For the 100th.

Posted on 31st March 2024 by admin

Preparations are underway for the 100th Miniatura.  If you have not already done so, take yourself to www.miniatura.co.uk go to the next show, how to get there and scroll down until you find a place to enter your email address, if you do so you will receive regular email updates about the plans of the exhibitors for the show, as they tell the organiser what the plans are.  I already know of three special exhibits and the amazing thing I’m doing which I’ll tell you at the end of this column.  The amazing thing has been planned since the last autumn show and ready since January. 

However, until the end of the column, here is news of other plans I have.  If you have seen me at the show, you know I always have a book for visitors to write in on my table.  Visitors who like my style and have wishes they think I can fulfil, in porcelain, in miniature, write in the book and I will make a few at the next show and put them on the table to see how well the ideas collectors have put into my head, correspond with the ideas in their head.  This, of course is one of the great virtues of the hobby in general and the collector’s paradise that is Miniatura in particular.  Collectors can commission the items they wish to collect.  I still have the 12 inkwells Terry Curran made for me to put in the desks in my school room.  I never finished the desks or the school.  I got more than half way and, as it was one of my first miniature buildings, gave up in disgust at my own incompetence.  I learned from my mistakes and donated the school to a charity shop, but kept the inkwells, which were utterly perfect.

My wish list for the last show, you know about.  It was Slight Versailles which everyone liked.  The posh end of the eighteenth century is loved as much by miniaturists as it was by my father, who only inhabited the twentieth century out of force of habit, in his head he was always a couple of hundred years adrift; having cabriole legs and a bow fronted chest myself, I understand.

I do have quite a list wished upon me for the next show, including a horse.  I did a unicorn many years ago.  The wished-for horse exists in reality, I saw a photo on a phone in the middle of talking to hundreds of people.  The horse had a friend, a special small horse with short legs (you and me both, Dobbin) but I’m not going to attempt that. Neither am I going to attempt the patches of colour on the normal sized horse, what I will be aiming for is a paint-it-yourself horse.  Porcelain is porous and readily accepts many types of unfired colouring medium.

But before that, and the other items on the list, what I am thinking of is dolls.

Yes, I know I do dolls, the dolls I am thinking of are dolls for the dolls.  Yes, dolls’ dolls.  And, of course I could do dolls’ dolls’ dolls.  Doll mad people did so in history.  I did, for a while, 144th scale dolls, who would quite nicely be dolls’ dolls’ dolls’ dolls, they were fairly small.

I was helped, as I began what turned out to be a career of sorts making porcelain dolls, by a local museum.  In a late fifteenth century building, which was, and is, suitably quaint, the county council displayed the collection of dolls of one main collector, who had had rampant doll mania.  The collection featured some rare survivors.  There were wooden dolls from the seventeenth century onwards, pedlar dolls, automata, fortune telling dolls, Jumeaux and everything you could possibly wish to see.  I saw them all a lot.  The building, however, became infested with beetles and was not even slightly airtight, so it closed as a museum in 2004 and the dolls were moved to another museum which is also closed.  However, in the early days of living here I visited a lot and actually saw the dolls, which gives a much better idea of scale and the condition and manner of manufacture of the costumes than an illustration in a book.

Books are not too difficult to find about the history of dolls but good, well-researched books are thin on the ground.  I recall reading soon after buying my kiln, a fanciful description in a standard work on the subject, about Victorian child labourers snatching red hot dolls from a kiln and throwing them along a line of children to a table.  The evocation of child labour hell was not authentic; if you snatched any doll even slightly warm from a kiln and threw it through the air, it would suffer thermal shock and crack.  Child labour was used in Victorian times for the production of many items.  One of my first collections, in the late Fifties and early Sixties was Victorian china dogs that decorated mantelpieces of the time. Knowing how much china shrinks in the firing and seeing the size of some of my dogs, I think adult helpers must have been needed because the dogs, prior to firing, would have been up to two feet tall and very heavy.  The work was probably piecework because the finish on some of the dogs is not good, the seams where parts are joined to make the whole shape are very obvious.  Some of the china painting is definitely by children, most of my dogs have startling eyebrows and nice smiles.  Adults may have done some finishing because those dogs with chains are decorated with gold paint, which is made with real gold dust and costs a lot, too much to let children get their hands on.  If you find a book with illustrations of Victorian china-headed dolls you can spot those painted by a childish hand, even when the modelling allows for lines to paint inside.

Books about dolls will tell you that there were no dolls before the eighteenth century.  There were but they were not called dolls until then. Prior to the eighteenth century, during Tudor times, dolls were known in England as Bartholomew Babies, being purchased at a famous fair, Bartholomew Fair, which was held at Smithfield, then outside London, in August, principally as a cloth fair but eventually having traders in everything.  The Bartholomew babies were turned wooden shapes.  Turning was a totally Tudor task.  Every wood and forest of woody and forested England had numerous turners using pole lathes.  Building on knowledge available since the iron age, woodworkers knew that a springy sapling could be used to power a turning frame, with a big branch fastened into it and rotating every time the sapling pulled back..  Apply your sharp iron tool to the wood and achieve a fancy corner for a building, a table leg, a bowl, a plate, a massive turned corner for a court cupboard and, at the end of the day, with the little branches left over, or a fair looming, the shape of a doll.  Some Tudor dolls had leather arms but none that have been depicted or found so far, had feet other than a mono foot, like the foot of a table leg.  Depictions of girls carrying their Bartholomew babies are in various Elizabethan paintings, if you were posh they were very nicely dressed.

