The eclipse

Posted on 30th March 2025 by admin

Close your eyes and grope around for some sunglasses, or, if you haven’t got sunglasses a bit of cardboard, ideally with two slits cut in it.  A cereal box would do, though, obviously do not try to cut the cereal box with your eyes shut.

Having assembled the necessary eye protection, you could squint briefly at this

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Yes it is the eclipse of the sun that happened yesterday.  I appear to have got the camera upside down because, of course, I couldn’t look at the sun to see where it was.  It was, in fact, up in the sky as usual but you can’t look at it and keep your retinas as well.

I hadn’t thought to provide a filter for the camera either, which was very unprepared of me.  I did think subsequently that this would be a good idea and fetched a blue plastic folder and got another similar photograph, just a bit darker.

I have now edited the photograph and dimmed it considerably to save your retinas, I wouldn’t want you to read this column and go round blinking all day.

You can actually see bottom right a slight dent and also a con trail of an aeroplane that was showing off and getting in the way.

Let’s face it my heart is not in this astronomy lark.  I’m sure you recall when the OH was into it and bought a telescope that sits in the sun room gathering dust, that I was very keen but quickly discovered that the major drawback of the interest is that you have to do it at night.  I quickly discovered that the most important accessory for the interest is very thick knickers.

Similarly, recently, when everyone and his dog was going on endlessly about seeing the aurora from their garden shed, I realised that the easiest way to do so was with a smart phone.  If you are a regular reader (hello, how are you?) you’ll know I think smart phone, foolish user, and refuse to outsource my thinking.  So I spent many minutes for several evenings staring upward without so much as a whisp of pale green, slight pink or even diluted orange juice.

When I lived in South Shields the main component of the sea was coal.  Grains of it washed up on the shore and had to be dried from between your toes after a plodge.  Now they tell me there are dolphins frisking beyond the Groyne (a lighthouse) and probably shopping up Ocean Road too.

I should have known.  Every indication was there when I was a teenager.  I heard that Cathy Mcgowan was going to open a Biba boutique in a department store in Sunderland.  I hopped on a bus, entered the store, rushed upstairs, burst into the ‘boutique’ corner (several rails of clothes standing against a black drape with glittery bits) and joined the queue.  When I got to the front, she went for lunch.

It seems that I am fated to just miss it, whatever ‘it’ is.

But not miniatures, I was there with a ringside seat and I still am, so after I have finished the tidy up of the packaging trolleys and made some cards, which are running low, I will get on with some dolls.

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Miniatura

Posted on 21st March 2025 by admin

I think I might be beginning to recover, mainly from lack of sleep.

I never sleep the night before Miniatura and I believe few other exhibitors do either.  The organisation required to build what is basically an entire shop on a table top is extreme.  Plus, this is Miniatura.  It is not any old show in a church hall, it is the premier craftsman show in the country, and, as this country has, in the current iteration of the hobby, been regarded as a world leader in craftsmanship – for goodness sake John Hodgson’s chairs were presented to Queen Elizabeth the Second, Terry Curran’s miniature pots were in a coffee table book of full size potters of importance of the twentieth century – we are good at this.

There are more original artists at Miniatura working in any medium than anywhere else you can find.  If they were expanded to full size and each had a room at Tate Modern, or any other museum, it would be the most famous exhibition of art on the planet.  The hall is full of people who can bring an idea they have had, which is just some electrical impulses in their brain, into actuality and put it on a table for you to buy.  And, because the shoppers are sensible people spending their pocket money, there is no rubbish.  If you attempted to exhibit a wrapped cliff or a pile of bricks or some ‘found’ art, first you wouldn’t get into the show anyway, but if you did you would spend the weekend watching the tumbleweed roll past.

It’s Miniatura, the visitors are as bright as the exhibitors and they know what they want.

Therefore many of us spend the night before the show wide awake, trying to remember what is it we forgot to do.

Sleep, mainly.

