JaneLaverick.com

Let there be light.

Posted on 17th November 2023 by admin

I am waiting for a dolls’ house which I am not expecting any time soon but eventually. Not only am I really happy to wait for the house, I want the builder to get on with something else. Keen miniaturists will be wondering if I have lost the plot completely, long time readers, going back to my magazine writing days, will know that I always applaud the general good, because what is good for the hobby is good for us all.

This latest development is really good. So good you’re going to want one as soon as I show you.

OK, so here’s a picture of a hall, so what. So, I’ll tell you what. This is not a real hall, it’s a dolls’ house room box, there are some in-scale switches. When you switch the switches, the light comes on. As if you were a mini person, going into a room and switching the light on, in fact you could hold the hand of a doll and get them to work the switch and the light would come on. The only way it would get any better is if the doll said, ‘Crikey!’

How realistic is that! Yes, I want one too, form an orderly queue please.

The clever electrician is John at Creative Dolls Houses, whose work you first saw last Christmas in the lovely 24th scale he built for his brother. You next saw him in my Miniatura report with lots of great houses and the authentic book nook of the Bronte hallway, which is the one I’ve ordered.

Quizzed about this recent achievement John says his Mum* had a dolls’ house with working light switches but they were way out of scale. Keen history-researching miniaturists may have noted these, in pre WW2 houses. I remember seeing one in a museum, the switches were just very small real life switches, and the lights weren’t up to much either. I had similar lights in my big house. No switches, you had to crawl behind the house and plug the transformer into the wall and switch it on and all the lights in the house came on at once unless the mini plug bar in the loft had come undone in which case they all didn’t come on at once. Apart from the bit where I was scuffling around in the dust in the loft, it was nothing like a real house at all. In fact I was so disgusted with the awful plastic lights and the dodgy wiring, my grandson helped me pull the lot out when he stayed in the summer. I’ve got the battery lights that work through the floors with magnets to install, which can light one room at a time but to switch them on I’m going to have to put my head in the room and knock all the furniture over. Gulliver’s Travels on steroids, it’s such a nightmare, all the furniture is living out of the house in a laundry basket in the hall.

What is needed is a proper light switch near the opening of the house, that you can switch on and make visitors gasp.

The room box is a replica of a room in the big house John showed at Miniatura, with the chimney breast moved to the back wall so you can see the lights.

And here it is!

If you would like to see the light, John is likely to be at a show near you soon. He will be at the York fair and Kensington’s Christmas fair. For details of other shows please go to the website. I will be first in the queue to be blinded by the light at Spring Miniatura.

Every now and then over the course of thirty years as a pro in the hobby, I meet someone who is so switched on to what miniaturists need, you wonder what you did before they appeared.

Have a look for yourself www.creativedollshouses.co.uk

*Ah, well, now I know. John and his brother have genetic dolls’ houses, no wonder they are so good at the hobby.

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged working dolls house lights with switches | Leave a comment

Mouldy

Posted on 14th November 2023 by admin

Long time readers, (hello how are you?) already know by the title what I’m doing. To be fair it isn’t exactly a mystery because I’ve been doing it for over thirty years.

Yes I am making moulds. After just one day of it, I am knackered. My old tee-shirt is soaked and filthy and I’m damp through to the skin. My fingernails are clogged with plaster fragments and Plasticene, the kitchen floor has gone all crunchy and every available surface is covered with stuff.

The mould boxes are made out of Lego. Which is great for getting nice neat moulds that stand well to pour, but less lovely if you pour the plaster too soon when it is a bit too liquid and it seeps out under the bricks and into the bricks and between every little bump. Then you have to take everything apart and stand patiently at the sink, picking the plaster out of the hollow backs of the bricks. If you neglect to do so the next attempt at building mould walls will be unsuccessful, so you might as well grit your teeth and get on with the cleaning. Three times so far, with over fifty bricks all to be cleaned individually each time. This of course is why my tee-shirt is wet and my trousers under them. If I were taller I might just have wet legs. If I keep on shrinking, I’ll eventually have a wet chest, then a wet neck. If mould making starts giving me wet hair it might be time to quit, and do something cleaner. And closer to the ground.