Of course there were dolls before Bartholomew babies.  There are Roman cloth dolls in museums, which survived by being buried with their deceased child owners.  I remember, during a visit to a stately home with a collection of early nineteenth century costumes, being told by the  curator, that of course, women of that era wore no underwear, because none had been found. My mother used to use my father’s string vests to polish the silver, though not when he was wearing them.  Any that developed holes (tricky to spot in a string vest, but maybe obvious on a mangle roller) were seized upon with glee.  Of course women throughout history wore underwear.  In Tudor times and earlier, Spring weddings ensured that the right time of year had been reached to plant flax to harvest later in the year to make linen for swaddling cloths, nine months on.  Swaddling cloths are the easiest item to weave, as anyone who was given a ‘My first loom’ set can attest to.  If you can weave a strip you can weave a swaddling cloth and necessary underwear for yourself.  If you have grown your own underwear, you are not going to throw it away.  Every Victorian home with a scullery had a bowl in it, in which rags were soaking for feminine hygiene purposes.  The rags which were not used for this, were mopping up cloths, or my father’s vests, polishing the silver.

Similarly, if someone turned you a doll, it would not be thrown away, it would be passed down until it was kissed to death.  This is the case for dolls through history, we do know that mediaeval boys had hobby horses and toy knights, the depictions of them are in the margins of psalters and hand illustrated books.  Girls are not depicted much because they were girls but any girl capable of sewing a sampler to prove herself marriage-worthy and able to sew clothes from her woven strips, could also sew a doll.

I am not going to make all the dolls’ dolls throughout history, just those that fit with the preferred miniaturising eras.  I have previously produced old-type dolls as house residents.  I did Lord and Lady Clapham, famous seventeenth century dolls with new, new every house-must-have-some fork hands. Prior to this we ate with a spoon and your own knife but suddenly forks arrived from the continent and everyone, even the dolls, knew about forks, in fact forkfluencers were everywhere.  Dolls do tend to be followers of fashion, and trendsetters, ask Barbie.

I already have eighteenth century dolls’ dolls, who got left on the table before the show.

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I have started miniaturising my seventeenth century fork-hands dolls.  I will model a Bartholomew baby, because there was a request for a Tudor doll in my request book.

I need your input, what else would you like?  Do you have a dolls’ house of an era with no doll?  Do you have a model museum with a missing doll?  Do you have a doll shop with a big blank where a doll should be?  If you do have an opinion or a wish for the list, please let me know by clicking on the link below.

And now to the amazing plan for the show.  I am going to have on my

oh bother!  I’ve run out of room again.  Next time, stay tuned.

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The 99th Miniatura.

Posted on 24th March 2024 by admin

I have been exhibiting at Miniatura for over thirty years and, as I started writing for magazines very soon after I began exhibiting, I’ve been reporting Miniatura for nearly thirty years.

I have interviewed artisans, I have reported on what it’s like to be an exhibitor, I’ve told you about the hall, the set-up, what I am taking, I’ve done adverts here for what other exhibitors were taking, when it was something new and they didn’t want you to miss it.  I’ve liaised with the management, with magazine editors, with photographers and, on several occasions, been a photographer.  I encouraged an exhibitor to make the smallest teddy bear in the world and then found a reporter to get it into the London Times newspaper (who had to buy a special lens to photograph it.)  I have had drivers, helpers and done the show on my own.

I’ve seen the show when it was at Birmingham cricket ground, exhibited at the National Exhibition Centre, the cricket ground in Edinburgh, the Scottish National Exhibition Centre and a theatre on Sauchiehall Street, Edinburgh.

And this last show was the 99th show at which I did something at the show which I have never done before.

No, it was not have a quick kip under the table, (though I did know a family of exhibitors, where the dad, who was the driver, from a long way away after a busy working week, did just that.)  Most of us just keep bags under the table.

If you look at the title of this column, you might guess.  This was the 99th Miniatura which means that the next one will be the 100th Miniatura.  I am doing something very special for the 100th Miniatura, so, to tell people what that will be, I designed leaflets to give away at the show.

The thing that I did this time that I have never done before, a lot, was to talk to the visitors about the show.  Numbers have gone up and down, especially round the aftermath of the pandemic, but the show now seems to be attracting a steady round about two thousand visitors over the weekend.  I think I printed off four lots of 50 leaflets and gave away over three quarters of them, which means that I talked to nearly one sixth of the visitors to the show.

And I listened to those visitors to the show, who all had plenty to say, and questions to ask.  Here, following, are some of the Miniatura facts which visitors did not know or were unsure about.

