If it looked as if I had vanished…

Posted on 31st May 2026 by admin

It certainly looked that way to me at half past five this morning.  If it appeared the same to you, it was a glitch.

I am in the process, with the help of the S&H, of changing website hosts.  If you do not know what a website host is, you’re in good company, specifically mine.

As you know I am one of the least tech people you will ever meet.  The reason I started the website was to help artists working in miniature.  In the nineties and noughties, if you are new here, I was writing for magazines about the Doll’s House hobby.  This is still a cracking hobby in that it sets the world to rights without harming anyone, there are so many aspects to it you never get bored or get to the end of it, the people in it are lovely, you can do it on your own or with friends and it involves real proper artists in every discipline you can think of, but in miniature.

It was the artists that attracted me.  A lifelong observer of my late father’s antique collecting habits and knowledge, I learned very early in life to distinguish between art and rubbish.  The miniature world was the place where I had found most real artists whose work could be purchased  by ordinary people with pocket money.  I also found the show Miniatura, best in the world because all exhibitors were vetted for quality.  I found that by writing for magazines I could help artists.  When your output is thumbnail sized, it’s easy to get overlooked even in a miniatures show.  A magazine article could explain what was good and how to get hold of it. 

The problem was that glossy magazine articles could take up to six months to get published.  In that length of time something a collector had seen in a magazine could have been bought and the artist had moved on.  Also, as it is in the nature of artists to respond to inspiration, which often strikes at the 23rd hour, the latest and greatest sometimes got sold before it had been reported.

However, with the help of the Internet, I realised, because I already had the ear of collectors and artists, I could help both by publishing all that was new and wonderful just before the show.

Fortunately I had a son who was fascinated by and already working in IT.  He asked questions about what sort of website I wanted; I didn’t have a clue.  He asked how I wanted it to look; I had no idea.  He asked who I wanted to host it and I went: Duh???

I think web hosts are the interface between the site providers and the company using the site.  The web hosts can invent all sorts of things to add on and charge for.  They are a sort of warehouse of what is available, virtually.

The one I was using kept upping the charges.  This is OK if you are running a multimillion dollar business from a website but not so good if you are just a doll maker and miniaturist.  So, with the help of the S&H we were changing website provider when the site disappeared altogether.  Instead there were severe warnings from Google about how dangerous I was.

I panicked and thought, in the floods of email messages that the change has generated, that I had pressed the wrong button and killed 16 years of work.  It’s the only IT skill I possess, pressing the wrong button.  If there were an Olympics in it, I’d win.  I’d be home and hosed taking the entire Internet with me, while the other competitors were hovering, considering.

There were many panicked emails to the poor S&H, trying to have a lie-in on a Sunday morning. 

One of the things he had noticed was an order which had not apparently been fulfilled from the shop.  I was horror stricken in case some poor soul had been waiting for an order forever because I had missed a message (my other IT skill) or pressed the wrong button.  It was me, trying to get to the bottom of this, that caused me to click on the website at half five in the AM and find it vanished, followed by, so far, eight hours of phone calls and intense activity.

All is well now, I hope.  You’ll know before I do, if this gets published.  What we take from this is that the Internet is a thing written in the sand.  For your own personal use if there is any bit of writing here that you would be sad to miss if the website vanished again, please print it off, or otherwise save it.

I note that several nations are now making provision for protection of undersea Internet cables, so it’s not just me who could make everything vanish by pressing a button.

The other note of which to make a note of is to note the bit at the bottom of every bit of writing which says ‘Leave a comment’.  You can click on that and your message will come straight to my inbox.  I am real, no one else sees your message but me.  If you value our correspondence you might want to  make a note of the address when I reply.  I actually have a loose leaf file of Internet email addresses, which various family members find hilarious

until their phones go down.