The doll I am making moulds for is twenty-fourth scale Marie Antionette, for an order. I spent several weeks researching her through assorted books. I feel very sorry for her, she was a picked-on high-born virgin sent to marry someone she had never met, in a totally foreign country, the language of which she did not speak, with not one iota of choice in the matter. When she got there, still a teenager, her husband, who was called Louis (because he didn’t have much choice either) was wonderfully ignorant, despite living in the French court, which was chock-full of intrigue, unbridled passion and assorted dalliances. As a result she failed to produce an heir as the marriage was not consummated for another seven years. In the end a friend of Louis decided that some nice long walks and a little instruction would be helpful.

Imagine it: So, your ‘Ighness, shall we take zis path? In ze chambre, your Grace, you need to remove ze britches.

Mais je will be un peu chilly.

Neverzeless, Your Grace. Zen you remove ze lower clozing from ze Queen.

Zen she will be chilly aussi!

Patience, Your Grace, if you let moi elucidate you will see ‘ow you will soon be warm.

Zis ‘ad better be good.

Oh, it is. Zen you get into le lit avec the Queen and you (whispers.)

Non!

Yes you do. And also (whispers) (more whispers) and, no come back (whispers.)

Mon Dieu! Est vous absolutely certain?

Absolument.

Does she need to take her wig off?

Well, shall we take this path?……….

The instruction was successful and the second pregnancy, it being the French court, produced a Dolphin. Really. This is history and I’m not making it up.

I knew that Mme. Tussaud had begun her waxwork modelling in the French revolution, but I didn’t know, until I read it in a book, that the first head she modelled was that of poor Marie Antoinette, which she found in a field lying fairly close, but not joined to, her body.

And I thought it was just me modelling heads from history to turn them into decorative figures.

Did Mme Tussaud model the head in wax from sympathy? When she found it did she just happen to have a bucket of wax at home? (In the same way I have buckets of plaster in the garage?) Did she rush home looking for a modelling material and grab a handful of candles and head back to the field? We shall never know. Marie Antoinette did not go on display but she is the reason Tussauds began. The lifelike waxworks she started are in numerous exhibitions round the world and always worth seeing. I think Mme Tussaud was really a doll maker, she just did hers life size. I wonder what she would think of my Marie Antoinette who is going to be under three inches?

More mouldy moulds and crunching underfoot tomorrow. Stay tuned later this week for news about dolls houses that you will find very illuminating.

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The one hundredth Miniatura

Posted on 10th November 2023 by admin

As promised work is underway for the one hundredth Miniatura, which is a mere eleven months away. Last posting I promised a free gift and here it is!

Well, I hope you find that helpful. There is also the modelling for a 48th scale side table and the junk to go on it.*

It is practically a law of the universe that if you have a table beside your comfy chair, it will collect junk. If I were more scientific, I’d tell you the formula for it.

Side tables are various. My father had a nineteenth century rent table beside his chair with a drawer no one could open, because of the chair. It had a very nice lamp on it, some spectacles, some spectacle cases, an assortment of small antique things, bits of paper, slight statuary and a rota of larger antiques that was ever changing as they were bought and sold. He never really stopped being an antique dealer and loved visiting antique dealing friends and doing deals. I learned early in life not to get attached to objects; they invariably vanished, traded up.

The OH has a table by his chair that he made at woodwork classes, with an inlaid kingfisher on the top. He was very keen to obtain UV blocking Perspex to put on the top, so it would not fade. This was an interesting conceit, as the table top is rarely visible. It is the home for the newspapers from the last seven days, all with partially completed cross words, numerous one-armed reading glasses, only outnumbered by the one-lensed variety, though not in any way overtaken by those specimens waiting to be mended.

The table on the other side supports condiments, finger napkins, several pots full of broken crossword completing pencils, nail files (the working one is the glass one and mine) and coasters. Yes we eat in the lounge watching TV like everyone else.

On the other side is my chair, next to it a table made by my father in the 1950s, covered with small square Italian tiles, very fashionable at the time of manufacture. It boasts a collection of bits of kitchen roll used as finger napkins and constantly recycled and turned to use all the good bits. That’s all.

