer. So I fed the battery to the mouse and the mouse worked for about five seconds before it died again.
Our kitchen drawer has batteries of every shape and size, just like yours. It amazes me why manufacturers manufacture artefacts that require different batteries from all the other batteries, Not only do I not know why they do it, I am also unable to fathom why we seem to have so many of them, and also, why no one can design a battery box which is secure in the shop, but containing subsequently, to avoid the situation whereby batteries, once purchased, have to be winkled out with fingernails, scissors and patience, but, upon being introduced to their home drawer will immediately leap out of the cardboard and roll all over the place like a three year old on E numbers.
Picking a battery from the tribe rolling around under the dishcloths and pan scrubbers does not guarantee the battery being new, full of charge, or even working. Some should probably be donated to a battery museum. Therefore, when the first battery died in the mouse after a few seconds, I naturally assumed the battery to be at fault and swapped it for a potentially more vital one, also rolling around in the drawer. This proving futile, as did the definitely new one prized at the cost of a fingernail from packaging, I concluded the mouse had died and that three batteries among the rolling flock were now suspect or, maybe, ticketty boo. Tricky to say until the next battery powered item was hungry.
Fortunately the OH had a spare mouse which I borrowed for a few days, being unable to get to the shops myself as I was rubbing down porcelain, two weeks later than I meant to, thanks to the kitchen refit, and really did not want to either stop, or go to the shops in my rubbing down gear.
If you have met me at Miniatura, you may think me to be a well-dressed, short person, with a new perm and comfortable shoes. If you met me while I am engaged in rubbing down, you might be forgiven for thinking I am an elderly derelict.
It’s the porcelain. The dolls I am making now are under three inches, composed of fourteen parts of mostly hollow porcelain. The only way I can make them at all is to rub the tiny cast pieces very gently with my small fingers encased in old cut-up tights. There is a way of partially firing porcelain and scrubbing it wet with a type of file, but you could never do that with the millimetre pieces I produce, you would destroy them all. So the work of rubbing dry is just that, it generates a lot of very fine dust. The very fine dust settles on everything and is capable of causing silicosis, so I rub down, having covered the table, the floor, the chair and the Welsh dresser in plastic and myself in a full face respirator, a head band and an apron and my very oldest clothing, usually an ancient pair of jeans, and a selection of holey tee shirts circa 1980. The glamour is off the scale.
I change the tee shirts every day in order to spend a week looking like a tramp, but, not a dusty tramp. However, the effort required to get changed to tramp to the shops is just not worth the time lost in which I could be working.
Naturally the minute time is tight, it is also stolen.
On Friday, as it was raining for the (put any large number here that you like) consecutive day, the OH, who volunteers once a week at the hospital, asked for a lift. Taking off my apron but still in tat, I splodged out to the car.
Which would not start.
The OH stood in the downpour outside the car, asking if it would start.
It would not.
The OH vouchsafed the information that we were with the Automobile Association via the bank, he thought, prior to me driving him to the hospital in his car.
Back at home. now covered in wet dust, with my hair plastered to my face and dripping rewetted slip down my neck, I went through the papers.
You really should keep your paperwork up to date, chucking out the old stuff from years ago and only keeping the relevant bits.
Do you? Me neither.
So, as my car was due to be collected for a service and MOT in two weeks time, first I rang the garage. This used to be in my town but has now moved, conveniently, many miles away to another town. They could not collect it A) because they had no drivers and B) because it would not go and C) there was no point anyway because it took four days to order the correct battery.
I tried the phone line of my car insurers. I got a message saying hang up, they no longer had a phone line, they were just online with a portal, so that was no good.
There were more bits of irrelevant paper in two desk drawers than there were dead batteries rolling around in the kitchen drawer. If I had not been short of time because Miniatura is only four weeks away, I’d clear out the drawer.
Nevertheless, eventually, I found the information for the AA, to which, apparently, we did belong. I rang and they arrived before I had time to change into the clothing of a responsible householder. So I answered the door to the AA man with the rain and slip running off my hair through the holes in my tee shirt, and back out to the holes in my shoes.
He looked at me, ‘You have a car? That won’t start?’ The first question seemed unlikely, I admit.
It did not take him three goes with a selection of batteries out of a drawer to determine that the car battery was A) underpowered for the car and not the right one, despite the battery being the one they sold me with the car and B) dead.
We had a brief trot through the ‘my garage which cannot help’ scenario and various possibilities, and a long stand in the pouring rain staring into the car engine, before the AA man suggested Halfords. This is a bicycle and car sundries national chain, who I would never have considered for a car battery. A call to head office produced the information that they did purvey car batteries and that the out of town branch nearest to me might have some in stock. Which did I want?
Er? Happily the AA man was willing to be put on speaker phone and run through a list to find the right one. Having ascertained that my nearest branch, far away at the out of town shopping centre had that one in stock, I paid by card and phone, while the AA man dripped in the porch. I was given a lengthy code, by phone, to prove it was me, should I be able to get to the shop, additionally a necessary text was sent to the OH confirming the purchase. A confirmatory email was also sent fairly pointlessly, to my laptop. The one with the borrowed mouse. Then the AA man, who had to go on another call, got my car going in a one time only, do not stop this car it will never go again, sort of way, I rushed upstairs to change just the holey tee shirt and into a pair of proper shoes also without decorative holes, I got into the car, running on the drive, and drove to the miles way out of town shopping centre without gaps, hesitations or pauses, but a couple of near stalls due to other drivers suddenly pulling out or stopping because of the driving rain making the driving difficult and I drove all the way with my heart in my mouth and into the space by the bollards directly outside the shop whereupon the car stopped permanently. STOP.
