Roman turret, part 7, in which the legion arrives and a wall is built

Read the previous posts about this project: part 1, part 2,  part 3, part 4 and part 5 and part 6.

I have never used action figures in my projects, I believe mainly because they are smaller than 1:12, which is my preferred scale, and also they tend to be rather ugly. But I knew I would never be able to make Roman soldiers from the kind of cheap dolls I purchase for upcycling, and these are wrong scale anyway. So I bought a set of Roman figures from ebay, trusting the seller's information about them being four inches tall. They were.

Apparently they are collectibles, randomly packed to encourage children to beg for more. So not all of them are Roman soldiers, some are gladiators, but I will have to live with it. I will do some research into who they really are. But I already have a favourite. Can you guess which?

The project became much more interesting with figures.

But their presence immediately made me realise that they needed more space. I had thought from start that I might add a bit of wall on both sides of the turret, since a turret is by definition not a solitary structure. Just a little bit of wall. Just enough for a warrior to be on it.

A fortification wall,  whether Roman or medieval, consists of two elements: wall walk on which soldiers can stand and shoot at the attackers, and parapet, a narrow structure that protects the soldiers from attackers' arrows or projectiles. The wall walk should be on the level of the upper floor so that the doors lead onto it. In short, quite sophisticated engineering.

I obviously used cardboard, making a square box and attaching it to the side wall of the turret.  I considered stripping the turret wall of stone masonry where the wall was to be attached and decided against it. Too much trouble, and the stones would certainly be damaged. The inner door, as I have made it, is in the wrong place in relation to the outer door, but I will leave it for the time being.

The parapet will be built, stone by stone, from craft cubes, just as I built the stone steps.

  
I started building the parapet first because I still haven't got enough egg cartons for the wall. I cut each cube in two, as uneven as possible, distressing them further and then painting, one by one, for colour variations.

To anticipate questions - yes, it took a long time. A very long time. Occasionally I get comments on my piece-by-piece work: "If you do it this way it will be quicker". But I don't want it to be quicker. I am not in a hurry. My marking is done, and it is far too hot for gardening. My room is cool and nice. Cutting and painting wooden cubes is peaceful and relaxing.

This obviously does not look natural, so once again, mock mortar.

That's better, isn't it? And better still after adding figures.

I think the figures really make a difference as they emphasise scale and generally make the scene livelier.

I won't show building the left wall step by step, because it was exactly the same.

In a close-up picture, you can see some details of stone masonry that, again, make it all look more natural. 

And here are the warriors:

Now, while I am waiting for us to consume all those omelets and scrambled eggs to finish the side and back walls, I will resume interior decoration. Googling "Roman material culture" yields hundreds of hits.

Come back soon.

Duncan Phyfe window seat

This is an interesting and unusual item.

I don't think I would have discovered it if it hadn't been a part of the House of Miniatures collection. I didn't know anything about Duncan Phyfe, but haven't I stated repeatedly how educational miniature-making is?

I have a full-scale bench that is very similar, but I don't think it is a Duncan Phyfe. It's very old though, with a lovely Morris fabric.

This project was another weekend challenge with some people from my wonderful Facebook group. I so much enjoy making the same item at the same time (with some shifts because of time zones). Sharing experience and mistakes. 

I won't show the step-by-step pictures because it was just a matter of patience when the legs and the splats wouldn't stay, and I am still not quite happy withe the cushion - I may have to do it all over again. But - here it is:

 

I used the same fabric I had used for the cabriole leg chairs, the day bed and the corner chair (which I apparently haven't shared here) as they will all be in the same room:




If you have been following my blog you may notice that there is a new doll in the ball room. I have tried several dolls in this room, and they felt wrong. But this pretty lady is perfect, isn't she?

Newcomers from Maple Street

Yesterday I was tempted to visit the most dangerous shop in the UK, Maple Street. I have written about it before. From the outside, you would never guess what an Ali Baba cave it is. It looks like a shabby warehouse. It is actually a warehouse as the shop mostly sells online, but it is overwhelming when you step inside. I didn't need anything in particular, but I can never leave this shop without buying something. First of all, I found this:

A mini vacuum cleaner to get rid of all dust and sawdust in the remotest corners of the dollhouse. It is meant for keyboards and other devices, but wasn't it clever of the shop to sell it to miniaturists! Warmly recommended. I had wanted something like this for a long time.