The first fact is that it was the 99th show, run by the same family, since the beginning.  This is highly unusual.  Shows of all sorts are businesses. Successful businesses (in which class we would include any show getting to 99) are sold on to the next owner, who runs them for profit.  As I said to over 300 people, Miniatura was not founded to make money, it was founded to make an affordable place in the Midlands for makers in miniature to meet their collectors, or, as the motto of the show has it, for miniaturists, by miniaturists.  Not for money, for us.

The second really important fact is that you cannot just pay for an exhibition table and show up.  Exhibitors, who are selected, have to be of a certain standard to have a chance of getting in.  As you learned a couple of blogs ago, the organisers do not make the exhibitors pay through the nose.  The outcome of this policy is a preponderance of original artisans and a fair number of exclusive artisans who you cannot find anywhere else.  Artisans here meaning people who can get an original idea out of their head and on to the table, in miniature, using whatever medium they are choosing to work in.  And because they are not forking out for very expensive hotels or paying exorbitant table fees they can afford to charge modest sums for their work, which means you have a chance of being able to collect it. Artists, as I’m sure you know, simply will not be told.  They do one, then they have a better idea and do a different one, then a better idea and do an even better one.  They do not work like machines, it’s mind to fingertips, every time, reasonably priced.

This makes the show a collector’s paradise, and neatly explains what happens when  the doors open. Miniaturists run wild and free to the exhibitor they love, to see what has been produced and buy it before anyone else gets a look-in.

This, of course, is one of the great benefits of the hobby.  The end result is a dolls’ house, or collection of miniatures, unlike any other in the world, yours alone and about as heirloomy as you can get.  When  you get a show that doesn’t just favour that, but encourages it, that, as really hundreds of people told me ‘is what makes Miniatura different.’  ‘You never,’ a lady told me,  ‘get tables the same next to each other, and they’re all different from stuff you see anywhere else.’

One of the problems a few visitors still seemed to have was getting to the show by public transport.  If you go to the Miniatura website here www.miniatura.co.uk  click on ‘next show’ and scroll down to ‘getting to the show’ there is lots of information and even a video about the shuttle bus from Coventry rail station.  The chap at the end who says ‘Welcome to Miniatura’ is Andy Hopwood, who runs the show.  His mother started Miniatura after exhibiting (she is a potter) at expensive venues and the reverse, in tents.  She realised we needed to be somewhere that didn’t cost the earth, was easy to get to, easy to visit and a wonderful place to exhibit (if you were good enough).  The first few shows covered their costs and left enough for a takeaway meal and that was it.  There are rumours that Muriel Hopwood, who invented Miniatura, will be there at the 100th, though she has retired now.

While you are on the Miniatura website, scroll down from the ‘contact Miniatura’ section and add your name to the email updates.  The next show will be the 100th, many exhibitors will be doing special things, not just because we all love Miniatura but because I don’t think there has ever been a one hundredth miniatures show run by the same family from the beginning.  As the special things are announced they will appear as news in the email updates. I think they will be good because the show itself just gets better and better.  You can tell this by the number of previous exhibitors, long retired, who still come to the show as visitors. I am not surprised, on the occasion that I was unable to exhibit, just after I had broken the first arm, I was a visitor who staggered round the show saying ‘Crikey this is good!’ every five minutes.

At the 99th show it was very interesting talking to visitors, I was surprised that some people didn’t know who was running the show (Andy, he’s in a video on the website), or how long it had been going, or that getting in to exhibit was satisfyingly difficult. If you are a Miniatura exhibitor, that says something about you.  As a visitor you know your time will never be wasted, as one visitor remarked, after being told of entrance requirements for exhibitors – ‘Well that explains it, I thought it was good!’

And it is. It is so good that some exhibitors will be doing special things for the 100th show in the autumn.

What I will be doing is

oh dear, I’ve run out of room.  Next time…

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Nearly…

Posted on 14th March 2024 by admin

It is normal, no matter how soon I start working for a show, for some people to get left on the table.

This time it’s going to be the dolls’ dolls.  I want to make dolls’ dolls through the ages, so, rather than rushing the dolls you saw through the dressing, I’m going to save them for the next show, when I hope to have some other, older type dolls’ dolls to join them.

Versailles took up a lot of time.  It was a place where they were very good at wasting time.  Here they all are, having a bit of a dance.

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That was yesterday, today they are packed in slightly Versailles ready to go. 

I am finishing off some requests.  I have worked this way for a number of years.  At the show, if you are a visitor and don’t see, on my stand, the doll you want, but like my style (which has always been innocent and dolly, for me the dolls’ house has always been the place where the dolls live), you can make a request which I will write down.  I will then turn up at the next show with a selection to choose from.  There is no obligation but this circumvents the difficulty of getting exactly what you want out of your head into my head.

Now I am finishing some men to work in a garage, which was a request.  Interesting, if my garage is anything to go by, there’s less working and more taking a video to see what else they can get me to change or update.  Nevertheless men for a garage are being dressed.  And they are quite nice men, not oily or anything.  I do see that other miniaturists do gritty realism really well but it’s never been my thing, I think there’s enough gritty realism in life in One scale.  In twelfth, twenty-fourth and forty eighth, I like pretty.  I like everyone happy, ideally dancing.