Am I some paragon of tidiness?

No because the real little table for me is the bedside table which has one lamp and a tower of books.

So that’s what I should probably miniaturise next.

I had a email from SMIL’s daughter yesterday. She had visited her mother, I think for the first time in a while and was unpleasantly surprised to be consulted about feeding strategies because SMIL has become thin and doesn’t want to eat.

My mother-in-law was the first person I knew with dementia who became very thin. By the time she died she was almost skeletal. She was never over-weight to begin with. A lot of the costs incurred in care of my in-laws was to do with trying to get my mother-in-law to eat. I put on sumptuous spreads, all to no avail. I remember vividly my father-in-law hammering on the bedroom door where I was trying to feed my infant son, shouting ‘Come down, I think she wants to eat.’ I plucked the infant from the maternal breast and dashed downstairs, where, of course, the sufferer had completely forgotten that she wanted to eat at all. Left alone at home during the day when her husband was at work, four days a week, she never thought of eating. She seemed to lose the habit, or desire.

As well as lack of food, there are contributory factors to weight loss in dementia. Inactivity, which was my mother’s problem, can leave undigested food festering in the intestines, killing off appetite. My mother was hospitalised at one point, before diagnosis, for this problem. She may also not have been helped by diverticulitis, a disease in which pockets form in the intestines, though returned home and moving more, this seemed to vanish.

Additionally, as I know first hand, if your intestines are not working they are unable to absorb nutrients from food passing through. This can be related to age, infirmity or disease.

I believe SMIL’s daughter had given consent for her to be switched to a largely liquid diet, whether or not this will help at this stage, is debatable. I continue to send cards weekly, containing chocolate.

My mother-in-law’s death certificate gave the cause of death as starvation. This is as shocking to write, as it no doubt is to read.

If you are the carer just give love and food whenever you can, and if that’s not working don’t beat yourself up about it. You cannot get into another person’s body and heal it, any more than you can get into their mind and make it work again.

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*I have not stabbed myself with the scalpel. It’s the varnish that will ensure the models glide out of the moulds**, which in this case is red nail.

**In theory.

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Posted in About artists., Dementia diaries. | Tagged the one hundredth Miniatura | Leave a comment

Some famous women.

Posted on 5th November 2023 by admin

I am at the start of the preparation for the 100th Miniatura. It isn’t until the autumn of 2024 but I need to get a head start.

I have decided that there should be a free porcelain gift for the first 100 shoppers at my stand on Saturday, and the first 100 shoppers on Sunday.

200 free porcelain items will not be dolls but they will be in two parts, various, and glazed and china-painted so that 100 years in the future they will still exist.

At the Millennium, which I also felt was special, I changed my hand-made Christmas cards for a crib in porcelain, over a few years. I stopped about 2004 and still have boxes of unbaked camels in the loft, as you do. So I am well aware of just how much work there is to give large numbers of hand made items away, which is why I am starting now.

I have modelled half of the give-aways and also have the normal orders to do. I had a request for Marie Antoinette in 24th scale, so she is being modelled, along with a couple of her children. I read up on her quite a lot and enjoyed all of the Antonia Fraser biography, called Marie Antoinette. I did know that Mme Tussaud began sculpting wax likenesses in the French revolution, but had no idea that her first head was that of Marie Antoinette which she discovered dumped near the rest of her. Poor Marie Antoinette suffered a fate which has overcome some famous and beautiful women in history. First lauded, then pilloried, many of the most famous never made it to forty. Hounded, sanctified, demonised, lusted after and rarely with any right of reply, Marie Antoinette stood in sisterhood with Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Boudicca and Cleopatra, in my opinion.

The Christmas cards I make this year will be minimal, just Christmas cards. I am getting a little tired of making and posting 70 amazing interactive tours de force and getting 27 purchased bits of cardboard back, (and three good ones, thank you, I kept them,) so a year off is not a bad idea.

Meanwhile news of SMIL, which will not be welcome if you are a carer of someone demented. Sad to say, SMIL has lost the use of her legs and is now in a wheelchair. This can happen with dementia. Any bodily function which is controlled by the brain can stop working at any point in the disease. As I believe movement to be a benefit to the brain, bringing nutrients and oxygen, against the pull of gravity, I am not expecting the course of the disease to be slowed by this development. For the last few days SMIL has been unable to respond in telephone calls at all, not even making noises. I am told she brightens up when I ring and is still listening.

