Lord Asriel's room, revisited

Every now and then I go back to my old projects and either dismantle them or improve them in some way. I have for instance made room boxes with shops, and I keep adding objects or things get "sold" for other projects. 

It is almost impossible to alter something in a project that you have gifted. For some time, I kept giving my friend new items for her shoe shop, but there is a limit to how much you can squeeze in a shoe box. Mostly, when a room box leaves your hands it's out of your control. I even wonder how many of them have been kept. I shouldn't care, but I do. 

I have for a while wanted to improve the room box I made for my son many, many years ago. It was the second room box I made, and I wasn't very good at it. Every time I came to visit, I would look at the box and wish I could give it another chance, and finally the time has come: I am working on the revision of Lord Asriel's study.  

This is the before picture, more or less the final picture of the original project. 

I will not elaborate on every fault I find, but it needs a total renovation, including floors, walls, mouldings and more. The challenge, however, will be to preserve the general look so that it will still be easily recognisable. The focal point of the room is the bookshelf, which is one of those pathetic first attempts at handmade furniture, so I will replace it with a magnificent Chippendale bookcase. And the rest will have to match. 

I have just had good training for this project making my Dark Academia book nook. I don't want to copy it, but I will use some features, because Lord Asriel's study is a typical Dark Academia environment. I didn't know anything about Dark Academia when I made the box all those years ago. 

The first thing I did was of course strip the room of everything, except the wallpaper and the ceiling that I decided to keep, for the reason stated above: it must be recognisable. I left the pictures just to have some sense of what it used to be. 

The old floor was flagstone made from air-drying clay. At the time, it was an innovative technology for me, and I was proud of it, but really, why would an Oxford academic have flagstone floor in his study? It's more appropriate for a wine cellar. Hence, the first step was to make a proper hardwood parquet. I had a large piece left over from an earlier project (in fact, I cut a little bit out of it for Dark Academia) so I used it, or what could be saved of it, since a lot had to be redone to fit the new floor area. I was much more diligent with sanding the floor when it was finished. 

Next, I wanted to make dark wooden panels, and for that I have experience both from Womble Hall and Dark Academia. I used a strip of card, adding some moulding from coffee stirrers and skewers. I considered heavy skirting I have left over from Womble Hall, but it felt too bulky.

But I wanted something extraordinary for the panels, also testing something I have never done before. I had a wooden ornament from a hobby shop, and it would have been easy to just get more of them, but it's not much of a challenge. Instead, I made a mould from air-dry clay, then made multiple imprints of the ornament. 

I painted the panels with acrylic, then gave it a coat of mahogany stain and several coats of varnish. 

Close up. Yes, I see that the wallpaper is bubbly, but not much I can do about it, short of pulling it off and hanging new, and that's too much. 

 

I did not put the ornaments on every panel because they would interfere with the furniture. 

I wanted to add a fireplace that wasn't in the original room but of course would be indispensible in an academic's room without other heating. I happened to have a suitable fireplace surround so I didn't make one from scratch, but I will add some details to it, including a fire. A mantlepiece is a good place to put all the numerous weird objects I had in the original room. I will probably replace the mirror with a more period-correct one.

Coving in the old room was made from full-size picture frames, which at that time felt a perfect solution, but wouldn't do now. Again, I have quite a lot of leftovers from Womble Hall, and since then I have learned to use mitre shears. although even with this tool, mitring cornishes is a nightmare. I considered painting coving dark as well, but decided against it, to have something white in the room for contrast. 

As you see, I have discarded the pipes. I have tried and tested, and they just didn't go with the panels. Since I am not even sure why they were there in the first place, I don't feel bad about them. 

Before I could focus on furnishing, I needed to consider anbaric light (which, if you haven't read His Dark Materials, is what they call electricity in Lord Asriel's world). I have learned a lot about lighting in the past years, and although I still haven't found a perfect solution for Womble Hall, I have successfully made lights for some room boxes, including Dark Academia. Lights do add to the atmosphere. That said, the recipient of this room box is a lighting expert so it has to be perfect or none at all. 