This is the dolls’ house, where, unlike life, you call the shots, decide on the décor and arrange every last little thing to your liking.

Incidentally, I have (maybe) joined the twenty-first century and invested in a card reader, so you can pay me at the show with a bank card, for the first time, (providing I can make it work.) I also accept money and cheques drawn on a British bank.

If you have not yet got your ticket but are planning to go on Saturday please visit the Miniatura website now to get one.  Visitor numbers are limited by the venue for safety reasons and the numbers already ticketed for Saturday are getting perilously close to the total.  Sunday is usually more relaxed and you can appear at the door and pay.  All the details are at www.miniatura.co.uk

I am at the back of the hall this time, on a corner. Tomorrow I’ll set up and on Saturday I, the aristos, all the twelfth scale glass eyed dolls, the articulated ten piece, twenty-fourth scale, the bendy forty-eighth and the jointed forty-eighth to dress and dressed, and the pictures and the ornaments and the dragons and anything else I can shoe horn on to the table up to nearly a thousand porcelain, original artist miniatures

will see you there!

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How to be the most important person in a hall.

Posted on 13th March 2024 by admin

Three days to go to the 99th Miniatura.  It is quite something for a dolls’ house show to be run by the same family for 99 shows.  What usually happens with a show as successful as Miniatura is that it gets sold on because it has been good at making money.  You will notice that some dolls’ house shows are very expensive to get to and can be quite costly to get into as well.  In some places the parking would cost you dearly for a whole day and no one can ‘do’ a whole dolls’ house show in an hour.  There are over 100 stands at the 99th Miniatura, which, if you expanded all the exhibits to full size would be like visiting all the shops in a big town centre in an hour, absolutely impossible.

Additionally there are plenty of shows where all you have to do if you wish to be an exhibitor is to pay the table fee and show up.  In the early days of the current flowering of the hobby, I visited a few of those, they were full of tables with identical stock, all mass-produced factory imports.  There is nothing wrong with factory made miniatures but by the fifth table of exactly the same thing you begin to hate them and the way they are wasting your time.

Miniatura was founded by miniaturists for miniaturists, in fact, that’s the motto of the show, which it has stuck to unfailingly.  If you want to be an exhibitor you have to submit your goods and be assessed and be good enough; if you’re not you won’t get in.  This also extends to a very few, different stands of mass-produced miniatures at very reasonable prices because the show has always welcomed the next generation of miniaturists at pocket money prices.  (And the last generation; in the early days, as a visitor, I went without dinners for weeks to save up enough to spend at the show. And quickly learned to avoid the shows where all I could afford was a look.  The whole point of a show is going home with a  glorious handful of little bags.)

So every table at the show has been hand-picked to be the best of its kind, which means that you never waste a second of your time, every table has something different and there has always been a preponderance of original artisans working in miniature making their own collectables from their own designs and inspirations.  Yet there are many items that anyone can afford.  I haven’t yet met the miniaturist who is rich enough to buy something from every table, I certainly couldn’t even though I might want to.  I rarely escape from my table these days because I’m doing the show on my own, but in the days when I abandoned my table to a helper, in order to see the show and report it for magazines, I don’t think I ever  found a table which was not interesting.  There is never anything boring or samey because it’s Miniatura, every exhibit has been chosen to be by miniaturists for miniaturists.  If you are a visitor this weekend has been designed and put together for you.  In fact, I would say, if you are a visitor, you are the most important person  in the hall, because, without you, no show.

Yet it is very reasonable to get in to the show and compared with family outings at the weekend to fairs, castles, stately houses and the like, a positive bargain.  And the parking is my favourite price – it’s free!  And it’s right next to the hall, no steps, no trek.

So why, if it is so fabulous (and it is) hasn’t the family who run it sold it to the highest bidder?  Because it hasn’t been made to make loads-a-money.  Some years ago when the hobby was burgeoning, would-be exhibitors used to beg the organisers to let them have a table at any price.  They were turned down; the show is not about making huge amounts of money by cramming in  dozens of dealers. The cost of a table is reasonable compared to other International fairs because the show is not about the organisers skinning the exhibitors so their costs are covered and they’re making money before the show opens (and some shows are, or have been, I can tell you) it’s about miniaturists.  In fact it’s by miniaturists for miniaturists.

It’s for you, it’s for me, it’s for us and always has been.  Something wonderful, something we could have a go at, something touching, something funny, something you could learn to do, something fantastic, for the 99th time.  I exhibit there and nowhere else – this is the show that has absolutely got it.  What we want and need. It is very classy, top class tiny stuff.

Among other things, I am taking this:

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It’s just a little box of Versailles, (prior to the unpleasantness.)

Another picture tomorrow, if I get a minute.

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All you need to know about the show can be found at www.miniatura.co.uk

It’s a very nice show and a lovely day or weekend out – for miniaturists, you know. (By miniaturists.  It’s for us. For the 99th incredible time.)

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Breeches.