It takes me all of the allotted three hours in the hall on Friday afternoon to achieve a partial set up.  I am putting out about a thousand items individually.  I never finish on Friday.  I get home at half past seven, eat something, check I’ve left my clothes out and the card reader is charged, then go to bed absolutely knackered having had weeks of eighteen hour days to get ready, I close my eyes and whoosh have I put the little bags behind the ornament stand, have I got enough dolls of many lands, are the easels secure…

It’s a relief when it’s five to six and I can switch the alarm off and get up.  This time, dressed and outside to spend twenty minutes scraping the ice off the car.  The frost got to my hair, which took on the aspect of a dandelion clock, so by the time I was actually in the hall working at speed, I was beyond exhausted, fatter than I have been for months from lack of exercise and looking like an explosion in a hair factory..

at which point the Observer magazine turned up wanting to interview, video and photograph me.

The photographer took an hour trying to photograph my face and proved singularly incapable of improving it in any way, though I give him credit for trying.

The journalist was absolutely lovely not least because she is a miniaturist.  I can’t tell you how rare this is.  The normal situation for anyone reporting on a show is to say at some point: these are dolls houses but you are adults.  Or, the lady from the local paper just looks at you and you know the show is going to appear in print as quaint at best.

The recent emphasis on metal health has been quite helpful to us and our interests.  For nigh on forty years I’ve been explaining in various locations and to my extended family why having such an absorbing hobby is a good idea.  Every now and then someone appears at the show looking very puzzled.  Elisabeth Causeret Bettler was told for years at full size pottery shows in France that she was doing it too small, then she came to Miniatura and found out that not only was there nothing wrong with her, she was a virtuoso miniaturist, she had just been exhibiting in the wrong show.

It is normal under stress to forget everything you know.  When I was photographed, did I set the right dolls up nicely, as I’ve been doing for thirty three years?  Don’t be silly.  I was utterly consumed by the horrifying fact that someone wanted to photograph my elderly face, the one with the huge scar, the massive dark spot and, after a sleepless night, big enough eye bags to carry all your luggage home in.

However the journalist is a miniaturist and I found what I had found in fifteen years of interviewing exhibitors at Miniatura: we both speak miniature.

The world would be a better place if everyone spoke miniature and sweated the small stuff instead of invading Poland and similar pastimes.

Under normal circumstances on the Saturday night I sleep the sleep of the just exhibited.  This time, of course I stayed awake with the adrenaline trickling out of my ears

So it has taken until today for this parrot to have landed.  Having achieved splashdown and shuteye I now have to get everything ready for the next show.  First I have to repack the table cloths, properly, and now I am concentrating on the boxes which I need to remake and the carrier bags I need to reorder.  I have bought new rechargeable music lights and spent any other profits in various ways and when I have finished making boxes will start to examine the dolls and repack and make lists.

Before that I am going to get the shop here up and running in case the article does get printed. Having written for magazines I know that what gets printed is reliant on many other factors.  The cardinal sin for any publication is to be boring; right now a lot of very interesting world news is occurring and changing, daily.  But, just in case, the OH has volunteered to help me get the shop up and running and once he has learned how, to teach his elderly, wrinkled, scarred, sleep deprived mother, the one with the awful hair, how to do it.

So watch this space, I’ll tell you if as and when the shop is open, if as and where the article or (horrors) video is and then

and then it will all go back to normal, which is good because I have a couple of absolutely cracking ideas for the next show.

Just like every other exhibitor.  If you are good enough to exhibit at Miniatura you will have wonderful exhibits, insufficient sleep and ideas you can get out of your head and into existence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Doll’s dolls and dolls dolls dolls. etc.

Posted on 13th March 2025 by admin

I am nearly ready to set up tomorrow but I thought you’d like a look at all the doll’s dolls.  I haven’t had time to do a proper photo, I just piled them all on a sofa.

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Some of the doll’s dolls aren’t much smaller than the dolls.

But then some of them are for shrinking, so they would be.  If I get my skates on I might get the other doll’s dolls which I might dress as just, you know, dolls, for anyone who just wants a doll for their dolls.

If you do want a doll for your doll I’ll see you there.

I’ll be the one with the dolls.