Dementia is very depressing for family members. If you are the primary carer you may struggle to find any time at all for yourself but a quick walk, even if it’s round the supermarket, and as much sleep as you can manage, is a good idea. Of course you know I think hobbies are wonderful for your mental health but I found the hobbies were only possible in terms of time, when the job was finished and the subsequent health issues that caring in me had raised, were addressed.

If you are a carer of a demented relative, fate has put you front and centre of a very large battle happening in our time around the world, with no answers yet as to what begins the process. If you are joining in with the caring and not running away, or leaving the daily struggle to someone else, I salute you, you are a hero in my book. You may get little thanks or none from other relatives who may have absented themselves in order not to know the details, but I know and, if you want to contact me and just have a moan about how very difficult it is, just click on ‘leave a comment’ below and I’ll get back to you.

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Posted in About artists., Dementia diaries. | Tagged preparation for the 100th Miniatura | Leave a comment

Keeping in touch.

Posted on 27th October 2023 by admin

I read on the front of the newspaper today that previous estimates of how many people will become demented were wrong. Currently there are 900,000 people classed as having any of the various forms of dementia and these numbers are set to double by 2040 to 1.7 million.

The article went on to list some of the contributory factors as smoking, being overweight and being diabetic.

As I have written previously, the one thing that links the seven people I have known personally who developed dementia, is inactivity. Two of them sat for work by the hour. One was a university professor who wrote many papers. One was a potter. A couple sat because they were old and tired. My mother got up and sat down because she thought manual labour was the province of the working classes whereas she was a lady. SMIL sat throughout the pandemic in order not to be a bother to anyone. Whatever their reasons for sitting by the hour, they all did the same dangerous thing – they got up and sat down.

If you like to sit and watch television for much of the evening, it may be instructive to consider what you are doing if you take away the television. You are sitting staring at the wall. We have not evolved to sit and stare at a wall. What did people do before television? Victorians were famous for gathering round the piano for a sing song, doing acres of needlepoint, or taking boiled-down cow’s feet to the poor as broth, which the poor were grateful for, it being some years before a takeaway was thought of.

The other thing people did, if they wanted to eat, was cook, which you have to do standing up. All the other activities necessary for civilised life involved hours of rushing around or standing up too. My grandmother rose at five when she was eight years old to wash the other children’s cotton smocks. Her father helped by putting the fire on under the copper and pumping the big jug full of water.

When I stayed with her on a Saturday night in the nineteen fifties, she was still washing her smalls with a poss stick in the sink and tackling any stains with a washboard. She did have Daz, a modern clothes washing powder. If you were good you got some in your bath and came out fresh as a daisy.

I am terrified of inactivity because of the risk of developing dementia. For twenty three years I’ve started nearly every day with a work-out. I am not huge and muscular, I am short and tubby. I exercise at least an hour but often all morning. I do not do it to excess, I just do it enough to make my feet warm.

All the blood that is in your body goes through your brain every seven and a half minutes, taking out the trash, bringing nutrition and oxygen, I just plan to exercise enough to give it a push.

The other thing I do nearly every day is ring SMIL. She can very rarely talk now, occasionally she manages a goodbye. I just chatter about all the normal family things, what’s growing in the garden, the weather, what the grandchildren are up to, cheerful, positive news the main purpose of which is to let her know she is not forgotten.

I have discovered by empirical research, that the more often you contact your demented person at a distance, the less of a trial and a difficulty it is. I think starting early after diagnosis and making it a habit is the easiest way to approach the task both for the contacter and the demented relative. Recalling that recall is the problem, the longer the interval between contacts the more likely the contacter is to be met with blank looks, or a worse : who are you?