Posted on 10th March 2024 by admin

Deep in the middle of doll dressing, I ponder, not just for the first time, how very difficult breeches are to make for a small doll.  All my clothing patterns are my own, worked out from numerous trips to costume museums all around the country.  There used to be both a costume museum and a doll museum here, but they have closed for various reasons.  Fortunately I paid attention while they were open.

There’s a great costume museum in Bath, where visitors in years past, going to sample the health-giving properties of the waters, found themselves in difficulties (anti-biotics not having been invented) and died;  water not being much of a cure for anything except dirt.  Their grieving relatives who had accompanied the invalids, promptly recouped some of the cost of the expensive and futile trip by selling their fashionable clothes.  There’s some great stuff including quite a few leather corsets, famous for not wearing out, therefore worn for many, many years, decades, certainly, and probably able to walk between the show cabinets on their own.

Breeches as a male garment (though females did wear them for sporting occasions at different times) are really tricky to make a pattern for, even if you have seen a lot of them.  They first began at the end of the seventeenth century when they were so massive they had to be gathered round the waist.  They continued to go in and out and up and down at the waist right through the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth when they were still the only acceptable court dress.  They were supplanted by what we would recognise as a modern trouser by the Victorians, which was worn very un-ironed, possibly as a reaction to the extremely tight breeches of the late eighteenth century.  There is a photograph of Charles Dickens on one of his lecture tours, wearing a pair of trousers that look as if he has had a battle with them, probably through a hedge, backwards.

The late eighteenth century breeches were so tight that the fall front was a popular fashion for a long time.  These enabled the wearer to attend to the sudden call of nature, whether down the stairs at Versailles, into a receptacle kept in the side board, (so he didn’t have to stop dining for long) (maybe still with a fork in one hand) or in the alley behind the coaching inn, without having to struggle out of a skin-tight garment.  How convenient.

But the fall front, so easy for the eighteenth century wearer, is an absolute so and so to make in miniature.  And, even though I sew them up, they are still made to fall.

I set hoops for myself to jump through, I really do.

Breeches, of course are still around in numerous locations as court dress for assorted servants, lower orders and butlers.

In the history of costume we find that fashion begins with the it crowd, whoever they are at the time, and then moves down through the ranks until, many years after the garment was first fashionable, the servant classes have adopted (or been forced into) the item as uniform.  This does make one wonder if, could we jump forward two hundred years, we would be welcomed into palaces by people in torn jeans and ripped tee-shirts.  Slightly horrific but quite a gift to doll dressers.

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The dolls will be going with me next weekend to the 99th Miniatura details:  www.miniatura.co.uk

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Realistic.

Posted on 2nd March 2024 by admin

I have been working some very late night shifts, dressing the ladies of Versailles.  They are the ladies of the court prior to the French Revolution, when all was grace and elegance and nobody knew what was going to happen next.

In the course of the run-up to Miniatura my work table gets a bit dreadful.

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I used to work on the dining table, which was quite large before the OH destroyed it and cut the end off.  There was plenty of room for all the boxes of material.  There are thirty-one years worth of saved boxes of doll dressing material, which can stretch as far as the eye can see, or, as far as the end of the dining table, which, when I used to take my contact lenses out to work, was exactly the same thing.

Now, in my craft room, designed by me with floor to ceiling windows, like the windows of eighteenth century weaver’s cottages, for the light, I can see beautifully, but the room is not big enough for the dining table.  We are still dining on the dining table, downstairs.  I was going to buy a wipeable table for the craft room but had just inherited an eighteenth century folding card table.  This stood, folded, in my parents’ dining room, by the window, with a very small television on it.  As everyone knows, it is very rude, verging on common, to watch television at the dining table, which is the correct place for polite exchange of news and views, though not with your mouth full and your elbows on the table.  So, if you are going to have a television in there it had better be a small one and not on a proper television table, that would acknowledge its presence.  This is why they used an eighteenth century folding card table, I suspect bought to sell in the antique shop.  However it would not sell well because the unfolded table, which may well have stood, folded, in the sunshine since the eighteenth century, is a completely different colour on the inside.

However, in my craft room it can be unfolded and fit a small space to craft in and be folded so the room can be an overflow bedroom with a bed in it when the entire family arrive to stay.  And, anyway, it’s me, I’d far rather have a wonky faded ancient card table to work on as a modern work table, no matter how purpose-built.  People have been doing thinking at this table for about two hundred and fifty years, the table knows when you sit down, you mean business.

Very appropriately I have been dressing eighteenth century for weeks, in twenty-fourth scale.  I do love dressing the twenty-fourth articulated porcelain dolls, and currently, in the manner of Versailles, before it all went horribly wrong.  Therefore I have been up till very late having my kind of fun.  But. just like the aristocracy, it is possible to have too much fun.  Last night at half past eleven I was trying to jam a diamond necklace over the head of an aristocrat, in the normal way, and

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her head came off!

Shocktrick shocks!  I had not intended the revolution to start yet!

The ladies of the court, needless to say, were utterly horrified.

