Tiny Tuesday - Reutter Porzellan kitchen items

 This week I have a selection of kitchen items by Reutter. I absolutely love Reutter's miniatures and would probably have a lot more of them if it weren't for two things. Firstly they can be quite expensive and secondly a lot of them are just too fancy. For example they have sets that are a handful of crockery sitting in a dish drainer, like they've just been washed. Except all of the dish racks are gold. Unless your dollhouse is the Palace of Versailles, that's just going to look weird! The one other thing to note about Reutter's miniatures is that whilst they're 1:12 scale, they're very delicately made and consequently can look undersized compared to some other 1:12 scale items. They have a lot of teeny tiny minatures made of metal and porcelain. But they also have larger pieces of furniture, sometimes with miniatures displayed with or on them, that have been stuck down. I'm never as impressed by their larger furniture pieces as I am by their delicate miniatures. I have heard that at least their wooden furniture pieces are actually made by a dollhouse company called Aztec (who I don't associate with high quality products, they're not awful but they are fairly ordinary) which would explain why they're not as high quality as the other pieces. Unfortunately I don't know if this is true or not.

This first item is a lovely old world wood burning oven. It's all metal, so even in the scenario above, I have no idea which company would actually make this. There are two little doors and a drawer (an ash drawer maybe?) in the front that open, and all the little hotplate covers on top lift off. The two on the right even have a sort of metal mesh underneath them.

 My favourite thing about this set is that whilst most dollhouse stoves that have chimneys, the chimneys are designed to extend to the roof. This means you either have to find a stove the exact right height for your kitchen, or cut the flue to size. This one has a curved flue that connects to the wall. The small issue with this, is that my kitchen has wooden beading on the lower wall, which means the flue isn't quite long enough to reach the wall, but I've fixed this by painting a small piece of balsa wood to go between the flue and the wall. If I was smarter, I probably would have realised that it's highly unlikely someone would have put wooden beading behind an extremely hot, wood burning stove.
My only gripe with this item is that the oven door (the big door on the left) falls open constantly.

 Next is this adorable little honey pot. This kind of showcases the slight weirdness of Reutter's scale. The honey dipper thing (I don't know what they're called) is in the scale of most dollhouse scale items, while the tiny honey pot is in Reutter's slightly smaller scale. This is extra weird, since they came packaged together.
 The honey pot is porcelain and so small that, looking at it in real life, it's clear that it's supposed to be a beehive with bees on it. Looking at it magnified in pictures, that isn't as obvious. The lid comes off and there's a small indent in it, theoretically so that the lid can close with the dipper in place. Except if you try that this happens . . .

The indent is nowhere near big enough!

Here's a closer look at the decorations

It just looks like a blob here, but it's actually a bee with three-dimensional wings. . . 

and possibly two heads?

  

  This pot set is one of my absolute favourite Reutter items. The pot lids are "painted" with Reutter's "Blue Onion" design, which I love. I also desperately love the little string of garlic! When I was a child, my Grandmother had two plaited ropes in her kitchen. One hung either side of the door. One had bows of floral fabric and whole garlic cloves at intervals, the other had little bags of floral fabric filled with herbs at the same intervals. The herbs were supposed to make the kitchen smell pretty. They only ever smelt of dust to me and I don't know if the garlic was even real, since it would have been about twenty years old, I'm guessing it wasn't. But I was adamant that I wanted a string of garlic hanging in my dollhouse. And this one is lovely.

  I think the pots are solid copper, although it's possible they're plated. They're surprisingly heavy. The handles are painted black and have holes in them so they can be hung up. Unfortunately I suspect any hook small enough to go through the hole, wouldn't be strong enough to support the weight of the pot. Luckily I don't intend on hanging them anyway.

Until I saw this photo, I never even noticed that the hole in the handle isn't perfect!

  The lids are porcelain and beautifully decorated but frankly they could fit better. The painting is actually decals but that's only to be expected. Nobody could paint that neatly, that small! Reutter have about a dozen different designs that they paint on things. This one is definitely my favourite.

This is the best picture I could get.

  The other thing I love about Reutter is their packaging. The large items (like the stove) come in boring white boxes with the Reutter logo in black. But the little sets (like the pots) come in great little perspex display boxes, stuck down with little dots of double-sided foam tape.

A collection of miniatures, displayed in these boxes would look great

  The newer "singles" line (like the honey pot) only include one or two items and come in cute little clamshells

I don't like these as much as the boxes. They don't stand up on their own without leaning forward and a few of the things I have that came in these, detatched from the base before I got them, which looked untidy, and one thing even broke! But they're still a lot nicer than the little plastic bags most dollhouse accessories come in.

  If I had all the money in the world, I would probably fill my entire house with Reutter miniatures. But I don't. And what items I do have are among my most treasured dollhouse pieces.