I also bought a harp for my music room. It was exceptionally cheap, and it fits in nicely.

But my best bargain was three lovely dolls. I believe they are handmade, as they don't look like any dolls I have seen in ordinary shops. They were lying in a heap, without boxes, and some were broken.

 

I like this gentleman's face. His posture suggests he is old and tired.

 

I wasn't sure where this lady would be best placed, but she ended up in the guest bedroom where her husband has already gone to bed in his bathrobe. Although he should probably sit in his armchair by the fire and have a smoke.

This pretty lady had no hands and was just a third of original price. Buying her, I was sure I would be able to mend her, but not sure how. I am not good with clay or fimo which might be the most natural way. So instead I took arms from a broken plastic doll whom I had never used in any project, since she turned out to be wrong scale. The hands were slightly too large and look more like baby hands than lady hands, but I hoped they wouldn't be too conspicuous. It felt creepy to work with severed arms, and they were also too tanned for my pale-faced lady, but I painted them in a paler tone:

 

I also put a diamond ring and an emerald ring on them. 

So the lady is not a cripple anymore.

The other inhabitants of the house are excited about the newcomers. I am sure there will be many parties this holiday season.

Alice in Wonderland room box

I have never made room boxes based on literature (except Lord Asriel's study, and it was pure imagination since it is not described in the novel). Since I am a children's literature scholar it may seem natural to make scenes from children's books, but for some reason I don't find it tempting, maybe because it's too obvious or too limiting or whatever.

In September I am doing a workshop for teachers in conjunction with a big international conference on Alice in Wonderland. The workshop will be focused on perception of size and scale, and what can be better as a point of departure than a miniature scene? 

For most of her time in Wonderland, Alice is three inches high, which is approximately 1:12 scale. This is apparently not a coincidence, but reflects spatial cognition, that is, the ability of our brain to understand size and proportion. Our favourite miniature scale is within the cognitive “comfort zone”. It ensures that the miniature world is still recognisable and comprehensible. If the scale is significantly smaller, psychology says, it demands a considerable cognitive effort. We miniature makers know it by intuition. If we work with smaller scales, it takes more effort to "see" the scale. 

Anyway, I agreed to do this workshop some time ago, and as a first step I took an empty wine box (formerly nursery, formerly yarn shop) and put in some random doors I had from various projects. This is what the text says: 

Alice “found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof. There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again”.

 

 The box was the right shape: long with low ceiling. I put in a 1:12 doll, but I also found a tiny doll - dollhouse-in-the-dollhouse doll - to represent Alice when she shrinks to fifteen inches, which in our scale is just over an inch. I also made a glass table with a bottle labeled "Drink me". 

Then I didn't do anything for a long time. I needed a larger doll to represent Alice when she grows to nine feet, or 0.75 feet in scale. She is taller than the ceiling, and I wanted to convey the sense of claustrophobia, the horror of being stuck in a small space, that is repeated throughout the book. I also realised that white doors on white walls didn't look good. It was tempting to paint doors in different colours, but I thought it would be too patchy and distracting, a beach-hut feeling. Instead, I tried various colours on the walls. And I also made "a row of lamps hanging from the roof". The lamps are tops of eyedrop containers. I made some additional doors in my three-layer technique.

 

Of course the three Alices do not co-exist, but a room box can tell a story containing several episodes. This is the first episode, featuring the middle doll:

“Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!”

I have hidden the little door in the corner, and it is easy to miss it because the large doors will attract more attention. You need to adjust your scaling, just as Alice. Unfortunately, Alice is too tall to go through the tiny door, but when she drinks from the magic bottle and shrinks, she is just the right size, like the smallest doll. But sadly, she has left the key on the table. I put the little doll under the table to show how futile her attempts to get the key are. Luckily, she finds a cake that says "Eat me" and grows to nine feet... and so it goes on. 

The three dolls do not look alike so I had to make them look more alike, and the only way was to give them similar clothes. I didn't want to follow the stereotypical Disney-Alice image with a blue dress and white apron (it is also historically incorrect). There are some illustrated versions of Alice that portray her in a green dress, and I had a nice piece of green fabric. This was a good test of scale! The big doll's dress was child's play, and it was easy to trim it neatly with lace. The middle doll took more time and effort, especially since I didn't want to take off her clothes and ruin them, so I put the new dress on top of the old one. The tiny doll's dress took five attempts, and I am still not quite happy. But at least I think you can see that it is supposed to be the same character. 