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www.miniatura.co.uk   free parking, level hall, more original artists working in miniature than anyone else (apart from visitors), chairs to sit on and do thinking, refreshments, doll’s houses, everything that goes in them, prices from pocket money to collector and, um, dolls.

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Lord and Lady Clapham.

Posted on 11th March 2025 by admin

Not some nobs opening Miniatura by cutting a ribbon, but the names of a very famous pair of 17th century dolls.  I have been obsessed by these dolls, who now live in the V&A, for as long as I’ve been a doll maker.  It is amazing that any dolls have survived from so long ago especially considering the turbulent times that the 17th century encompassed.

Yet, as I researched and did a house in 17th century style, complete with priest hole under the stairs, I discovered that, out of turbulence and civil unrest, our modern age emerged, with the foundations of all that makes Britain a great place to live.  If you are researching for yourself, you could let Samuel Pepys, the diarist who lived in those times, be your guide.  His writings are never far from the top of a book pile here.  His voice is so authentic, partly because he wrote in code and didn’t intend us to read it.  He moved among the circles of the great and good at a time of immense political upheaval, yet spent just as much time talking about his everyday life.

It is from Sam Pepys that we get our first clue as to why 17th century dolls, which were wooden, look as they do in the buff.

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The jointing replicates the antique doll as far as I am able in porcelain, in miniature.  As my dolls are under two and a half inches I’ve omitted the knee joints that allow the famous dolls to sit in their chairs.  I have done this because I made the last five dolls to shrink.  The best I have kept to take moulds from; as they get smaller the difficulties will be those authentic hip joints and the fingers of the very distinct hands.

17th century wooden dolls all have these hands.  The previous 16th century dolls either had no hands, carved spoon-like hands, or knotted rope hands, which I have replicated in the kits.  The reason the dolls of the later century have these distinctive hands was good old fashioned showing off.  Forks for dining first appeared in England in 1608, fetched from Italy.  Although two pronged forks had been known as a carving aid, prior to the appearance of individual forks for each diner, people had eaten with a knife and a spoon, or, if you’re Henry the Ate th with a chicken leg grasped in each fat fist.

Forks at first were considered a bit nancified, but not getting your fingers covered with sauce caught on.  By 1663 Samuel Pepys was writing about ‘the laudable use of forks.’

Mid century the fork was occupying the same place in society as the smart phone today.  I’m sure there are modern dolls with smartphones; in Pepys England even the dolls have fork shaped hands, because the doll is always in the latest fashion.

Making such dolls in porcelain, which, to get the detail in, has to be cleaned when it is just dry, before being strengthened in the kiln, is an activity with a high wastage rate, which is why many were poured but few made it all the way through.

The black spots on the face of the doll are also a fashion of the time, they are covering smallpox scars.  We have to wait until the end of the next century in 1796 for Edward Jenner to notice that milkmaids don’t get the pox and invent vaccination, vacca being one Latin word for cow, though if he’d used the other we’d have had bovisation instead.

I have dressed the two men very like Lord Clapham, they have breeches, which must have been chilly round the lower legs and a shirt, waistcoat and big overcoats.

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I have moved the ladies towards the end of the century.  It took quite a while for women’s fashion to recover from Puritan influences, when if you wore anything other than plain black you were likely to be hauled off by the authorities.  Restoration fashions were very extreme but by later Jacobean times, even though it was James the 1st and 6th who was responsible for the mass hysteria that generated the Witch Finder General and the persecution of thousands of little old ladies, the costume of well-off women was pretty and the fabrics were lighter and moved more than the stiff Tudor outfits.  They are still wearing stiff corsetry down the front, but, as I’ve written before, the habit of any respectable lady of lacing herself into her corsets first thing so she could think, continued, with my grandmother, into the 1950s.