And, of course, you can always find me, and the dolls, at Miniatura, which is not a thing waving around in the ether, although there is some great stuff online, www.miniatura.co.uk but a real hall full of the nicest people there are and the best art, in miniature, that exists in the known and actual world.  (Or IRL, as they say, online.)

~~~~~~~~~~~

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A bit of digging.

Posted on 23rd May 2026 by admin

Apologies for the radio silence.  Ever since I last wrote I’ve been poorly with this whatever it is the OH and I have had.  He has had a vaccination for some respiratory virus going around and finishing old people off, I’ll have mine next week but I think it’s a bit pointless, I think this is what we’ve had.  So, uncharacteristically, instead of writing that I was ill I have just been ill.

However I am now better and finally got digging.

I love a bit of digging.  Not necessarily archaeology, not through somebody’s bin for incriminating paperwork,  not through the kitchen cupboard for the OH to find the garlic powder (he has turned himself into a cook, which is just as well, I wouldn’t use garlic powder if it came free with gold bars) not through the sock drawer to find the pair without the hole, but actual digging in the soil.

You really cannot beat a bit of digging for sorting out your mental problems.  Digging is so simple.  You shove your fork in, you lift it out, you jiggle it a bit, you take off the weeds and stick them in your bucket and you smash the soil with your fork until it is smoothly in little bits.

This of course will not work everywhere.  When we lived in Aylesbury I barely got going on the digging before we moved, which was just as well, the soil was, mostly, solid clay, which is very similar to concrete.  You can grow roses in clay, in fact they like it.  They like to feel their roots are very secure.  Some plants do like restricted roots.  Agapanthus, for example, are not happy with endless loam, they much prefer a small pot.  I had one that was so happy in a small glazed pot it grew in a very unfettered but fettered way until the roots broke the pot.

If you are digging, or contemplating digging, it helps to know what your soil is before you begin.  It helps to know who was digging there before you.  Two thousand years before I was digging here, the area from the river to the top of the hill was a neolithic flint factory.  When digging I come across the ends of stones from which all the sharp edged tools that can be struck, have been stricken.  I have quite a collection.

I also come across glass.  The biggest bit was a piece of Victorian window.  In this time frame, the land my house stands on was where the gardener’s hut stood.  The gardeners in question were working on the market garden for the posh estate, growing food to feed the nobs.  Opposite me, going up the hill, there’s a pair of old semis that were the gardener’s lodgings.  They are quite extensive and were the houses of many workers, the posh house they served is now a ruin, although it was a vast Palladian Mansion and stood down by the River Avon, well away from the workers located out of sight, up the hill.

The area in Warwickshire in which I live has had this division between rich and poor noticeably marked for centuries.  The posh houses tend to become increasingly expensive for normal people to inhabit.  On the way into town Priory Park used to be the site of the twelfth century Priory, then the Tudor Mansion built in 1556, which is no longer there because it was very carefully demolished, the bricks numbered and the entire house shipped out to Richmond Virginia and rebuilt.  All that is left is some foundations in the soil.

The answer always lies in the soil.  It constantly amazes me that archaeologists can tell where neolithic round houses, built of grass and sticks, stood, by the changes in the colour of the soil where the roof dripped outside of the walls.

I do love soil.  It is incredible stuff.  Of what it is composed is that which is decomposed.  My garden is used as a toilet by the cats from next door, because their garden is two rooms outside; a lounge with waterproof sofas and a dining room on a floor in the corner.  I don’t mind.  I like the cats and one, in particular, always has a chat to me when we meet.  They are enriching my soil, eventually.  This is traditional.  The previous town but two, in which I lived, up North, had many terraced houses back to back with the privy at the end of the back yard.  In the back street each privy had a slide up metal door which gave access to the contents for men with long shovels known locally as the Midnight Mechanics.  I am old enough frequently to have seen people rush out into the front street with a shovel after a horse and cart had passed by, to collect the manure for their roses.

In the next town I lived in, in the Seventies, the building of a new shopping centre unearthed the tannery pools.  Here the smelly business of tanning leather, that essential mediaeval wardrobe staple, was carried out, for hundreds of years, in a series of pools.  The first containing strong human urine, took the hair off the cow hides, the second, with weaker urine, softened the hides and the last, filled with dog faeces and pigeon poo which were massaged into the leather, by hand, before the invention of rubber gloves, made the leather workable to wear at court and similar venues.  It’s enough to make you feel that whatever your job is, it’s quite dainty.  It also gives a clue as to why sweet smelling pomanders were carried fashionably at court.  Henry the Eighth, after he had been dead for a few days, exploded.  Right up the arras behind the curtain.  Given the usual  odours at court it may have been a while before anyone looked, they were probably all sniffing each other and asking: ‘Is that jerkin new?  Your shoes?  Your britches?  Anything?’

The tannery was discovered, needless to say, by changes in the soil, not, as you might imagine, by the lingering pong, though when I visited the new excavations in the Seventies, there was definitely a very, um, earthy smell.  It’s worth remembering, next time you would like to bury your nose in one of those leather handbags that cost a thousand pounds and have a waiting list, that the smell may not be of money after all.

What else is in the soil apart from rubbish and assorted poo?  Dead bodies, of course.  My late father did not have a dead body, he had left his to medical science without telling anyone, but my mother, cremated, was sprinkled on the roses at the crematorium and a very fine rose garden it was.  Roses like a bit of bone meal.  Sooner or later we will all be soil.  It is interesting to speculate, given tectonic plates, that all the soil in one part of the planet is plunging into the middle, only to be turned into lava and emerge elsewhere.

Lava is interesting. Visiting Herculaneum we were very aware of excavations on site by the sound of drilling.  When the archaeological soil is solidified lava, you need a really big road drill, rather than a trowel and a sieve.  It was Guiseppe Fiorelli at Pompei, who, discovering holes in the lava as he excavated, realised that the holes were where the vanished Romans who did not escape, had died, been covered in pumice and rotted away.  He filled the holes with concrete and the Ancient Romans re-emerged, an extreme case of what was not in the soil being defined by its absence.

It is incredible, when you think about it, that all we eat is either grown on the soil of the planet, eating the plants that grow in the soil, or eating other creatures that eat the soil.  We are made of soil and, after a brief period, in the life of the planet will become soil again, plunge into the mantle and come back as rock, weathering to soil.

We are the planet and the planet is us.  We are the original recycling.  The soil I grow my plants in and find the leftover flint tool bits in is made of the tool makers.

flints

~~~~~~~

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Ahead of us..

Posted on 10th May 2026 by admin

I am absolutely full of cold, heaving, sneezing and bunged up.  This was a generous birthday gift from the OH, who caught it from somewhere and brought it back for me.  I was OK last Wednesday, my actual birthday, but the OH was not.  He says he is paralysed when sneezing and makes no attempt to get a tissue.  Between our chairs there is a round table on which he dumps his blown-on tissues, so the result is pretty inevitable.

