Tiny Tuesday. Boxed chess set.

This week for Tiny Tuesday, I have one of my favourite items in my dollhouse. It's also probably one of the most ridiculously frivolous items in my dollhouse. A little boxed chess set. I have no idea what brand it is. Unfortunately a lot of my dollhouse items came in plain white boxes, some had stock codes scrawled on them in pen, but most had no branding on them, which means it's often hard to know who made what.

The box is made of walnut with applied carvings. It should have a little brass pin to hold the catch shut but it was missing one of the pins that held the hinges on, so I took the catch pin out to fix the hinges. Now it always sits with the lid slightly ajar.

Inside it's lined in green plush although my camera tends to turn greens bluish, it's actually a deep Christmassy bottle green. Across the centre is a trough for the pawns and either side of that is a row of tiny compartments to put each of the individual pieces in.

The pieces are all individually shaped. But because they're so small, it can be hard to know which piece is which. Even still I love that the pieces are actually different - that's why I bought this set, it's the only set I could find where the pieces weren't all the same.

The pieces are incredibly tiny and impossible to get out of the box without turning it upside down and tipping them all out, and then I'm terrified of losing one!

So why do I say this is ridiculous? Well partly because it was around sixty dollars. Looking back I can't believe I was willing to spend that on a box of miniature chess pieces. Partly because I never actually bought a chess board, so the dollhouse dolls can't even use these. And mostly because the box is so big. The library desk is the only table in the entire dollshouse that it fits on and it takes up so much of that, that it can't be used as a desk. Turns out the box is just under five centimetres (two inches-ish) front to back and most dollhouse shelves and tables are only around three and a half centimetres deep!