We have to wait until 1914 for Caresse Crosby to pop into a corner with baby ribbon, handkerchiefs and her ladies’ maid to invent the modern brassiere and overturn five hundred years of corsetry.  By the 1920s the boyish flapper look was in fashion and with it bust binding.  I remember talking to a well-endowed older friend of my mother’s who told me of her miseries as a young woman trying to flatten her bust.  I also recall a couple of older lady teachers in the girl’s school I attended, also young women in the roaring twenties, who wore their bosoms dangling au naturel and slightly flattened just above the waist, and, inevitably, eventually, somewhat lower.

Whether the 17th century dolls will mould and shrink after Miniatura, I’ll find out next week. meanwhile if you’d like to visit the doll’s dolls they’ll be here

www.miniatura.co.uk

the floor plan is now on the Miniatura website so that you can plan your visit.

Or you could just wander round being amazed in the usual way.

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Jane Austen doll’s doll.

Posted on 7th March 2025 by admin

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What is this?  Dead spider?  Scrap off the floor?  It’s quite small as you can tell  by the needle. 

It is a discarded bonnet.  I have been dressing the one inch jointed Jane Austen dolls; this bonnet didn’t quite come up to scratch (I’m my own worst enemy – but you know that.)

We don’t actually have evidence for Jane Austen herself having dolls.  She was farmed out as a  baby to day care with a family until she was three.  This was common practice in Georgian England, where ideas about the development of the brain and rationality held that children were not very sentient until they were three or four.  Happily there are pictures of contemporary children holding dolls, and surviving examples in collections to prove that there were plenty of dolls in Georgian and Regency England.

This is not this first time I’ve visited doll’s dolls in the age of Jane Austen.  Surviving Regency dolls are quite fetching, often jointed wood, sometimes with various composition plaster-type overlays on the face to make a base for the painted features.  These Georgian dolls and earlier dolls are the descendants of the Bartholomew babies in that most survivors are English.  Possibly because of Bartholomew Fair, England, certainly from the sixteenth century for at least two or three hundred years, was the doll capital of Europe.  In the later eighteenth century we find the start of the mass import of wooden dolls from the traditional German toymaking areas.  The German dolls were the dolls that Queen Victoria was so fond of dressing when she was a child.

To modern eyes the English mid eighteenth century dolls in court Mantuas, the dresses with the huge skirts, like shelves resting on the hips, are not as attractive as the slim Regency dolls in their wispy white dresses.  The life size court Mantuas must have been a trial to their owners, some of the dresses incorporated strings and pulleys so that the ‘shelves’ on the hips could be collapsed or drawn upwards to allow the wearer through a doorway.

For these reasons of attractiveness this is not the first time I have visited Regency doll’s dolls.

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Here they are in their bonnets and lacy dresses.  I have managed eight.

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As with every doll I have ever made they have more hand appeal than photographic lure.

You can see them in person in a week.

A week! EEK!

www.miniatura.co.uk

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It’s all Greek to me.

Posted on 4th March 2025 by admin

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This little doll’s doll is my version of a very old doll indeed.

She’s about 2,500 years old, which is knocking on by any reckoning.  Porcelain is not a bad medium in which to have made this copy, the original, in the Metropolitan museum of art, is made of terracotta.

Mine is 1and 3/16th of an inch or 33mm and jointed in the same places as the original, which was jointed with string rather than wire.

She is wearing a red hat and has painted fired hair, like the original but I have given her real clothes rather than painted clothes.

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She is wearing the one shoulder shift of a temple dancer, who was probably the Spice Girl of her day.

Ancient dolls turn up in various places.  We know that Ancient Roman girls presented their dolls as a rite of passage at the temple when they had achieved womanhood.  This might well have meant quite young girls, barely into double figures, marrying into family alliances, rather than reaching physical maturity.

Dolls turn up in tombs with their owners, which must have given comfort to the family of the deceased girl, sending her off into the unknown with her doll to keep her company.

Ancient Egyptians do appear to have been entombed with more dolls than you’d have room for in the average bedroom but they are not dolls as such.  They are the ushabti figures or answerers, there to serve and assist in the afterlife.  The Ashmolean, among many other major museums, has great collections of what look like not far off twelfth scale wooden figures.  These model servants are to work the granaries, mills, wells and all the other model buildings so indispensable to the pharaoh or entombed official in the afterlife.  They are usually solid sculptures because it was believed they would be magically transformed into real servants by various spells, after which they’d be stuck grinding grain, or sweeping the floor, for eternity.