It’s quite a while since I had a cold, possibly the lack of any social involvement helps.  I did respond to a local social media post and go along to a craft group last Monday.  Being me, I jumped in with both feet and finding the organiser was funding it all herself, offered to demonstrate tomorrow, brilliantly without getting the organiser’s contact details, although she was savvy enough to get mine.  I’m hoping she will contact me today to check that I’m OK for tomorrow, otherwise, on my second meeting with this little group, I’m going to infect everyone.

One of the disadvantages of a hefty cold is putting on weight.  I keep it off by a workout every morning, unless I have a cold, in which case I put it all on sitting around eating stuff I can’t taste.

Also, instead of getting restful sleep, which might help the old immune system to get to work, I just sit up and cough and sneeze.

Did you see David Attenborough’s 100th birthday celebrations on the BBC on Friday?  They hired the Albert Hall and filled it full of the good, great and invited and Sir David looking fabulous for 100.  I do so hope no one invited went with a cold, though if you were and you had you might go anyway to an invitation-only once in a lifetime event, in which case they’ll all be spluttering too.

I sent him a birthday card – me and hundreds of other people.  I remember watching Zoo Quest in the late 1950s with my grandmother.  I used to stay with her overnight often, as she had a bungalow a few streets from my parent’s house.  In this black and white programme, a very young David Attenborough, just in his twenties, had journeyed to some far-flung corner of the planet with a cameraman with a wind-up camera and tape recorder, to collect animals for zoos.  His obvious enchantment with all the animals he encountered was mesmerising.

For the birthday celebrations the BBC had found a harpist from Paraguay, Franciso Yglesias, who played Pajaro Campana, the theme music from Zoo quest, which was instant time travel seventy years backwards for me.

There were several excerpts from the best sequences of seventy years of wonderful wildlife programmes.  I don’t envy the job of whoever had to do the choosing, though the bit where the blue whale surfaced right beside the small inflatable boat with Sir David in it, was unmissable.  The best, however, was definitely the sequence of the Galapagos of the newly hatched baby iguanas having to brave hordes of starving racer snakes to run to the safety of the colony on the rocks.

If you missed it put BBC I Player, David Attenborough’s 100 years on Planet Earth, into your search engine.  It is as worth watching as everything he has ever shown us.  His broadcasting has influenced so many people all over the planet to care for all the other animals on the planet and their habitat that it really does answer the question about what difference can one individual make.

There is a possibility that the more interested you are in something the longer you’ll have to do it.  I think I’ve been writing here for 16 years, and hope to go on for another 16 at least.  I’ve been making dolls for 33 years and making all sorts of other things ever since Sellotape came in blue tins and the only glue you could get was made from boiled hooves.