I have heard from quite a few relatives of terrible upset when their demented person had no idea who they were. They felt left out and ignored at best and deeply wounded at worst. We know that long term memory is on a different circuit from short term, what we had for breakfast, circuitry. Therefore the more often you contact, the more likely it is that the long term memory will be invoked. The brain is best at the things it practises most often. You don’t have to think how to walk, how to clean your teeth, how to go to sleep because you do them so often your brain has instituted short cuts to save time and save you working out how to do them each time. This is learning. If you want to be one of the things your thinking-challenged relative has learned, then frequent repetition is your friend.

It is not always easy to think what to say. I have days when I’ve dialled the number and have no idea what the next ten minutes will hold. There have been times when staff at the care home have not helped, or have put me off, or the telephone equipment has gone wrong, or something major has been happening. I am fortunate that the secretary is very personable and always bright and cheerful. She told me that very few relatives bother to contact their demented person at all.

Just imagine if you were told you had a disease of your brain. Then, when you’d absorbed that news being told there is no cure it will kill you. Then, just when you were wondering how you would manage, because you knew already that your memory was on the fritz, your family tell you they are going to sell your house and shut you up for the rest of your life in what we used to call (and you will think of if you are a certain age) as the looney bin.

No wonder people go nuts.

And then they never visit, never call and you know you are going insane, among strangers, until you die.

If you are among the sane and have a relative who is not, there is little you can do if closer relatives take the care home route early or immediately. What you can do is stay in touch. I consider fifteen minutes a day as a prayer of gratitude that it is not me.

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Posted in Dementia diaries. | Tagged keeping in touch with demented relatives | Leave a comment

A trip to the show 3.

Posted on 22nd October 2023 by admin

If you were reading the blog last Christmas, you may recall the dolls I made for a wonderful 24th scale Dickensian house. This autumn I was delighted to meet the maker at Miniatura. He is John Dowsett, brother of the furnisher and finisher.

John has been building houses for a long time, he was featured on a local television programme twenty years ago as a house builder in miniature, though for many years he worked at his career as an electronics engineer.

Family circumstances indicate that working from home making homes will be John’s occupation for quite a while. If you are a fan of everything Georgian and you like your houses picture perfect, you are in for a treat.

How badly are you itching to furnish this house? This house boasts Farrow and Ball paints, as requested by the customer. John’s houses are definitely bespoke, the customer decides on the colour, the layout and everything else. This miniature experience is the nearest thing you’re going to get to being the landed gentry.

Here is another picture perfect house that will get your furnishing juices flowing. Next to it is a 24th scale house similar to the one John built for his brother.

But the house that got me going was this one.

This is not a book, this is a book nook, perfected.

I have seen many houses in thirty years as a reporter and professional miniaturist. A lot.

Reader, I ordered this one.

This is the hall, stairs and landing of the Bronte parsonage, where the book was written. John, a member of the Bronte Society, was allowed to crawl around the real building, doing a bit of measuring.

Here we are in the parsonage. Let’s just pop upstairs and write a masterpiece. These houses are so bespoke, that, even though it is a book nook, originally invented so you could slide a house into your real book case and peer in though the spine, I have ordered mine to be side opening (like a book) so I can play with it and get some dolls in there, and maybe a couple of pieces of furniture.

Houses come ready lit, utterly perfect, just as you ordered and ready to fit out, furnish and fall in love with.

These houses are really worth seeing at a fair, they are Georgian paragons. If this is up your street and you can’t wait for a fair, visit the website at www.creativedollshouses.co.uk .

You may be sure that I will show you my Bronte house in the fullness of time but I do have a lot of houses. If you want to get ahead of me in the queue, just say Jane sent you and I will wait while John makes your order. Having been miniaturising for so long I know that anyone making houses this good will very quickly be pounced on by keen collectors. If this is you I strongly suggest you get in the queue while the door is open (and up the stairs and on to the landing, oh I can’t wait – but I would for you.)

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Posted in About artists., Miniatura | Tagged Creative dolls houses, Georgian dolls houses | Leave a comment

A trip to the Min.

Posted on 15th October 2023 by admin

I was delighted to have time to spend with an exhibitor who was there purely to exhibit his room boxes.

You might think of a room box as something very neat, depicting a perfect little room from sometime in history let into the wall of a full size museum, but Graham Bolton has taken the concept and, over the last ten years, made it his own, though it was forty years ago that he was first inspired by miniatures. After thinking time, he finally began to shrink the world and what he sees in it, to twelfth scale.