There has been a lot written about the purpose of jointed and playable-with dolls from antiquity.  After thirty three years of talking to doll collectors both adult and young there is no doubt in my mind that the doll is and always had been the silent and reliable, friend, companion and playmate that everybody needs.

If your museum or nursery of any age needs a Greek temple dancer I will have five at Miniatura.  I know that isn’t many, authentic joints in a 12cm terracotta original have proved to be quite tricky to get in an out of a kiln a quarter of that size. 

It is and isn’t amazing that  two and half thousand years ago when life was much harder, a potter took the time, trouble and clay to make and fire a doll for a child.

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I tip my hat to that long gone potter.

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Rock star.

Posted on 2nd March 2025 by admin

I did the man who was lying in the old meat tray looking at me.  A lot of dolls live in polystyrene meat trays.  The trays are very old because I’ve been vegetarian for years but the supermarket expanded  polystyrene trays are cushioned, ideal for  either porcelain bits or entire dolls. They’re good for poured dolls and bits out of the kiln, I have a zipped bag full in the garage, when the last meat tray cracks I’ll have to stop.

Twelfth scale dolls take so long.  I do them with fully removable clothes and I’m very picky.  I can make a garment three times until I like it.  I undressed the first Tudor lady and remade her shift.  I do have labels on the dolls saying they are undressable but I don’t know if anyone is ever brave enough to do it, so probably no one else will ever know the shift is perfect.  I do.

Fortunately I’d already made a wig for the bloke.  This is good, circular stitched miniature wigs can take a day each to do.

First I did him some underwear.  The underpants are not removable, well, you could with scissors, eventually.  The vest had to be good because he’s going to wear a vest, a gold chain and an expensive looking jacket.

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The light isn’t that brilliant but he does have the most beautiful purple eyes.  I don’t think I have any purple eyes left.  One of the advantages of going to Thuringia for eyes was that, as doll’s eyes have been made there for over a hundred years, you can get every colour of glass rods that has ever been.  Most of creativity works like that round the world, wherever you get a concentration of craftspeople doing the same thing, the supplies for all aspects gravitate to the place where people need to buy them.  I used to go the the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter once a year.  If you want to buy tools for jewellery making that’s the place to go.  On the main road there are jewellery shops and down the side streets little groups of tool shops.

Once he had his underwear on I kept picking him up and kissing him.  Big mistake, I’m supposed to be putting him up for sale in a fortnight.

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See how good the vest and gold chain look under the jacket.  The jeans are proper and removable.  It isn’t a zip, it’s Velcro but it works the same.  Most of today was making the jacket.

The hat, shoes and working belt are lovely yellow leather.  I have a lot of coloured leather of various thicknesses because I bought the small hides to make the cushions for the S&H which had to be strong enough the withstand cats and children and I have a box of the thinnest leather for doll shoes, which are also sewn, as was the hat.

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I haven’t got time to set up a proper studio, but if he wants to write a quick shopping list..

Isn’t he lovely?  Someone will ask how long he took to make.  Thirty three years of practice, six weeks pouring, five weeks cleaning, two days firing, one wet-elbow day grit scrubbing, two weeks china painting and refiring, two weeks matching body parts, three weeks stringing and, just for him, a week dressing.

He’s going to be my top price which is £50.  I know there are people making Fimo sculptures in a day, gluing on clothes and asking £100.  But he isn’t a thing to collect and put.  He is a friend to play with, out of my heart into the hands of the doll maniac who will love him.

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Got to make a doll stand and put him in a box to go.

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You can see him in person in two weeks, here

www.miniatura.co.uk

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Smile please.

Posted on 27th February 2025 by admin

Where does the time go?

I’ve spent the day, so far photographing dolls, or to be more accurate, trying to photograph dolls.

Of course all my dolls move, they would do, they’re articulated.  And the clothes all move, they would do they’re removable.  And the hair moves because of being brushable.