When you are not having colds and passing on diseases, what are you going to do with your whole entire life?

~~~~~~~~

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Tidying up.

Posted on 28th April 2026 by admin

If I did not know many miniaturists I would wonder what was wrong with me.

I have a surfeit of stuff.

A lot of the surfeit is crafting stuff.  I must have had crafting stuff prior to building a craft room on top of the garage.  I do vaguely remember a bookcase that stood against the back of the chimney breast that overflowed with stuff.  I do recall the sun room being full of doll stuff.  The garage, of course has the kilns in it, surrounded, now, after the major garage tidy up, by space the final frontier.

The craft room being built and finished, filled immediately, or if possible, sooner.  It does get tidied when both grandchildren come to stay because it is a bedroom for a grandchild.  My grandmother had a bedroom for grandchildren to stay in.  It had two beds, a wall mounted electric fireplace, the height of modernity, which I have in fact miniaturised and a Lloyd loom blanket chest which now lives in my loft.  The blanket chest contains a very, very old duvet, which embodies the nub of the tidying dilemma, or, to count more exactly, three of them. Nubs, that is, not duvets.  Well, I don’t think so, it’s a while since I looked.

You cannot recycle old duvets.  They go to landfill.  For a long time after we came to this house, as a consequence of coming to this house we were skint.  Duvets at the time were very expensive.  The one in the blanket chest, moreover, had been a wedding present from my new in-laws.  Everyone knows you cannot throw wedding presents away.  The late queen Elizabeth received clothing coupons from all and sundry of the ordinary populace as wedding presents, who were keen to see her getting married in something that looked unaffected by rationing.  I have every confidence the coupons were used and appreciated.  As was my blanket chest and the duvet.  The blanket chest is treasured because it was from my grandmother’s house.  Being pink with a flowery padded seat it goes with precisely nothing in the house anywhere, therefore it lives in the loft.  Simultaneously such an indispensable requirement and also so utterly pointless, it almost holds sufficient qualifications to be a politician.

The spare room for the grandchild is only that for a couple of days every now and then, in between it is a craft room.  You would think it would be the room where all the dolls get assembled and dressed, which it is.  If you thought it might be the room where the porcelain gets rubbed down or china painted it is not, they are both dirty working which needs to be kept away from clean dressing.  Dirty working happens at the dining table and gets tidied away immediately after completion, being health hazards on a dining table.

This is the nub of another problem, if I just did one multi-process arty activity, it might, possibly, be quite easy to tidy away, or just have it in one area or two, allowing for clean and dirty working.  Would that I did.  I still get the sewing machine out for alterations, a little bit of quilting and what have you.  I have yet to get to the end of what it can do.  I did give my basic machine to my daughter-in-law, which did clear a bit of space, although I do have a stand-by machine and enough bits of fabric to fill the corner cupboard bought to house them.  I completely blame Create and Craft TV channel, now defunct, for that.  They kept having sewing hours that made me think I would like to join in.

This is the real problem.  I keep seeing, thinking of, buying books about, creative ideas I would like to have a go at.  For this I blame my own nature and miniatures because a doll’s house contains every art and craft you can do, but in miniature.  In itself this eggs you on, you know the highest ideal is to be able to make the house and everything in it.  If you are competitively crafty, it’s the unmissable challenge, added to which it is in miniature  if the entire finished item can fit in the palm of your hand, how much room can the making of it occupy in a real full sized house?*

Also, as I have written before, many times, anyone at all arty can tell you that all the creativity happens on the last six inches of the table, unless you are really cooking with gas, in which case it’s the last half inch and it’s a masterpiece.

Unless your brain works differently to all the artists I’ve interviewed and myself, no one just picks up the latest creation, creates for half an hour and then stops for lunch. (If you were doing that it would just be craft, not art, see below.)  It seems to be the norm to take some time to generate ideas.  The first half hour produces copies of something else, is remarkably pedestrian, happily contained in an inch of space on a clean table and as meh as anything can be.  The second half hour is beginning to rev up, producing items that are even interesting to the producer, covering at least a square foot in possibilities.  Then suddenly whoosh!  Bits of the brain, hitherto dozing, wake up and join in.  Your hands speed up, your fingers fly, we’re in the zone, the table silts up

Then the phone rings and by the time you’ve convinced the cold caller that you have enough loft insulation, it’s gone back to one tortured inch at a time.

Such is the nature of art.  It can be pursued with forks and hope but if it happens frequently you know the absolute necessity of having the stuff to hand for the chase when the hunting horn sounds.

Herein the wellspring of another problem.

In the modern world it is necessary to buy stuff with which to make other stuff.  In mediaeval times all you needed to do was to train your sheep to stand by your spinning wheel and you were off.  All was well, the pair of you could sit, or stand patiently on your balcony for hours until a carter passed with a load of tasty hay.

Have you ever just put ‘glue’ into a search engine?  Don’t do it before bed, you’ll be up all night.  You actually know a woman with two entire drawers full of glue.**  Which is quite a worry, you should take more care with the company you keep.

They talk on crafty telly about the die cutting revolution.  Well it’s a revolutionary way of making money, that’s for sure.  You have to buy a die to see what it will do.  The technology involved is proceeding by leaps and bounds. Ten years ago a paper cutting die could have cut a square and cost a hundred pounds, now there’s one that could do a model Eiffel Tower side in one go and costs fifteen quid, how can you not join in?

I do.  As well as all the boxes for the dolls, most of my other hobby, which is making greetings cards, is die based.  The current machine spends a lot of time fighting for space on the dining table.

Herein another problem of creativity.

By the time I have spent an afternoon standing at the table cutting all the bits for an idea, and covering the floor with all the bits that fall out, by the time I get the good bits upstairs, I sit down and drop off.

There are people who do not have a creative bone in their body.  My late mother was one such. Folks of this ilk are never surrounded by stuff because they do not need it.  In my mother’s case this was just as well as she was married to a world class antiques collector.

I do collect the stones from the garden that are the discarded ends or nubs of the flint tool worker who lived here in the neolithic.  And modern carved stones.  And other stuff.  And, of course, all the stuff I have collected in miniature made by other artists.

My only consolation lies in having seen various photographs of artists’ studios.  Some of the most memorable belonged to famous artists, some did not and none of them tidied up at all.  Ever.

Paint everywhere.  Up the walls, across the ceiling, in lumps on the floor.  Cliffs of canvases.  Plague palettes.  Specimen jars.  Dead brushes.  In the middle  of the horror, the artist wearing the garb of a different sex and a model wearing nothing but goosebumps.

Total Recall of this is enough to avoid a dystopian future  by spurring the artist to tidy up.  Pick it up!  Put it away!  Find the table top!  Discover the floor!

And don’t look at the stuff as you do it or you’ll be off again, producing.

As I remarked, I am as glad to know many miniaturists, as I am to know I am a one.

Phew!  Nearly thought I was peculiar there.

~~~~~

*Every last inch, yea even unto the attic.