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Fainting occurred (on those without doll stands.  Those with doll stands didn’t have the opportunity, their feet are fastened to the floor.) They calmed down once I stood them all up again. That’s because they don’t know yet that they are up for the tumbril to Miniatura, where they will be sold, not even to the highest bidder but for a fixed price (£25) for aristocrats!  Each!  What is the world coming to (Miniatura, in a fortnight www.miniatura.co.uk ) Zut alors!  Mon Dieu! Blimey!

Back to the eighteenth century for me, see you there.

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Reprieve.

Posted on 28th February 2024 by admin

I am happy to say that the brain scan for the OH concluded that he was having a migraine and nothing worse showed up.  I think he has got off lightly and I think it was a warning and have said so.

And now I can turn my attention to where it should have been exclusively for the last two days and get on with dressing twenty-fourth scale dolls, which is a thing I really enjoy.  Well, I do but still have to take a run up to it.  I find that, as with most creative undertakings, you need to be doing it for a while until you get into the zone and the ideas start arriving.  Warming up is not just for sports people.

Did Michelangelo do a few ceilings in anaglypta and a couple of coats of magnolia first?  Did Barbara Hepworth round off a few rocks before she thought of putting a hole in them?  Did Franz Hals do a few grumpy cavaliers in a greyish vest before he told the model a joke and got him to pop a frilly coat on?

We may never know but I’ll tell you for posterity (if it has any interest at all, which I doubt) that I take a couple of OK dolls to rev up to much better and a few uninterrupted days sewing before I get really creative and start dreaming of outfits and fabrics.

It’s just the way my brain works.  I still wake up with entire poems in my head, fifty eight years after that first started happening.  Brains are amazing.  You are your brain.  You need to keep it hydrated, give it the good food building blocks, and get plenty of sleep and exercise to get the blood and nutrients rushing through it.

You should love your brain and be kind to it, which does not include sitting in a chair gawping at TV while shovelling in sugar or alcohol by the hour, the day, the year or the life.  There was a children’s TV programme called Why Don’t You (just switch off your television and go and do something less boring instead?) which started in the seventies. This was as good an idea as the programme in the fifties called All Your Own, in which children demonstrated what they had learned to do with the TV off.  I always envied the violinists.  An old violin came into the house but I only had a little go before it was whisked away, traded up for a better antique.  It had some writing on it: Stradi something or other?

I still have a big block of stone in the garden awaiting a chisel.  Fortunately now I am ambidextrous, so if hitting the chisel in my right hand hurts the metal in the shoulder I can swap it to my left.  After the Min, with a following wind and some sunshine I will get busy.

Though I have had ideas for new dolls for the autumn and kits, all in twenty-fourth.

I could have been telling you that I was about to become a carer again; I think I’ve done enough of that. I think I’ve had a reprieve.

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

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A distraction.

Posted on 28th February 2024 by admin

If I say I am working flat out getting ready for Miniatura, for some reason there will be a distraction.  Merely the act of mentioning how busy I am seems to invoke Loki the joker, who will toss his card in the mix ensuring you get a tricky hand.

Yesterday it was the OH, complaining for the umpteenth time about his skin.  The excessive dryness and itchiness of his skin he has ascribed to the humidity level in the lounge and the new carpet.  He found a site on his phone that suggested humidity levels in the house should be at fifty percent.  It didn’t say at which percent you would have to develop webbed feet.

There was a list of other symptoms, he complained of loudly, and then I shouted at him if he was worried, to do something, instead of endlessly telling me how stupid I am when I ascribe his classic symptoms to alcohol ingestion.  I went upstairs and started working but shortly he appeared at the door saying he had rung the NHS advice line, whose advice had been to get me to take him to the hospital at once.  So I did.  After a battery of tests he returned home very pleased that nothing abnormal had been detected. See!  See! What am I worrying about!

There has just been a phone call offering him a brain scan this afternoon.  I will not be able to take him, he’ll have to walk up the hill or find a space in the car park himself, because I have an appointment to pick up my driving spectacles.  I am not being cruel, I have had a few scans, including brain.  It is not difficult.  You take off metal, you lie on the bed, they inject you, the machine goes backward and forward, you get up, you get dressed, you go home or back to the ward.  By the third go you arrive in stretchy leggings and underwear with no metal anywhere, which speeds things up considerably.

I know many readers (hello) are drawn here in fellow feeling, who are carers of one sort or another.  Living with someone with a difficult condition, whether it is acknowledged or not and however slight or otherwise the caring role, is not easy and never convenient.  No one is ever overtaken by disease at a time when there is little else to do.  The trip to the hospital has never arrived as a sudden distraction from boredom.

Sudden distraction from work, yes, all the time.  Inconvenient for everyone else, always.  Something that could have been prevented from becoming a drama by action thirteen years ago when tendencies were first noted, absolutely.

I’ll keep you posted.  All things being equal I have a lovely twenty-fourth scale assembly of residents of Versailles to show you.  Yes they were living the high life, yes there was glamour and cocktails and all-night games of cards.  Yes the end of the eighteenth century in France was as OTT as OTT can get.  They didn’t even have to go to the pub, there were butlers with bottles absolutely everywhere and a massive marble staircase that people used to wee down while waiting for an audience.  (I know, visited as a teenager with the French family I stayed with, in the sixties.  They had definitely mopped it up by then, the staircase is huge, as waterfalls go it must have been impressive.)  (And damp.)

