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 - My Mini Mixie Qs

This is an accidental collection. How do you get an accidental collection? Well, when these were first released I bought a couple of the blindbag packs. I was happy with them. I liked them. But they didn't really do anything for me, so I had no intention of buying more. But because I had them, the Giant Husband bought me some more, and more, and more. I was actually quite surprised to see how many I've accumulated.

Mini Mixie Qs are Mattel's contribution to the blingbag toy plague. They're tiny (seriously minuscule) blocky figures and accessories that look kind of pixelated. They're sold in blingbag packs of two, or in packs of several figures sometimes with extra clothes and hair pieces, or in sets with playsets. They have hard plastic wigs and clothing that can be removed and swapped around.

Figure with hair and dress

Some of the outfits are quite plain

Others have tiny attached accessories

And some are even fancier

The multi packs either have one or two figures with lots of extra outfits and hair or a few themed dolls with maybe an accessory or two

Some of the playsets fold up into cubes, others are stackable. 

I have a candy store

And a toy store. The toy store came with more accessories than actually fit inside the store. It also came with extra clothes and wigs (That I didn't photograph because I forgot about them until just now.)

These are actually really cute. (My camera didn't agree! I had a hard time getting it to focus on them at all.) But I think they're more of a novelty than a toy. They're just too small to comfortably play with and once you have the playsets are set up, if anyone so much as breathes near them, all of the teeny tiny accessories fall over and are lost forever!

My favourites are definitely the pink ninja girl and the little dog figure.

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. Re-ment Pose Skeleton.

 This was nearly a very different post. The Giant Husband gave me a budget to buy something that I wanted for my birthday. I immediately decided to order some Reutter Porzellan miniatures for my dollhouse. (If you don't know what these are, here's a link. They're lovely.) Which I would have written about here. Unfortunately the shop that I like to order Reutter stuff from (because they're fairly local, cheap and friendly) was closed for most of March and somehow I ended up finding something else entirely different somewhere else.

 Meet Mordecai, a miniature (extremely) posable skeleton by Re-ment. If you don't know Re-ment, they are a Japanese company that make miniature, blindbox toys. A lot of their stuff seems to be food, from the pictures I've seen online a lot of it's amazing, this is the first piece that I've seen in real life. The Pose Skeleton comes in a few different sizes. Mine is the first one they released (understandably marked #1 on the packaging) this one was, as far as I can tell, just a skeleton. Since they released this one, they've added #2 - a child, #3 - a slightly taller figure with a more aggressive face which is male, #4 - a slightly shorter figure with a detatchable hair bow and a more smiley face which is female. There's also a dog, a cat, accessories and furniture plus dinosaurs and animal skeletons. (I'm pretty sure the dinosaur and animal skeletons are a totally different scale to these figures though.)

 This little guy is TINY and incredibly detailed.

 In all honesty I have no idea if he's an "accurate" skeleton (I'm fairly rubbish at science in all it's forms.) but he looks extremely impressive. He's made of off-white plastic but there's plenty of shading to highlight the details. And he has an amazing number of joints. His head sits on a ball-joint. His jaw is jointed so it opens and closes. He also has a ball joint at his waist and more in his shoulders, hips, knees and ankles. His elbows are hinged. Probably the only disappointment is that his wrists are not jointed. BUT his hands do rotate in their sockets, because they're removable. AND he comes with a second extra set of grasping hands!

I'm not sure if it's just me but the grasping hands seem whiter to me than the regular hands. More importantly these are unbelievably small. I'm caught somewhere between being terrified I'm going to lose one, or just calmly accepting that I will inevitably lose one!

How is he supposed to pick his hands up, without any hands?

Altogether this little guy is eight centimetres (or 3 inches if you prefer) tall. The Re-ment website says he's nine centimetres but I think they must be measuring him with his feet stretched out, making his legs seem longer, because lying flat-footed on a ruler he is exactly eight centimetres.

Like a tiny, little fairy!

To give you a better idea of his proportions, I snapped a few, quick photos with some other dolls.

Monster High's Frankie Stein makes him look like a rag doll. . .

But they look really cute together!

This Living Dead mini doll (which has the same body and size as Barbie's old sister Kelly) makes him look tiny and delicate. . .

"When I said you were big, I didn't mean it like THAT!"

This Heidi Ott dollhouse doll (4 inches high) looks oversized and clumsy by comparison. . .

But he is posable enough to ride her rocking horse, even though she isn't. . .

And he's a fairly similar size to the mini Shopkins dolls and the mini Lalaloopsys. . .

But he doesn't look comfortable at all!

I have had a great time playing with this guy. His jointing takes a little getting used to. Mostly because he's so small that it can be tricky to move one joint without accidentally moving another. And moving his head or jaw very often generally results in his entire jaw falling off!

He is 1:18 scale. Which means he probably should work well with furniture made for Sylvanian Families (Calico Critters) or Little Woodees and Lundby dollhouse sets. Or maybe even Playmobil. Unfortunately I don't have any of this stuff to test that theory but he does fit in quite well with some of the Shopkins Happy Places stuff. . .

If they look a little wet, it's because I assumed this lounge would float.

I was wrong.

And some of the more delicate 1:12 scale dollhouse stuff actually works quite well with him, like this Reutter outhouse. . .

I couldn't help myself.

He also reminded me of one of the reasons why I loved tiny, little toys as a kid. Because I could sneak them into places that I wasn't supposed to take toys. Yep. He came to work with me.

He explored. . .

Climbed the cabinets. . .

Admired the artwork. . .

Made friends. . .

Wondered how the heck he was supposed to ride the horses. . .

And posed for pictures. . .

I am incredibly happy with this little guy and am already plotting to maybe get him a family, or to maybe buy a Sylvanian Families house (Little Woodeez are cheaper but they seem to have vanished from all our local stores so maybe they don't make them anymore?) and spookify it for him. For better or worse he is giving me a LOT of crazy ideas.

One thing I will say is that he cost me $15.50 with shipping from Japan. While I was looking for him, I saw him at a variety of prices, one ebay ad (that looked a little dodgey) had him for much less than what I paid, but also a lot of places were selling him for forty dollars, or more. As cool as he is, he's not worth that much. I wouldn't recommend paying more than about twenty dollars for him.