**Yes, me.  Crammed.

~~~~~~~~~~


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What to do when you are worried.

Posted on 19th April 2026 by admin

I wish I knew.  I’ve had a lot of worry in my life, my health, the way other people have treated me, how to make ends wave at each other and quite a lot of worry about the health of other people.

The health of other people is one of those worries where you are really powerless to make any kind of change.  As regular readers (hello, how are you?) know I’ve had plenty of worry about demented people in my life and how best to help them.  The worry of it is one of the reasons I start nearly every day with a workout of at least an hour, having noticed that the one habit the demented people I’ve known had in common, was getting up in the morning and then sitting down.  It is my personal belief that the best thing you can do for your brain is to get the blood whooshing through it as soon as possible every day.

The person I’m worried about currently is the OH.  Our beliefs differ; he believes a person can drink alcohol every day for sixty years and only feel benefit from doing so.  I disagree.  The OH, already under investigation for persistent pain, has had an extreme reaction to a Covid booster injection, and is telling me at every opportunity how poorly he is, which differs very noticeably from someone in withdrawal, screaming at you that there is nothing the matter with them apart from the idiot standing in front of them.

It’s a worry. 

One of the benefits of being a miniaturist is that you always know someone with greater worries.  The people I have met and interviewed over the last forty years sometimes realised that they were making a miniature world because the real one was such a worry, and sometimes had no idea why they were drawn to a world you can totally control.

We all know the disastrous outcomes of anyone in power trying to control the real world, if you tip one end up, somewhere another end will go down, and, as it’s all going round and round at the same time, predicting where the fall will be, is tricky to say the least.

In the personal sphere, you find out very soon in life that you cannot control the people round you.  If you were me you learned to worry very young; an unpredictable and dangerous mother is a never ending source of worry.

If you have two incredibly balanced and happy parents (anyone?) (no, really anyone?)  you are more likely to be less of a worrier because life has given you less to be worried about and your reaction to adverse events may be coloured by your experience. If enough events in your life up to now have turned out favourably you are very likely to expect that future events will eventuate similarly.  Why would you expect anything else?  Moreover your cheerful expectations may influence your own behaviour and the outcome.

But my guess is that, if you are reading this, you are a practised worrier, more seasoned than a hot frying pan at what is coming next.  You already believe there is not much you can do to change other people and that events will happen and you’ll just have to come along at the end and mop up.

The real question is what do you do between the start of the worry and the end.  Just worrying is bad for you.  Eating your worries away is fattening and bad for your health.  You can go out running in the rain (I only know this because I’ve seen people doing it – they did look awfully wet and not, noticeably, happy).  You can develop all sorts of interesting behaviours that will occupy your time, money and attention and bring a load of worries of their own with them, you can drink, gamble or work your worries away, all of which are temporary relief followed by worse worry.

What you need to do is something that will occupy your mind completely for as long as you need it to do so.

This, as the regular reader (still here?  How many good parents did you have?*) already knows, is a hobby.  As the RR also knows, I have three main hobbies.  Miniaturising is more of a job now but I still do occasionally do a diorama or a room box and, (being fully qualified) have a couple of house kits on a shelf and in the garage, which I will eventually do when I’m less worried.  And I garden.  This is definitely a hobby, though, had I had more self-knowledge when younger, I’d have done it as a job.

I have done nearly all the handicraft things you can possibly do.  I’ve been making my own greetings cards for over thirty years, which is what I am currently doing in the present worry.  Card making has much to recommend it as a hobby.  If it goes wrong it’s just a bit of cardboard, you put it in the recycling.  If it goes right you send it to someone and they are grateful.

I also do a lot of shopping for hobbies.  Sometimes I think the shopping is the hobby.  This is hardly an earth shattering realisation, Muriel Hopwood, the founder of Miniatura, came to this conclusion over forty years ago.  There is something very soothing about having the stuff to get on with, next time the worry strikes.  Viewed correctly the stuff you have in piles everywhere is not the problem you think it is: if you acquired it anticipating a worry and didn’t get round to it, that could well be because the thing you were worried about never happened.

Worry is a way of thinking.  If you can change the way you think, you can change the world inside your head.  As we all live in our heads, a change is as good as a rest. Meanwhile, send a card, get out in the outside, do a bit of online browsing shopping, make a mental list of the stuff you would have if you had the money and what you would do with it if it arrived.

These are the things I do when I worry.  There’s another one, if I could remember what it is.

car

Um.. oh yes, writing.

~~~~~~~

*If the answer is ‘none’, you are very highly qualified.  We are all here to learn, you have picked the advanced course.

Three of the cards in the photo are using a die cutting machine and materials from www.carnationcrafts.co.uk  You can buy everything you need and get free downloaded artwork and there are online demonstrations.