He has an eye for gritty realism, as you can see. The real cigarette to give the scale is his trademark, and I would have to say the nice clean new cigarette makes the terrible toilet look even worse. Graham said the toilet bowls were difficult to do, I admire the way he has managed matching basins and urinals. Nearly everything is made from scratch using MDF, broken up tomato crates, wooden cheese boxes and purchases from pound shops.

Graham has acquired great modelling skills and a wonderful eye for detail. The message that he wants to get across is that the making of miniatures can cost little but the satisfaction is enormous.

If you are of an age, this kitchen scene will look very familiar. Graham has an excellent eye for life in progress. Look at all the stuff cluttering up the work surfaces. It’s hard to believe that this is all Graham’s work, and that parts are not expensive commissions. To produce a scene this realistic, Graham has had to learn how to be a jack of all trades. Look at the wood, metal, ceramics, cabinetry and textiles to name just a few of the materials in which Graham has obvious mastery.

Very impressive, as is

this.

I look at this absolutely perfectly realistic shop and find it difficult to comprehend that it has been made for next to nothing.

Graham makes his miniature scenes when he can’t get out in the garden, which makes me wish for a long hard winter so we can see some more. As Graham lives not too far from me, in Coventry, I’m hoping he will exhibit locally again soon. These are the sort of displays that spread miniaturism very effectively. Once you know this can be a low cost hobby and you see what can be achieved after only ten years of perfecting all the skills, you just have to have a go.

These are just three of the large display of room boxes which Graham was showing at Miniatura. His table drew crowds throughout the weekend and I hope the excited feedback was as inspiring for Graham as his exhibits were for visitors. If seeing them here makes you want to visit the show and see such wonders for yourself, details of the website that has the tickets for the Spring show are below.

And if these wonderful room boxes make you want to have a go yourself, what are you waiting for? Rummage through your recycling, or visit a pound shop and get busy!

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www.miniatura.co.uk

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Posted in About artists. | Tagged exhibitions at Miniatura, Graham Bolton | Leave a comment

A trip to the show 1.

Posted on 9th October 2023 by admin

You wouldn’t think there are any drawbacks attached to exhibiting at Miniatura, which selects all the artists that are there. Every stand holder has been invited; you can’t just pay money and turn up.

So, in a way, if you are there, you’ve made it. Hooray!

The problem is that, unless you have someone else behind the table with you, there you are. The whole point is to be there, so you definitely can’t just wander off.

In the days when I was reporting the show for magazines, I had to do exactly that. I had various helpers to man my table, which I set up and then deserted. The Saturday was the big reporting day, when I tried to get the best of the best to the photographer’s studio before someone bought it and on the Sunday I interviewed anyone whose work I’d taken for photography. I tried to see the whole show, in detail, which is one of the reasons I know how very good it is.

These days it’s just me behind my table. I do manage to scuttle round the other exhibitors, especially the new exhibitors, early in the morning on Saturday before the show opens. I saw three artists this time I thought you would like to meet.

Here is Kitten Von Mew.

Kitten looks utterly gorgeous and totally steampunk and so is her house, which she is busy filling with furniture. Sadly I can’t show you the filled house because then the show opened and I was back behind my own table. Kitten was demonstrating texturing techniques but was there, as well, just to show you her house.

This is one of the great features of Miniatura. If you are going to the show at a rather low point financially, there will still be plenty to see. This is a very good thing. The core of the hobby is you alone at the dining table late at night fiddling around with bits of something and a craft knife. If you manage to actually make something small and very good, no one in your family is likely to think you’re clever. Quite the reverse, sadly.

At Miniatura also this time, right opposite my table, was a wonderful castle. This was Kastle Kelm’s fantastic castle, absolutely not for sale, it’s theirs and it’s not leaving home. All weekend people took photos of it. Everyone except me.

But it was definitely there and made a lot of visitors consider a castle. That’s the thing about Miniatura, it’s well known for giving you big ideas. The show organiser, Andy, invites artisans purely as inspiring exhibitors. In the Spring there was a wonderful twelfth scale hotel, right opposite my stand, which I enjoyed all weekend. It’s not just inspiring, it is also quite comforting to be in a huge hall of people who think the same way you do. We all consider shrinking the world to manageable proportions to be a very good idea.