What this expert taught me is the fundamental principle of display lighting is that the light sources have to be hidden. There are many ways of doing this, but I have added a top frame to hide anbaric lights behind. At this stage, I also painted all edges dark brown, to match the panels.

It does make a difference, doesn't it? I still need to make some improvements, but wanted to test. 

Now to the details. The bookcase needs to be filled with books. There were a few books in the old room, all of them with a special significance, but I need more, and of course since then I have made hundreds of books - that's not a hyperbole, really hundreds, for Womble Hall, for the library room box, and more still. 

I have some lovely books that would fit into an academic's room. They are real books, with words and pictures. Unfortunately they are a couple millimetres larger than the shelves so they will have to  be scattered around the room.  

Most books will be fake, with just covers. I estimated I would need about 60 books, and I was right: 65. It kept me busy for a while, but I didn't want to cheat with just spines. There are indeed 65 individual books that can be taken out, and at least one row is books with recognisable covers. They are all there for a reason. Others are simply generic "old books", but I used different covers and made some books larger and thicker, for variety. It does not look natural when all books are of the same size. 

Inside the room, the book case looks truly authentic. The recipient may never bother to open the bookcase and look at the books, but it doesn't matter. 

Of course I also have a copy of His Dark Materials. And a copy of one of my own books - I always leave a secret signature in my projects, like Hitchcock always has a vignette of himself in all his films. 

In the drawer of the bookcase I have put old maps, letters, newspapers, notebooks and other private and confidential stuff. 

I have already mentioned the fireplace, and it needed some extra work. To begin with, the back can never be mahogany, can it? It needs to be brick or just black. 

It is also too shiny as compared to the panellling, but I will have to live with it. I painted the back, and I had to sacrifice the fireguard because the kind of fire I wanted to insert didn't fit behind it. But I needed a fireguard, and I made one by painting a piece of fence from a farm play set. I made the fire with a flickering tea light, the way I have always made fires. This one can be put on a timer so it will switch on automatically in the evening, but in my experience it exhausts the battery quickly. But it is easy to take out, switch on and put back. There is of course a more sophisticated way to do it: drill a hole in the side wall and the fire surround and use a battery light that can be switched on from outside, but it will be, or might be, a next step. 

The wallpaper was damaged in some places, which happens when you are stupid and attach things to wall with blue tack. These spots had to be disguised, and on one wall I put a large old map of Svalbard. If you have read His Dark Materials, you know why, and if not, it plays a significant role in the books. Lord Asriel would definitely have a map of Svalbard in his study.

 

There was another map in the original room which I had cut from a magazine so it had no relevance at all. I replaced it with an old map of Oxford. I am afraid there is no Jordan college in this map. 

On the left-hand wall, I put some framed portraits. I don't know who these people are, but let's pretend they are famous Arctic explorers.  

The rest was more or less straightforward. I put the golden compass on a more appropriate side table. I added another occasional table by the armchair, on which I put a decanter of Tokay and two glasses. I kept Asriel's equipment for experiental theology - which is what science is called in his world.  

I put two very pretty candlesticks on the mantlepiece. I made them in my miniature club, and I think they fit fine. I also added a mantle clock. 

At a glance, the room probably looks the same, which has been the intention. But almost every feature has been improved, and I am very happy with the outcome. 

 

Borrowers room box

On the first day of 2017 I have started  a project that I have been planning for a while. I will use it for a workshop later this year.

The theme is Mary Norton's Borrowers, a children's book about miniature people who live under floorboards in a large Victorian house and "borrow" everything they need from big people upstairs.

In many ways, the challenge of this project is the opposite of my usual recycling strategy: finding everyday objects that I can turn into something miniature. This time I must shrink myself and see real objects from this perspective, deciding what might be useful to "borrow", including tools to make things.