But we all know what happened next.

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

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The secret of life.

Posted on 18th February 2024 by admin

No rubbish, our kid, you get the good stuff here.

I would like to make clear that I am not writing about the meaning of life.  That is something completely different, as explained by Monty Python.  Neither is this the answer to life the universe and everything.  Douglas Adams had his finger on that one and it’s 42.

No, what I would like to reveal today is the secret of life.  Just.  As you do, well, I do.

I’m hoping it will be helpful to all readers, such things occasionally are.  Most of all I hope it will be helpful to carers, who could do with every weapon available in their personal arsenal to help them to fight back against what sometimes seems overwhelming odds.

Carers are various.  In my life I have been an adult carer looking after the next generation up who were suddenly getting into dreadful difficulties with long term fatal disease.  Stepping in to help, as opposed to running away is something I have applauded and encouraged for eleven years in this column.  Our lives consist of time, we only have a finite resource of it.  Giving it to someone else is easily the most generous thing anyone can do.

Other carers, of whom I know increasing numbers as I age myself, are people looking after life partners as those partners succumb to the diseases of age.  Of course what I have written about here is dementia, which has mushroomed in all advanced societies round the world, causing desperate problems financial, practical and emotional and frequently causing illnesses of various varieties due to stress, financial hardship and just sheer exhaustion on behalf of the carer. But other frailties of age can equally, suddenly cast one partner into the caring role.

Yet other carers are children, there are about a million child carers in the UK currently.  Children who come home from school and start caring for an adult in their household in every way possible.

And there are parent carers.  People who have children with such needs that they will never be able to leave home and live independently.  These parents are people who worry all the time about what will happen to their children when they, the parents, die.

None of these circumstances are new in human history.  What is new is developments in medical science that mean that babies born with great disabilities, who would have died in past times are now able to survive and live a normal life span.  Medical developments that mean that adults contracting dreadful diseases, who would have suffered just a few years and died are now able to continue, still with the diseases and the difficulties they cause for many years.

In these columns any ethical considerations of such advances are not mine to expound.  I am a survivor twice of cancer thanks to medical advances and I am a survivor of the surgery twice that saved my life, that had to be corrected with more surgery, in one case sixty-two years after the original surgery that caused the problems but saved my life.  I am glad to be here and have a ton more stuff that I would like to do, and make and write.

What I write of here is my personal experience of the caring role, not to tell anyone what to do.  Each person’s life is their own and we are all here to discover what we can do.  I simply offer support for those times when life is so awful and what seems to be expected of you is so far beyond your previous experience that you don’t know where to turn for support or comfort.  I have told you what I did, or what people whom I know did and how it turned out for them, and you can read and decide if any of that helps you.

I first came upon the caring role in my third year of life.  My parents had good friends whose third son was born with Downes Syndrome. I grew up with this child and played with him and spent time with the family.  He is the reason that when my future husband told me he had inherited Downes Syndrome in his family I didn’t run a mile.  I knew it could be lived with and that someone with the syndrome could be a family member.  Before the Second World War the number of Downes Syndrome children who survived to adulthood was limited to those whose immune systems were better developed than others.  My playmate tended to get virus infections very badly and be extremely ill but was saved by the availability of numerous antibiotics that were developed after the war.  His father had been one of the few that battled for Britain in an aeroplane, he was a very brave man.  By far the bravest thing he did was in his old age.  His wife had died, his other two children had grown and married.  To save them and let them live their lives he sold the beautiful, extensive home fit for a hero that he had lived in and moved into a tiny caravan to provide the money for his last son to be cared for in a nice home, no matter how long he lived for.

I once stayed in a caravan in North Yorkshire in winter.  I was there for a week and it took a couple of months to stop being ill and get warmed through again.

The secret of life I envisaged under the influence of laughing gas, which I promise you isn’t funny at all if you are having a tooth extracted, as I was at the age of sixteen.  The tooth, which was central in my jaw, had died after being struck by a ball and developed an abscess.  I don’t recall the ball but I remember vividly the pain of the abscess being such that I was quite keen to rip my face off.

Out of it while the tooth came out of it, I had a vision and a voice said ‘THIS IS THE SECRET OF LIFE’.  Excellent!  How helpful and unlooked-for under the circumstances.  I saw an oval bed covered in bright yellow silk.  (This is me we’re talking about, I’m not going to have a down-market vision, now, am I?)  On the bed curled head to toe like commas were a man and a woman. And that was it, because it was quite a quick extraction.

Great, so now I knew the secret of life or, as I called it until I got dental braces, the secfet of fife.

But what did it mean?  Was I meant to go into homewares retailing?  Be a marriage celebrant?  Check my writing for absent punctuation?

Some years later, in a book, I came across the Yin Yang symbol and recognised it immediately.  An acid yellow circle with head to toe comma shapes imposed.  What did it mean?

Balance.  The secret of life is balance.  For every down there is an up.  For every wrong, a right.  For work, repose. For tears, laughter.