Not only can you not control the real world, you can’t control what happens to you in your own life, either. Stuff occurs. You can either get upset and go bananas and get arrested, or you can clear a corner of a table and get busy with a hobby that takes the edge off, is creative, artistic and has every chance of telling the future that you were here and jolly clever with it.

I am still busy with my stand redesign but will find time later in the week to show you someone else who was exhibiting at Miniatura, the show for Miniaturists by Miniaturists since 1983.

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The Spring show is on the 16th and 17th March, 2024, if you would just like to go and have a look, the details are at www.miniatura.co.uk

Posted in About artists. | Tagged Miniatura artisans | Leave a comment

The march of history.

Posted on 7th October 2023 by admin

You may not have heard as much as you would wish from me since the Min. There are several reasons: one, I was knackered, two, I was tired and three, I was doing a stand redesign.

I do have some photos of wonderful things from the show, which is coming back from Covid with a will. I want to get the redesign out of the way first because it involves the dining room being a no go area whilst I get creative about space.

Lack of space is a feature of the expanding show, which is always challenging, to use the modern term. I now take nearly a thousand miniature items to the show but I have only three hours to construct the display and place the objects. Here is the display from the Spring on one side of the table.

These dolls are incredibly precariously placed in their boxes. The ones on the right, stacked up, are resting on a metal picture stand, inherited from my father. The base of the stand is collapsible and needs a metal ruler held in it with a bulldog clip to prevent it collapsing and all the boxes above are stuck to each other and the metal struts with Blu tack. On the extreme left is the start of the twelfth scale glass eyed dolls, in boxes with a similar arrangement and between them the segmented white box (which was an evening dress shirt box) wedged into a pair of curly shelf brackets, upside down, as you do.

This time the new fairies in their domes were on the corner on some stacked MDF boxes with an offcut of fabric artistically arranged. Below them the dragons on a selection of acrylic blocks, all individually put out.

I looked at the stand next to me, which had selves constructed at the show from slotted plywood shapes. You would think as the OH has his own workshop and every tool you can imagine, that emulating such a feat would be a snip.

However, since the floor collapsed into the wet, the shed is now a no go area. Therefore I had a trip round various local DIY shops and spent three days faffing about with polystyrene coving and all the ancient cardboard from behind the shelves in the garage.

So now, having wasted three days (although it was quite interesting) I have reverted to making huge nesting boxes by which I can elevate the metal picture stands and have a row of precarious boxes beneath them too.

It’s going to be wonderful maybe.

Meanwhile to the real information, about which I was going to inform you, informatively (because this blog is categorised as ‘site information’) if I hadn’t distracted myself. JaneLaverick.com is now archived by the British Library.

The S&H applied for this a few months ago and heard the blog had been accepted just a couple of days before the show.

You’ll be aware that there are several types of blogs and endless demonstrations on the Internet and so is the British Library. I think it is a very good thing that new ways of spreading information and keeping in touch are being preserved for posterity.

I think of the wonderful window on the seventeenth century that is the dairy of Samuel Pepys. It is so honest, not least because he was writing it in code. To read it is to be back in time, sharing his concerns and knowing the man.

I do hope this blog has captured in the last fifteen years what it is to be a late middle aged woman in the twenty first century. I remember in the nineteen sixties a television programme called Tomorrow’s World. The presenters were inclined to posit the theory that the rise of living standards, the use of robotic helpers and the increase of global wealth would leave us all with vast amounts of retirement time to fill, somehow. I don’t remember anyone suggesting this would be done by people sliding their fingers round screens. I don’t recall predictions of the rise of families famous for being famous, of teenagers being stars in their own bedrooms just for demonstrating how to put lipstick on, or any of the other things to be found on You Tube and similar platforms.

But they did suggest hobbies would be important. They are.