The card with the mouse reading a book is from a junk journal.  Various companies make them, they are books to cut up to make cards and other papercraft items from, they have press-out shapes, stickers and so on.  If you wanted to just have a go all you would need is scissors and glue.  Stamperia make the hottest ones currently, put Stamperia Junk Journal into a search engine to find them.

~~~~~~~~~~~

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Is it art or craft? What’s the difference?

Posted on 12th April 2026 by admin

I have been very fortunate in my life to talk to, interview and look at the work of many artists.

It is, of course, because of Miniatura, with which I have been involved for forty years, first as a visitor, then as an exhibitor, then as a reporter.

Miniatura is slightly different from art in the full-size world, for a very good reason.  Artists exhibiting at Miniatura are hoping to sell their work to members of the public; in this respect you might consider them to be no different from artists working in full size.  However, the shoppers and collectors visiting Miniatura are, mostly, members of the public shopping with their own pocket money.

My goodness, what a difference this makes.

Early in the current iteration of the hobby there were visitors to the show who were representing various museums in America which exhibited miniatures.  They came with very large cheque books.  You might well say that this is remarkably similar to the full-sized world, where the size of the cheque books is often remarkable.

In the full-sized world the enormous cheque books are often wafted in the direction of items that are questionably art.  I recall cliffs wrapped in plastic, piles of bricks, urinals, unmade beds, giant balloon animals, paint sprayed through stencils, coils of old rope…

I’m as sure that you can add a lot of items yourself, as I am that you have questioned whether the item in question was art, or, perhaps, was the ‘artist’ some sort of con artist?

There have been very few con artists of any variety at Miniatura for several reasons.  The first is that all exhibitors go through a selection process.  I remember talking to Muriel Hopwood, the founder of Miniatura, who was very firmly of the opinion that some would-be exhibitors would never be good enough to make the grade.  She expressed the view that visitors who had paid good money to get into the hall deserved respect.  The motto of the show is: by miniaturists for miniaturists.

This makes a difference from the start, visitors are shopping with purpose.  Whilst this does mean that you may go with every intention of getting stuff for the house you are currently working on, the quality of the show means that there are irresistible exhibits which  you rehome because they speak to you as art.

Is it art?  If it is intended for a dolls’ house can it be art?

The dictionary has quite a lot to say about art.  ‘Skill, esp. human skill as opposed to nature’ is the first qualification.  This would seem to rule out many of the ‘found objects’ that pass as art in the full-sized world.  Ferrying an unmade bed to a studio from the bedroom, or crowbarring a urinal off a toilet wall, or delivering several hods of bricks from a building site to a gallery, under this consideration, may have more to do with logistics than art.

‘Skill applied to imitation and design’ my dictionary continues. There’s that word again ‘skill’.  It’s a very good word in relation to art, it goes on: ‘thing in which skill may be exercised.’

Then it gets right down to the nitty gritty: ‘certain branches of learning designed as intellectual instruments.’

Here you can see exactly why I like Miniatura so much, if the artists have insufficient skill, they won’t be there.  The selection process ensures the visibility of skill applied to imitation and design.  You only need to talk to some exhibitors for just a few minutes to be left in no doubt of the depth of knowledge and intellect brought to bear on the world in miniature.

You could argue that the whole of miniatures is about skill applied to imitation and design, because the hobby is about replicating something in miniature, convincingly.  Notice I say ‘something’ because it can be anything.  You could replicate a real house, everything in it and all the people at a moment in time, or you could make a miniature version of something that never existed.  Seasoned miniaturists and people with no experience of miniatures at all could tell you whether it was good enough by looking.  The skill that had gone into the reproduction could be apparent, up to a point.

If you use a 3D printer linked to a computer on which you can bring up a photograph which can then be reproduced in miniature, is that art?  Does it demonstrate skill, or does the skill lie with the person who wrote the computer programme that enabled the reproduction? Does the skill lie with the designer of the 3D printer?  Does it lie with the photographer?  Is the skill involved in knowing how to put the process together to produce the desired outcome?

Turning to the dictionary to assist us in finding the truth, if we look up ‘craft’  we find fewer words, which are: skill, cunning, guile; a branch of skilled hand work, and ‘crafty’: dextrous or ingenious.

I would describe craft as the necessary skills in any medium to make the medium work to produce the desired object.  If I gave you a box of watercolour dried paints and you dug the paint blocks out and hammered them into dust, I’d suggest you were unaware of the craft required to make the medium work.  If you knew to wet a paintbrush and rub it on a block to produce colour and then used the brush to apply the paint to a sheet of watercolour paper, I’d say you understood what the craft entailed.  If, after many years of skilful practice you could stand before a view and using the medium, transfer an image of the view on to the paper, I’d say you had learned the craft sufficiently to have the beginnings of art.  If you could paint the picture to show us something more than we could see with our own eyes, say, the fleeting nature of English summer sunshine, or the majesty of a tall sailing ship, I’d say you were an artist.

This brings us back to the notable absence of con artists at Miniatura.  You can tell, not just by looking, but by talking to the exhibitor if it is good of its kind and how much effort has gone into it and whether the effort represents years of acquiring the necessary skill, but there is no way you will splash your hard-earned cash unless it exhibits skill applied to imitation and design.

Miniaturists are particularly good at this because they, themselves, have tried to make art in miniature.  This could be anything from commissioning artists in every field, assessing the suitability of the items produced for the end vision and assembling the finished display, to sweeping the plates off the dining room table to make room for the collection of cereal boxes and the big tub of glue and anything in between.

I love miniaturists, they know what they’re on about because they’ve had a go themselves.

For myself I do both art and craft.  The art you know about, it consists of getting a convincing representation of a person in a difficult and lasting medium out of my head and into existence by the practice of all the skilful steps that are necessary to make it happen.

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I also enjoy paper crafting, specifically making cards, here are some of the latest