They don’t necessarily follow one upon the next at speed.  You know from your own life that you can bump along the bottom for years before the upturn. Life is a rollercoaster and you don’t get off until you have experienced the thrills and spills, every one.

That in itself is a help to know and has helped me in my life constantly.  Knowing that no situation is forever and that you just have to stick it out until the change comes, is a great fortification against woe.  The only constant in the universe is change.

For the carer, stuck in a seemingly unwinnable situation, balance is the thing to seek actively in order not to fall out of the rollercoaster before the end of the ride.

Does this mean that in order to survive yourself and be there in the future for your cared-for person, that they have to go into a care home so you can attend to your own needs?  Yes, it might well be the case.

Part of the search for balance is discovering your own capabilities.  You can only do what you can do.

The welfare of the pair, carer and cared-for includes both.  As I have written often, placing the welfare of the carer above the cared-for sometimes for as long as is necessary to restore the balance, is not a bad thing.  If the carer burns out the cared-for will end up in a care home anyway except without the carer to visit them, if they have died.

Working out how to restore the balance in your life is what life is about.  It is completely individual.  Making sure there is balance in your life before you run into difficulties is a very good idea.  Someone who gets up in the morning and sits down for the rest of the day, ordering people about, as my mother frequently did, is not living a very balanced life.

Someone who lives on takeaway meals, someone who exercises to exhaustion, someone who works twelve hours a day, seven days a week, are people not living balanced lives.  You can only weight the seesaw so far before it springs up again, flinging you off.

I cannot tell you what is right and balanced for you, you have to work it out for yourself.  I have often written about facing the realities, getting to grips with what help is available and finding out about stuff rather than burying your head in the sand and hoping it will go away.  Such actions actively seek to redress the imbalance imposed by the sudden descent of an awful occurrence, whether ill health or any other terrible life happening.

Being brave enough to do whatever needs to be done but in an intelligent way, after thought, is a demonstration that learning is occurring and that progress is being made.  It might even indicate that we are acquiring wisdom as we live.

Wisdom is another thing altogether.  Good gracious, I can’t tell you about wisdom.

All I can tell you is the secret of life.

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



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Many dolls.

Posted on 17th February 2024 by admin

Over the last few weeks I have poured, fired and assembled 44 dolls.  To be exact I have assembled 44 dolls from the many more that I poured, fired, glazed, china painted and fired again.

When you are making dolls so small that a few millimetres out can cause rejection, you learn not to work when you are tired, which is why it takes so long.  As to the wastage rate, here is a picture which may explain –

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

this is the back of the two drawer stack that holds all the reject bits.  All the leg without a friend, all the hand without a hole, every head with a neck hole too big to stop the bead falling out, every wire loop that stuck through the arm, every wire hole that was too small to get the wire through and all the china paint that looked great going into the kiln and rubbish coming out.

The box stack is the result of many years, porcelain is so exacting it’s always worth keeping oddities in case they find a pair eventually.  There are also many more heads (because you only need one head) and bodies (for the same reason) than there are arms and legs, or more commonly, upper arms, forearms, calves, thighs, feet and hands which all have to be paired.

I did at first think the cause of all the oddities was that I was not very good at making porcelain dolls.  In truth, at first, I wasn’t.  The first time I opened the kiln on my own dolls made from my own moulds made from my original sculptures, it was extremely obvious that I had a lot to learn.  Later I was comforted by researching the history of various china companies.  Manufacture in England using local clays began in the 1740s in various places, the locations of which have only been subsequently discovered when archaeological excavations revealed the presence of dumps of wasters – all the bits that had gone horribly wrong.  A trip to any museum with a good collection of eighteenth century china may make you wonder how they could tell the wasters from the good stuff.  Individuality abounds.  Some figurative pieces are sufficiently hilarious to make the aspiring doll maker feel they have nothing to lose.

I used a very few really awful bits of practice porcelain, smashed up with a hammer for crocking pots.  Smashed up china is a good drainage provider.  I had to stop as soon as the pieces started resembling dolls, and I don’t think I ever chucked any on the garden.  If anyone in the future is going to identify my house as a location for doll making, they’d not be able to do so by excavating wasters.

This locality has been a place for making things by hand for at least two thousand years.  My garden was a neolithic flint factory, I turn up the flint nubs from which the hand axes and stone knives were struck all the time.  I do know the flints I find are the discards but whether someone threw them away in disgust wondering if they’d ever be any good, or whether they are just leftovers, I cannot say.

Under my beech hedge grow the lords and ladies that Tudor laundresses used to starch lace collars and keep them high.  Where the canal is now, were reed beds that thatchers have used for making roofs.  A walk into town takes me up Smith Street where busy metal workers bashed out armour for the castle for hundreds of years.

It’s a hive of industry round here.  Shakespeare was five miles away in that direction, scribbling furiously.  His father was a glover, sewing very small seams by hand.

I feel I have landed in the right place and fit right in to all the history that is here, working away to write words and make things that I hope will make people happy. 

At least I might do if I stopped gasbagging to you and got on with some making.

Four weeks to the show!

details as always at www.miniatura.co.uk

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

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