Tiny Tuesday - A Dollhouse for a Dollhouse

 Thanks to everyone that said nice things after my last post. I had my first scan today which thankfully confirmed I'm only having one baby! Twins run in our family and one of our cousins has triplets, so I was seriously having nightmares about the possibilities!

 Today I'm going to show you my dollhouse dollhouse. When I got this, most of the dollhouse sized dollhouses that I could find online were cast resin and didn't open, or the opened but looked very modern and had no dividing walls or floors inside. That's why this one stood out.

This one is by the Dollhouse Emporium. It's made of wood but the image on the front is printed on card that's stuck on. You can't really see ti in the picture, but the sticker is a little loose and creased in the bottom left hand corner. It's actually really sturdy for the size, short of being jumped on, the only part that I could imagine ever breaking is the fine metal rod that hinges the front section.

  The inside is completely painted cream and not only are there wall and floor partitions, there are even little doorways cut into the walls, which is definitely the kind of detail that makes me make high pitched noises. The vertical wall panels aren't completely straight, they're set on a very, slight angle, which surprisingly doesn't bother me at all. That's the kind of thing I wouldn't be surprised to see in an actual children's dollhouse, so in my mind it kind of adds to the realism. On the other hand, to my eyes at least, the front opens the wrong way! Which probably bothers me way more than it should. Even more annoying, you can actually see on the right side, where little holes have been drilled to accommodate the pin hinge, which just makes me confused. Why drill the holes there if you're not going to use them? I have, in a particularly OCD moment, considered trying to rehinge it on the other side but I'm pretty sure I would just wreck it, so I talk myself into leaving it.

  This little house is based on one of the Dollhouse Emporium's actual dollhouses. The Montgomery Hall. It's a pretty good likeness. It's even divided into the same number of rooms inside. Here's a catalogue picture of the actual Montgomery Hall for comparison.

 The biggest differences seem to be that the colours are more washed out in the miniature version, and the big version has two doors on the front, one opening toward each side. The little house would be an amazing dollhouse for inside the big version.

Not including the roof section, the little house is just under seven centimetres high, so about two and three quarter inches, if you prefer inches. And to give you an idea of scale here it is with the child from my dollhouse and a Kelly doll (who I just realised, too late, is having a slight wardrobe malfunction.)

 At some point I would like to decorate the interior. Wallpaper it with scraps of paper, carpet it with scraps of fabric or ribbon and furnish it. But it's a daunting concept because it is so tiny and so I always put it off. I've come up with a few ideas to furnish it. One is to download vintage foldable cut-out furniture sheets for paper dolls, shrink them down, and print them on card and have folded card furniture. Or to do the same thing but only roughly cut the images out and glue them to tiny cubes of balsa wood. OR to buy kits for 1:144 scale furniture and make it. . . I've already bought a few kits, but I'm too scared to attempt making them.

 They're terrifying. And, realistically, at this point, I'm not even sure they're going to fit well in the house. Since it's supposed to be a kid's toy, I'm not going to be overly fussy about scale (and they're supposed to be the same scale) but if the stuff literally doesn't fit in the rooms it's not going to work. But I guess, until I'm brave enough to had a go, that's a fairly moot point.

But of course to make this the coolest dollhouse dollhouse ever, it is going to need a dollhouse inside it. And for that, I probably will just use a square of balsa wood with a picture of this house glued to the front.

Tiny Tuesday - Phoenix Models Tea Caddy and Cruet set

 This week for Tiny Tuesday I have two dollhouse items by Warwick Miniatures. Warwick Miniatures are made by Phoenix Model Developments who specialise in white metal miniatures. Some of their stuff is amazing in it's detail and historical accuracy. Much of it comes as kits of cast pewter pieces that require painting and assembly. The two items I have today are polished white metal that look rather like silver (but are probably pewter) so they didn't require painting.

 First is this tea caddy. It's TINY! The engraving looks a little crude in this picture but in real life it looks extremely delicate because it's so very small.

The lid is removable and has further engraving. The only fault I can find with this is that I wish the interior was enamelled white. In all honesty, I have no idea if tea caddies were commonly enamelled white on the inside, I just remember that my grandmother's was. I need to look that up and if it turns out that that was indeed how they were made, paint the inside white.

Next is this cruet set. I was determined that my dollhouse family needed a cruet set. Realistically while not every house has a special fancy matching cruet set, it's probably fair to say that a selection of condiments for the dinner table is something you would expect to see in most houses in most eras. And once upon a time (long before I was born) one of my family members always gave people cruet sets as wedding presents, so as a child whenever we visited our older relatives, they always had beautiful cruet sets on their dining tables. Some were used, some were purely decorative, all made excellent makeshift dolls if the adults were being boring. When I wanted one for my dollhouse I discovered they were pretty thin on the ground in dollhouse land but this one is so beautiful, it makes up for all the ones that don't exist.

 There's a decorative stand and six tiny bottles. The bottles are made in pairs, two of each shape. Tall, thin oil bottles, medium sized salt and pepper shaker, and two little pots for pickle or mustard. These are so tiny that when I dropped them on the floor by accident, while taking pictures, I actually found them by closing my eyes and running my hand over the carpet rather than looking for them!

To me it's the little touches like this, that real people would actually have had in their houses, that are often overlooked because they're such a part of day to day life, that take a dollhouse from being a toy or plaything to actually being a miniature representation of life at a moment in time.

And here's another picture of the cruet set with a Lego minifigure for scale.

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.

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!