I got ambitious, I tried to photograph three dolls at once.  As the afternoon wore on it became clear that trying to photograph more than that was hopeless.  One doll on its own will fall over, it’s hair will fly away in a way you didn’t notice, its glass eyes will drink in the light and look dark, the sun will go in and the pose, not stuck down, just relying on the articulation to make standing look real, will look rubbish.

So obviously I tried with five dolls at once and got this

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Here we all are, Mummy went to Bartholomew fair and bought me and my little sister dolls.

This is a thing that could actually have happened, done with dolls.

However after slogging away all afternoon the winner was the first photo I took.  This happens often in life in general  Here it is

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It looks better printed out.

The set joined in, first I broke the cardboard, which kept falling over, then it was all bent and I got a dark line, which you wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t drawn your attention to it.  Later on we will have a dolls house competition called ‘here are the things I did wrong’. The person with the longest list will be declared a miniaturist.

Photographing dolls is so much harder than photographing people, I think anyone with an ambition to photograph models should have a go with miniature dolls first.  Once you’ve got that sorted, you’ll find actual people easy.

Now I must make some doll stands and then do some work.

As you know it is just over two weeks to the show, here’s all about it.  There are nearly 130 exhibitors this time and most of them are original artists.  If this show was full size art instead of miniature it would be world famous.  Well it is, but famouser.

www.miniatura.co.uk

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Lady two.

Posted on 26th February 2025 by admin

I have finished dressing the second lady.  This doll really has everything.

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Drawers and shoes (the shoes are removable, the drawers are not.)

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She has a shift which is removable and has a drawstring neck like the real sixteenth century shifts.  As you can see from portraits of Henrician Tudor ladies and eventually Elizabethans, the material of the shift at the exposed neckline became gradually finer.  Later linens are almost diaphanous; textile technology having reached a peak not seen since ancient Egyptians were so clever at weaving fibres that they were able to utilize plants to make paper.

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The leather corset is laced under the bust. As you will know if you wear a modern bra, the support depends on the fitting of the band which goes round the torso under the bust.  The sixteenth century corset may not look very supportive, relying as it does, on the linen shift to encase and cradle the bust, but look what happens round the back.

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That is a lot of support and warmth.  I have seen actual sixteenth century leather corsets in museums, the costume museum in Bath has good examples.  They are business-like garments.  The gathered neckline of the shift means the new mother could feed her baby without removing her corset and the garment is adjustable simply by tightening or loosening the lacing.  Needless to say, surviving examples show major signs of sweat, I haven’t seen one leather corset anywhere without dreadful stains.

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It must have been a relief to the nostrils to get a substantial embroidered skirt over the top.  The skirt, like everything else, is removable, it has a drawstring tied in a bow round the back, and look, you can neatly push your shift and corset strings down your skirt front.  I wonder if this was the origin of the pocket?  Queen Elizabeth’s inventories mention pockets, although they did not come into general use until the seventeenth century for women.  They were what I used to call a Dorothy bag, a small pouch with a drawstring top. These were worn under the skirt with the strings looped through a belt or the skirt drawstring.  Later, slits in the skirt that enabled the pocket to be reached without getting undressed, turned into what we would recognise as a pocket today.

Dressing these ladies with all their clothing tied on with strings, made me realise the origin of another popular doll, the pedlar doll.  Pedlars and packmen have been depicted since the twelfth century selling various wares including early forms of literature, and ribbons.  In rural areas they must have been essential in the middle ages.  If your ribbon snapped or just shredded under the strain of general living you would have had to tie your clothes on with a cuttingly thin spun flax string or a bit of wool.  How grateful you must have been to see a pedlar hove into view with a nice tray of broad ribbons.  The earliest pedlar dolls date from the sixteenth century, the dolls proving testament to the history.  Pedlar dolls with enticing trays full of miniature wares continued to be popular until the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution brought much of the population into towns where there was work and haberdashery shops.