I have added some Alice-related items to the scene: chess pieces, the Queen of hearts, mice in different scales, a clock. I wanted to have a looking glass, but I cannot see where I could fit it in. I have some time to work on it. The workshop participants will be asked to create their own room boxes inspired by Alice's growing and shrinking. It wil be exciting to see what they come up with.

Doll makeover

After endless floor cutting I felt I wanted to do something else for a change. I was rummaging through my retro house to see if there was anything that should be moved into the new house (quite a lot), when two dolls caught my attention. I bought them a couple of years ago at a car boot sale for next to nothing, and they have been sitting stupidly in the drawing room looking very much out of place. I suddenly realised that I could make them new clothes and invite them to Womble Hall.

Here is the uncredibly ugly girl doll. Actually, when I stripped off her clothes she turned out to have breasts, so apparently she wasn't a girl doll at all, but a female doll in a smaller scale.

But she will be a girl doll, and for underwear, a Victorian girl would wear pantalets. I made those when I made clothes for Tilly the Dutch doll, so it was easy. I discovered afterwards that I had used the same piece of lace.

With Tilly, I was careful not to damage the doll, but with this one I used a drop of glue to hold the garment.

It took me some time to find a suitable fabric, and finally I found a skirt left over from another makeover, when I turned a souvenir doll into a Victorian lady. Since it was a full-length skirt it was enough to made both a short skirt and a bodice. I won't describe how I made the dress because it was straightforward.

 
My original idea was to make a pinafore to put over the dress. Victorian girls, even in affluent families, frequently had just one dress, and to protect it, they would wear a pinafore, which is something else than an apron, and I know all this because I recently attended a very interesting talk. However, I thought the dress was so pretty it was a shame to cover it, so we will pretend that this young lady has just arrived for a party, wearing her best.

What left me deeply dissatisfied was her hair. Most of my dolls are souvenir dolls wth "real" hair. I have never made hair, but I know people do it. I searched ebay and found lots of wigs (quite pricy) and a DIY kit that I added to my watch list, and then I went to Youtube. You can find anything on Youtube. For instance, this tutorial. It didn't look unsurmountably difficult, and anyway, it was worth a try. The tutorial suggested cotton thread, and I tried it, and it may be fine for a Barbie, but not for a Victorian girl. So I found a ball of yarn in my basket for mini-knitting. I didn't find anything in a suitable colour, so I had to cut bits from a multicolour ball. And then you need to split it into as many single threads as possible.

Next, you tie it in the middle and comb out as much as you can, literally "unspinning" it. You can see the difference on the right side here.

I forgot to take a picture of the rubber cap so watch the tutorial to see how to make it. The tutorial suggested a balloon, but I didn't have a balloon so I used the tip of an old rubber glove. (Must remember to buy balloons!). I assume that the reason for using a cap is that you cannot glue the wig direct onto the doll's head. I didn't try.

In this picture, the left-hand side is still not properly combed. By the way, I used a miniature comb from a Christmas cracker. For the very first attempt making a wig I think it is not bad at all. I know what mistakes I made, and will avoid them next time, but rather than doing it all over again I covered the faults with a hat.

Of course, a young Victorian lady would wear a bonnet rather than a hat, but I happened to have this hat that matches the dress. I will make a bonnet with the tiny bits of fabric left from the dress.

By now you have forgotten what the doll looked like to begin with, so here is for you to compare. I would never guess it was the same doll.

So here is the young lady, arriving for a party. I also think she adds a welcome colour spot to the interior.

 

Come back soon for the boy makeover. 

Finding the right place

As promised, I am going to show how the riches from the flea market either find their place in the existing environments or, perhaps, inspire new projects.

To place the pewter things was easy: they merge nicely into the Tudor great hall. They are slightly too big, but I don't think it matters. The rich master of the house wants to impress his guests.

In the solar, which is the upper floor of a Tudor house, I have put the lady, the baby in the cradle and the chest.