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very pretty easel cards with precious little to do with me.  I buy kits and dies from various manufacturers and put them together.  I like the composition and variety of producing something pretty without much thought, it’s a nice change from the brain-taxing effort required to make an original porcelain doll.

In case you wish to emulate me, the wishing well cards are from www.annagriffin.com and they are further embellished with die cuts made by dies cutting out downloadable artwork from www.carnationcrafts.co.uk 

As to judging whether what you see at Miniatura is art or craft, or learned craft so skilful it has become art, you can judge for yourself at

www.miniatura.co.uk

Scroll along the header bar and click on ‘All the makers’, you’ll find a great deal of food for thought, which may well translate into a list of artists you wish to visit at the next show which is 10th and 11th of October 2026.  The tickets are on sale from May Day, as always I’ll see you there.

In further pursuit of what is art and what is craft and can you do it yourself, I will, as promised, begin a few blogs on all the different ways of making a doll, shortly.  I’m just going to finish having a lovely time creating without much thinking, it isn’t my art, it is art done for me so I can craft and it makes a nice change for a while until my head will not let me rest again until a new doll arrives.

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Ants.

Posted on 3rd April 2026 by admin

I’ve got ants.

It’s very depressing.

I do live in a very anty area.  A neighbour once opined she was surprised the entire street hadn’t been moved several feet to the left because of the ants.

Usually however, they’re in the garden.  I have fought them in the garden every year for ages, always wondering where their nest could be.

I found out.

Do you remember my giant lilies in the front garden?

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This picture is from several years ago when there was still a tree beside the giant lilies in their giant pot.

Last year a lady passing by asked if she could have a lily bulb if I ever repotted the lilies.

This year I repotted the lilies.

Lifting the bulbs was difficult, to put it mildly.  They had wedged themselves in, sent shoots under the turned in rim and nearly filled the pot, which was huge.

Some of the pot filling was new baby bulbs, some was old gigantic bulbs, the rest was ants.

So, with difficulty I rescued all the bulbs down to the last third, which was ants and then (spot the bit where I went wrong, no prizes except a feeling of ineffable smugness) I moved the pot from the front garden to the fence near the house to make it easy for myself to put ant powder into the pot at daily intervals.

And, as it turned out, for the ants to move out of the chilly garden into the nice warm house.

First we saw them whizzing along the counter top, maybe coming up from the rarely emptied bottom corner cupboard.  Somewhere under the Formica is a formicarium.

It took a couple of days to move all the stuff out of the cupboard, the end result being a trip to the dump with a car full of 1970’s enamelled cookware.  By the look of it I did nothing in the seventies but buy casserole dishes, pans and dishes with enamel outsides and enamel interiors.  I did save the kettle in case the international situation gets so bad the only way I can make a cup of tea is to balance the old enamel kettle on a bonfire of anything that is left.

Although the tea is in doubt because once the corner bottom cupboard was cleared out the ants made their way to the wall cupboard where I keep the teabags.

So once all the stuff from that cupboard was cleared out, and put everywhere else, I purchased a packet of bait stations and put one in the cupboard instead.

It took them a couple of days to find it, then the cupboard was crawling with ants.  I wanted to put the bait station in the cupboard in a flattened disposable foil tray because there were dire warnings on the packet about the extreme dangers of people, pets and other life forms encountering the bait station poison.  The OH, however, said casually it would be all right and moved the station out of the foil and put it on its own in the cupboard.

For a couple of days activity dwindled.  I decided to leave it one more day, to be sure.

Predictably activity increased, which is when I put the second ant bait station in the cupboard, which very many ants seemed enthused about.

By this stage, a week after the start of proceedings I was quite depressed.  I don’t want to kill anything but I don’t want ants in my kitchen either.

I was coming to terms with it all and then at four o clock..

we had a cup of tea

and at five o clock

I spotted an ant in the bottom of my drained tea cup.

I’m very depressed again and if I have the urge to lie on my back and wave all six legs in the air, I leave the dolls to my collectors, my crafting stuff to anyone who can be bothered to take it and my new, extremely expensive Prima Donna bras to Smalls for All in Edinburgh.

Whoever first vouchsafed that we should not sweat the small stuff, either did not have ants or did have a pet aardvark, or just never had an ant in their tea.

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Box clever.

Posted on 28th March 2026 by admin

It is the second weekend since Miniatura and I still have a hall full of wheeled cases and assorted exhibiting stuff.

My paraphernalia is mild compared to other exhibitors.  Some have very large vans, especially if they are showing houses, as you might expect.  Some have huge boards to put on top of the table to extend it, especially if they have a lot of very small sundries and accessories to show in partitioned baskets.

I only can have what I can fit in my car, which is a ten year old Volkswagen UP.  As there is only me I do have a bit of wiggle room without a passenger, nevertheless, the exhibition sundries occupy more room in the car than the dolls.

Some of the sundries are items you might expect such as table cloths and stands.  I spent a long time working out how to display dolls so that they could be picked up and put down again safely. Leaning, in a box, is the answer, so that the boxes themselves have been propped on a range of leaning devices.  For years they were on metal picture tripods. inherited from my father’s antique shop and picture gallery, until I bit the bullet and actually purchased wooden stands for artists to paint pictures on.  These stand on boxes which I made and covered so that  some of the dolls are at eye level.  Visitors like to look at a doll often before they pick it up and everyone complains of back ache at the end of a long weekend, so I like to get as much as possible into a viewer-friendly area.  The art easels have an arrangement at the base like deck chair feet, so that the rake can be varied, so that dolls can fall back into the boxes easily.

All of this ancillary stuff takes up space in the car, going in various containers but the packaging takes up an entire wheeled case of its own.

When I began, dolls were rehomed in paper bags.  Many exhibitors still do sell their wares in paper bags, which would be the packaging of choice if you were selling ribbon, for example.

Over the years, talking to collectors and being a collector myself I have realised the importance of packaging at the fair.  For a start many miniaturists have travelled a long way to get to Miniatura, I know my dolls live all around the world.  The packaging has to be strong enough to survive a journey.  I also know that many of my dolls live in packaging waiting for a house to be built for them to live in.  Some dolls are part of a collection without a house and can be displayed in rotation.