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Here is the lady with the overgown, her removable hood and her diamond earrings.  This doll, as you may have noticed, also has green glass eyes and eyelashes.  This thirteen joint porcelain doll is the equivalent of about five foot four.

I was reasonably happy with her and nearly skipped off downstairs for a cup of tea leaving her standing on her own.

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Fortunately I realised what I had done and took a photo and then I even went back and laid her down, flat and safe.

Over the last thirty three years I have discovered that the main aim of any doll with separate porcelain fingers is to throw itself off tables, face down on to hard surfaces and succumb to as much gravity as possible, breaking fingers on the way.  Dolls should not be left unsupervised anywhere, not in houses, not on tables, nowhere.

Tomorrow if the sun comes out I will do some mother, daughter, doll photography and then I will make some doll stands.

After that I should be getting on with the doll’s dolls in history but there is a man lying in a box next to my work table who needs to be a rock star, every time I look at him, he smiles.

If I had behaved like some doll makers I have interviewed, or, even most of them, I’d have worked out how to do it, bought a ton of commercial moulds and a book of dress patterns, all of which exist, and set up a production line, I might even have charged an amount of money that had something to do with the amount of work.

However, I have belatedly realised that what I do is art.  No two dolls are the same, unless they are such as the prototypes for the Tudor doll’s doll.  I am happy making little individual works of art and collectors are happy collecting them.

Today a regular reader knocked at the door, as it was raining the lockdown library wasn’t on the drive and she had a jigsaw to return.  She went off very happily with a huge bag of books and I was happy because she declared herself happy.

That’s it really, isn’t it?  If you can use your time to do things that make people happy, that’s a good use of time.

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Happily for you it is only two and a half weeks to Miniatura, all the details and the tickets are to be found here www.miniatura.co.uk


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Doll’s dolls dolls.

Posted on 23rd February 2025 by admin

At ten to eleven last night I finally finished the first little girl doll.  She is just over three inches so she is probably about four years old.

She might not look like a doll dressed according to a portrait because she is a doll dressed by an interested costume historian, but also an adaptive miniaturist. (That’s me, by the way.)

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She does have china painted shoes because I didn’t know which era she needed to live in until she did.  Of course all of my dolls are porcelain, you can dress and undress them as often as you like.  Even the smaller scales, which have their clothes sewn on them, are undressable in the future with a pair of scissors.  I think a doll should be an heirloom and something you can play with.

As you can see she is wearing drawers and a shift.  Because her arms are articulated you can put her arms over her head and take the shift off.  I have used Broderie Anglaise, which actually was first developed in the sixteenth century, so is not completely anachronistic, though it did not become a craze in England until the Victorian era.  I’ve used it because the pattern looks Tudorish to me.

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The underskirt is heavily embroidered, which is correct and on a drawstring which is also correct.  Tudor clothes were tied together and mostly based on rectangular pieces of cloth sewn together and many layers.  Wooden buildings are actually quite warm.  I was surprised when I first inhabited my writing shed to find how warm it was with the door closed, even on a cold day.  On a warm day the wood soaks up the sunshine.  Even I take layers off if I’m writing in there and it’s warm.

It took a good few hours to make the gown, which is, like the lady’s gown, similar to our dressing gowns, in that it is put on as you would put on a coat, and tied at the front.  Tudor little girls must have learned quite young how to tie laces.  I am assuming, though I have not yet found proof, that children did not need separate sleeves.  By the time they reached teenage years they’d have needed the ventilation at the underarm that stopped the sleeves rotting in the absence of anti-perspirant, adult sleeves being laced over the shoulders, the lacing covered by the picadil.

I’m sure you recall that the reason I was dressing the little girl was to see if she would like the Tudor doll.

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She’s considering it.

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Oh yes, she would.  Look! It matches her dress. 

I wonder whether she likes the bigger doll better or

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That’s the one!

In my thirty three years exhibiting at Miniatura I’ve given away quite a few dolls to little girls but this is the first time I’ve given a little doll to a little doll girl.

Don’t know why it took me so long.

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Thee weeks to the show.  AAAAAArgh!

Details here   www.miniatura.co.uk

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