This is the first doll I have in the Tudor house. I was planning to have one, but it didn't happen until now, and I see how the presence of a doll makes a huge difference. I guess it means that there will be more.

Samuel van Hoogstraten room box

This project took me over a year to complete - not because it was particularly time or energy consuming, but because it demanded a lot of clever engineering. It all started when I went to an exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum called Vermeer's Women. I am partial to Vermeer (who isn't! But I've been to his house in Delft, and it makes you twice as partial). In addition to Vermeer there were several of his contemporaries in the exhibition, and I made a new acquaintance: Samuel van Hoogstraten. Especially one painting, The Corridor. It is so profoundly enigmatic, even beside Vermeer's enigmatic women, that I kept coming back to it - in fact I went back to the exhibition several times just to see it. And already the very first time I said to myself: this is a room box project.

What I didn't know during my first visit was that van Hoogstraten actually made room boxes. As you can see from this painting, he loved optical illusions, and he made a room box, or a peepshow box, in which he painted the inner walls to look like three-dimensional objects.So my reaction to the painting was in fact not off the point.

My project was thus to make a three-dimensional copy of a two-dimensional painting that pretends to be a three-dimensional space. So how do you do that? There are three vertical surfaces in the painting and three sets of frames (and people say that metafiction is a postmodern invention!). It means that I needed two partitions in my box, with a door each. But unlike the painting, my box would hide something behind the walls that you could see if you looked at the right angle.

I started with a three-dimensional model, making the two walls out of cardboard. The floors were easy to copy, just finding the right colour of paper. The back wall has cream-coloured wallpaper made of a paper table cloth that I have used repeatedly in various projects. I put Girl with a Pearl Earring on the back wall for inpriration. It comes from a sticker booklet I bought at the exhibition.

Quite soon I found exactly the right bit of fabric for the table cloth, and I had a candlestick from another house. I also put in a pewter pitcher, just because it fitted in. I put up more Vermeers on the walls. The frames were 30-pence frames from thrift shops that I painted with a mix of gold and copper. And I just happened to find this magnificent mirror right then. Hiding behind the wall and looking at herself in the mirror is an enigmatic Vermeer woman.

So far so good. But believe me or not, it took me ages to find the right materials for the walls. I tried paint and I tried paper, and it looked wrong. Then finally I found what I wanted. Here is the back of the box with the side walls decorated. I made the chair with bits of wood strip and chopticks for legs. Today, after a period of advanced furniture making, I would have made it better, but it looks authentic eenough to me.

 

The next steps were to make the walls. This is where the clever engineering bit comes. There are flaps on the sides and on top. The back of the walls will not be visible, except in the mirror, and the edges of the farther wall will be hidden by the front wall, so they don't have to be neat, which is cheating, I know, but there are enough challenges with this project. I used dado rails for door posts

The front wall has the opening shifted to the right for a better effect.

What you cannot see inless you peep into the box is that the mirror reflects a painting on the opposite wall. I think van Hoogstraten would have loved this trick. The enigmatic lady is both looking at her own reflection and the reflection of the painting.

The enigmatic lady will make a brief appearance just to show you what she is like. She does have a pearl earring.

This is the finished box. Sort of finished, because I am sure there will be improvements. I still have not decided whether I will have light - strong light coming from the right, as in the painting.

Think: this photo is a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object that represents a two-dimensional painting of a three-dimensional space. This is what I call postmodern!

A little tea party

I bought these lovely dolls in a thrift shop. I knew they were too big for my Victorian house, but I couldn't resist them. I hoped that I would find a way to use them. The most obvious way was to let them have a tea party, but it wasn't until I bought these chairs that the environment emerged.

 

I haven't been able to find out where the chairs come from. I need to discover a website where you can post a picture and have your object identified. I am sure there are such sites. 

I didn't use a box for the tea party because of the dolls' size: they looked too crammed. They are just having their tea on a shelf. This is what I have served them:

I had the tea cups - far too big for any of my other projects, but just right here. I didn't have saucers or plates in the right size, so I made them from clay and painted with varnish so they almost look like porcelain. The cream cake is a schampoo bottle cap, with a ready-made ribbon bow, and the cake plate is a button. Another button has become a butter cup. I baked the scones and cakes from clay The tea pot is from some thrift shop.