As you know, this blog was started to publicise artisans in the Dolls’ House hobby, which enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s, flourished mightily in the eighties and nineties and has subsided since. In the early Noughties we saw the emergence of crafting TV, currently a million dollar business, which dolls’ house miniatures never was. I predict the slow decline of this, prompted by the vast number of people making videos from their own homes, which do not require the expense of a TV studio to produce.

I think the Dolls’ House hobby will continue, it has proved resilient, along with railway modelling and a variety of traditional handicrafts such as knitting and quilting.

This blog, however, as you know, settled down and spread in maturity. A lot of it is me, larking around, writing. Some of the writing turned quite serious in nature because of the prevalence of the newly global phenomenon of dementia in an ageing population. I also catalogued ill health on my own part, and, therefore, inadvertently, the National Health Service in the UK.

The late Queen snuck in, quite a bit of gardening and the occasional verse. This column is mainly writing, I hope largely polite.

What it is not is an album of family photographs. This is because of very slight journalistic training on hobby magazines; images are tricky and not to be used without permission. I rarely use names, either, for the same reason. If I report artists, I get their say so, or write verbatim what has been agreed.

One of the things you’ve never seen is a photograph of me. There are not many of them. Recent photos are marred by scars, ill health and age. But, just to satisfy the curiosity of posterity, here is one of me on my wedding day in 1976. I was 25.

My dear mother announced that she was going to wear something deliberately dowdy ‘in order not to outshine the bride.’ Which may give you a clue as to the sparsity of subsequent photos.

So here we are, reachable by posterity through the British Library, because, interestingly, if you have ever clicked on ‘leave a comment’ below and left one, and I’ve published it, you are part of the march of history too.

And now, just like the very famous literary figure, Samuel Pepys, I shall go and have some lunch.

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

Posted in About artists., Site information. | Tagged archived by the British Library | 1 Comment

Away with the fairies.

Posted on 28th September 2023 by admin

I have spent the morning fotografing fairies, or perhaps, photographing pharies. Anyhow, here they are:

Each fairy has it’s own dome to live in but I have removed the domes for fotografy. These fairies are about four and a half inches tall, fourteen part internally strung jointed porcelain.

They have glass eyes.

They have combable hair too, though most of them seem to prefer not to comb it at all. They are wild fairies. I have found them in my garden, so the backing picture in the dome is a watercolour painting of flowers in my garden.

The base of the dome is also covered with whatever is in the picture. Flowery fairies have flower bases.

I found some of the fairies living in a stream in Wales. It was next to a playground we had taken the children to, halfway up a mountain (because it was Wales.)

The bases for the stream fairies are flowing right out of the watercolours, because, well, they are rocks and water.

The fairy lights come with the fairies, obviously. There are little hooks in the pictures for fairy light arranging.

I never mention prices, but I’m going to do so. The fairy and everything with it, the dome, the base and a spare set of lights will be £53. Most of my dressed twelfth scale original artist, glass eyed, porcelain dolls are £45 and have been ever since I started. The extra eight pounds are what the dome cost me. You’ll be getting paintings and lights for free.

The only snag is that, so far, for this show, I have only managed five of them and the other problem is that I only take money because, as I only exhibit at Miniatura, twice a year, if I bought a smart phone and a card reader, that would neatly wipe out any profit at all.

I make little at the show, I do it all because I am happy to make things which collectors love to collect. In my life I have loved collecting things made with care and skill by artists, probably thanks to my antique collecting mad father. He taught me to see things made by human hands as some of the best achievements. I hope there will always be human artists of every variety and I like the ones working in miniature best.*

And also, of course, I am away with the fairies.

It is this weekend, I’ll see you there, I’m M5.**

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

Still time for tickets, cheaper than on the door.

www.miniatura.co.uk

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

*Because how would you fit the Sistine chapel ceiling into your living room anyway. And what would you do with all the people walking through staring up? (You’d have to dust the big light – who does that?)

** First I was flitting round a mountain in Wales, now I’ve turned into a motorway.

Posted in About artists., Miniatura | Tagged fairy dolls | Leave a comment

Let there be light.

Mouldy

The one hundredth Miniatura

Some famous women.

Keeping in touch.

A trip to the show 3.

A trip to the Min.

A trip to the show 1.

The march of history.

Away with the fairies.

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