Whatever the reason the packaging is important to keep the doll safe, sometimes for years.

I make most of my own.  I spend many hours researching dies to make various boxes.  I am so glad to have a die cutting machine which is so much faster than measuring and cutting card with a craft knife, which I used to do years ago.  It still takes a few days of hard work to cut all the replacement boxes after a fair and stick them all together.  For a while I had Gladstone bags in light card for the twelfth scale dolls, but I decided this fair they weren’t strong enough and instead have bought white postal card boxes, for the twelfth scale dolls.  Anyone under three inches tall goes in a matchbox made by me.  I have just found a third size of matchbox dies, which I am very happy about, they will fit the new lad perfectly, being long and slim.

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I think matchboxes are just the right thing for the dolls, even if they never get anywhere near a dolls’ house.  It is perfect to have a real, articulated, invisibly jointed, original artist porcelain doll, in miniature, living in a matchbox.

That’s what miniatures should be about, I think.  If you never get further than a collection, a collection of wonders in matchboxes pretty much defines the hobby, I would say.

What do you think?

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Spring Min.

Posted on 19th March 2026 by admin

I love Miniatura.  I used to love it because it is the best show for Dolls’ House Miniatures that there is.  It still is.

I loved it because all the exhibitors are hand-picked and I was proud to be one of them, I still am.

But most of all I loved it because of the people, both visitors and exhibitors.  Miniatura always was and will be a huge hall full of like-minded people.  People who choose to minimise their troubles and focus on the tiny world they make to their own specifications, rather than big world troubles which they cannot do anything about.  You still have to live them.  If you have a problem body, a difficult family, wrong funds, wrong job and a horrible backstory, miniatures doesn’t take any of that away.  What the hobby does is it gives you a breathing space so you can deal with the awful stuff with equanimity.

To be in a hall full of wonderful people who don’t let the awfulness of life get to them, is incredibly uplifting.  It’s not often you see people in shops hugging each other but you see it at the Min all the time.  It’s a hall full of brave people smiling.

As always I was the last exhibitor to finish packing up and go.  A thousand porcelain things have to be packed carefully.  I try to do reverse order from putting out but inevitably dolls have wandered round the table.  I am still exhausted but the weather is so sunny, I’ve been out painting the fence and gardening. After the next bit of gardening I will do the garage and all the books and then I will repack all the trolleys with boxes, ready for next time.

10th and 11th October is the next show, be like the savviest visitors and book your tickets now.  Some people do, you know.  Like me for the last nearly forty years, they live from show to show.

Reality is rubbish and frequently disappointing, currently in large parts of the world the baddies seem to be winning.

Miniatura has always been good and is getting better, it is the place where the miniature world meets, for hugs for love, for amazement, for a great day out.

I love Miniatura (did I mention it?)

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New newness.

Posted on 12th March 2026 by admin

There will be a box of new dolls.

So far, in it are the lads, who are teenagers, and the lady, who is the doll inspired by Leonardo’s Annunciation.  On the moulds I’ve written BVM. but in the box I’ve labelled her the lady.

I wasn’t sure, last time I posted, if I could properly wig them all.  The difference between gluing hair directly to a head and sewing a proper wig cap is about a day of time but I think for some dolls the results are superior.  Here is the scruffy boy with his sewn wig

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I could not get this amount of hair, tumbling round the face if I just glued it to the head.  It moves, like real hair, is rooted (by very many tiny stitches) to the leather wig cap and can be brushed.  It is brushable with a dry toothbrush.  If the hair is a bit flyaway, you spray brush-out human hairspray on to the toothbrush bristles and brush the hair which will then lie flat but is brush out if necessary.

These dolls are all properly dressed with sewn clothing and, because of the wigs and the fourteen pieces of porcelain, are going to cost £28 each.  For something hand made, designed and brought into being by one person, I think that is reasonable.  These days if I buy a tee shirt made in a factory for that, I think I’m doing well, and I don’t expect the tee shirt to last hundreds of years, which the porcelain will do.  It’s a proper heirloom.  In the future you (or your descendants) can remove the clothing, surface wash the porcelain and redress the doll, just as two foot tall Victorian porcelain dolls in museums have been enjoyed and cared for for the last two hundred years.

Many years ago, I was very upset at a show when a visitor grabbed two of my dolls and said she was going to have ‘two of these cheapies’.  When I was a collector, going without dinners to buy something at a fair, I valued every single purchase.  Moving to the other side of the show table I priced accordingly, which does mean I’m working for 40p an hour.  Luckily I’m not doing it for the money, I’m doing it for love.

It’s love which makes the miniature world go round.

Would that reality were the same.

If you love miniatures and you love collecting and you love a lovely day out at Miniatura…

www.miniatura.co.uk

Visitors to shows do ask me, because I wrote for magazines for so long and interviewed many artisans, which miniatures are good value, and, sometimes, which are overpriced.  It’s a very interesting topic.  After Miniatura I will begin to answer the question by showing you plenty of the different ways in which you can make a doll.

One of the wonderful aspects of the hobby is the way in which it caters for all hobbyists at all levels of ability and all pockets.  I will write more of this.  Meanwhile the age old advice to buy the thing you really love is still true.

When I  was a shopper long ago, I never failed to come home from a show regretting some item I did not buy.  What you need to do to be happy, is to work out which item that is, at the show, and buy it.  If you are on a budget don’t be afraid to ask the seller if they could do a lay away plan for you so you could buy something a month at a time.  They are, after all, there to sell.  The worst they could say is no.  The great thing about Miniatura is that it is a hall filled with over a hundred hand-picked top-class artists.  There will be lots of things you love and I’m sure you will find and afford a few.  Don’t forget to invest in the brochure, it has the contact details of the exhibitors, if there was something someone else got to first, you could contact the exhibitor and ask if they could make one for you too.

See you there!

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