However, at the shop all was well. The massive code was accepted without the need to ring the OH to ask what the text was and some cute little colleague, who could easily have been anyone’s granddaughter, bravely stood in the downpour and swapped batteries. I went shopping while she did it, at the suggestion of the lady behind the till, because I really couldn’t get any wetter. Eventually I squashed back into the seat of the re-batteried car, and for lo! She worked. Hooray!
At home the OH complained that his trouser legs had got damp walking home, but I won, as by then my underwear was sodden along with everything else, but I changed slightly, back into the dry holey tee shirt and got on with the rubbing down.
The following day I nerved myself up and got in the car which started. I went to the very local supermarket and bought a new mouse which actually came with a very ordinary battery and that worked too.
Then I worked and worked and finally the kiln went on, first firing, at eight last night.
I could not feel more exhausted if I had yomped up to the ice cream van on the summit of Mount Snowdon with or without the SAS, and giant slalomed back down again.
All that remains is to renew the car insurance with the AA, not the insurers that can only be reached via a magic portal and possibly write an online approval of Halfords customer service, which was, really very good.
And now to get on with work for Miniatura which is in four weeks time, featuring lots of artists who will currently be trying as hard as I am to get a bit of uninterrupted work in. If you would like to see who they are www.miniatura.co.uk will be the online portal that works, with or without batteries.
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I suffer from awful FONBATDI. Crippling really.
It’s a bit like FOMO. Or, no it isn’t. With FOMO all you are afeard of is missing out. There’s a remedy, which is to buy, do, acquire the thing for which you have the FOMO and there you are. Mended.
FONBATDI is much worse. It’s the Fear Of Not Being Able To Do It, whatever it is. I suppose some of the Olympic athletes get it.
Personally, if it were me at the Olympics, which it would not be, I wouldn’t even try in the first place. You wouldn’t get me to the top of the slope under any circumstances, so the appalling site of late middle aged me going down sideways in carpet slippers and curlers hanging on to a hot water bottle is not one you will be required to endure. There would be no shrieking, I’d just be trying to breathe.
As the show approaches and I just have to get on with it, the fear intensifies. This year I was not helped by the OH taking over the kitchen for a crucial fortnight, so I was late beginning.
So, did I set to with a will as soon as I was able?
No, I engaged in displacement activity. I went online and ordered stuff and then, when it arrived began playing with it. I cleaned stuff. I organised the garage. To be fair to myself I had to organise the garage, as the oven refit had involved moving kilns, moulds and all items associated in order to drill holes in the wall and I had to put them back, having sorted them out.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I just made a product. People do. Some doll makers purchase commercially available moulds, make them the same way for twenty years or more but dress them in different ways. As you know everything I make is my own from my own moulds from my own sculptures. I like doing new things. I could not do the same things for ever, I have a very low boredom threshold. I like inventing stuff. I like inventing different stuff. I like not knowing if it will work.
The real problem is that I do not make just one of anything. They are all individual, so you can buy one which is different from the others, whilst being the same item. I do this because I was a visitor to shows and a collector before I was an exhibitor. It is beyond annoying to turn up at a show, having made the effort to get there, for someone to shove in before you and buy the last one. This applies to artisan made objects, of course, not commercially produced items, whether factory made, or mass produced in whatever form.
You could argue that what I make is mass produced because I do make a few of each so that no one will miss out. However, every item and every part of every item is individually hand made. For every show there will always be completely new things.
Will it work? Can I make it? Can I pour it thin enough to be hollow so I can string it? Can I invent a metal part to fasten the wings to? Will I be able to dress this strange shape?
I am having to be careful as I get older that FONBATDI does not cause high blood pressure. I can hang around nerving myself to get on with it until the blood pressure goes stratospheric and I begin to get migraines.
Anyone sensible would begin immediately after the previous show and I would if I didn’t do so many other things. Writing this e.g.
If I were ready three months early that would be boring.
So it is, with only four and a bit weeks to Miniatura that I finally force myself to mask off the furniture, cover the floor, don the apron, headband and full face mask and actually sit down to see if I can rub down the outlandsish item I have invented and poured to see if it can be done. Already I have discovered that I moulded the baby’s head upside down, making it unstringable. I remedied this in the pouring, mostly, but other errors in other items may only show up when I try to rub the dry casting down. And yes, I have done babies before, but this one is articulated, and twenty fourth scale. I am always pushing the envelope. I don’t really care if no one else is interested, I want to see what I can do.
What of course, happens in the kiln, is in the lap of the gods, Vulcan, probably. Will they articulate? Will the bits that need to fit inside the other bits do so?
Or, have I just wasted months of my life training for something which is going to have to be binned?
It’s not even as if it is one something new. It’s about six doll-like items that have never been seen before, because they have previously been in my head. It’s not even as if they were just variants on one doll, or even as if they were nice big twelfth scale.
No there’s about six and they’re all titchy.
The only antidote to FONBATDI is knowing that there’s a hundred other Miniatura artisans and quite a lot of them are in exactly the same position. Do you work until late at night? Is it better to sleep and make fewer mistakes? Can you actually do it? Can you do it in time?
Have a look here www.miniatura.co.uk to see which poor souls are suffering from FONBATDI right now.
And then tune back here because you know I’ll show you, if it works. Or, better still, pop along to the show and find out for yourself.
Will I conquer my fear and BATDI?
Stay tuned.
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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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