There are pictures in my copy of the book that give a good idea of what the dwelling looks like and what some of the objects are. There is also a detailed description that goes:

"Homily was proud of her sitting room: the walls had been papered with scraps of old letters out of waste-paper baskets, and Homily had arranged the handwriting sideways in vertical stripes which ran from floor to ceiling. On the walls repeated in various colours, hung several portraits of Queen Victoria as a girl; these were postage stamps, borrowed by Pod some years ago from the stamp box in the morning room. There was a lacquer trinket box, padded inside and with the lid open, which they used as a settle; and that useful stand-by - a chest of drawers made of match boxes. There was a round table with a red velvet cloth, which Pod had made from the wooden bottom of a pill box supported on the carved pedestal of a knight from the chess set..."

I'll stop here, but it goes on, and more details are revealed later.

 

So there are several interesting aspects to this project. It needs to be as close as possible to the descriptions and pictures. It must be period-correct: no plastic, nothing that a Victorian household wouldn't have (of course, I can paint plastic to look like brass or tin). It also has to be real objects or objects that the borrowers could make with the few tools they have, such as needles, safety pins, or a half of a pair of scissors they use to slice "borrowed" potato.

However, before I can think about the details, some basic decisions. Because this room box will eventually be on public display, I decided to use a proper wine box. (Has anyone noticed that it is increasingly difficult to get hold of wine boxes? All shopkeepers want them for window displays). The only one I had available was the one that once was a yarn shop, then an Alice in Wonderland box. I had already dismantled Alice, so the box was half empty, but it still had the many doors, a row of lamps, wallpaper and flooring. In these situations I usually ask myself: "Who is this idiot who glued wallpaper directly onto the walls..." So this was the starting point:

 

To begin with, the ceiling in the borrowers' dwelling would not be painted. If I had a new wine box I would just have left it unpainted, but unfortunately that wasn't an option. Instead I covered the ceiling with self-adhesive shelf lining, tested and discarded for flooring in my large dollhouse. But here it worked, because the pattern should be in 1:1 scale.

 

The box is obviously upside down, so this is the ceiling, which is the floorboards of the big house.

Next, as you can read in the description above, the walls are papered with old letters, and these I printed out from the internet - there are scores of images of nineteenth-century handwritten letters.

 

The text says "scraps", but I didn't go that far. I didn't print out stamps of Queen Victoria, because I try to print out as little as possible, recycling what I have instead, and I have been saving some standard stamps - this is an anachronism I will allow myself.

Once again, the borrowers live under floorboards and use water pipes for heat and water. You can see pipes in the picture. I had been thinking about these pipes for a while, and this morning I got an idea of making them from kitchen towel rolls, but when I tested they were far too large - they just dominated the whole scene, even though they would be right in scale. I then tried dowel, but you cannot bend dowel the way water pipes bend, so I had to fall back on the well-tested method of drinking straws. They are definitely wrong scale, but as it turned out, they worked well and created the right kind of effect. 

I have a large supply of drinking straws that I use for various purposes, so I painted them copper, but I happened to have one straw painted black, so I tried painting copper on top of black, with a much better result. It really looks realistic. See for yourself. I wanted to build a complicated system of pipes, as they would have in an old house, and it took some elaborate engineering.

I will not show the whole process, but these pictures explain the method. I used toothpicks and grill sticks to attach the pipes to walls and to connect them. Then I used silver duct tape to enforce the connections, precisely like real copper pipes are connected with lead. 

You can see they are pipes, but they do not dominate the scene. 

Then I tentatively put in some suitable objects I had found. 

 

On the floor, Homily has red blotting paper that Pod borrows from upstairs. I don't know whether you can get blotting paper anywhere today, but I will investigate. So far, I have used soft craft paper. Some objects match the description. Homily knits the family's clothes from silk thread. They use thread spools to sit on. When did you last see a genuine wooden spool? I had some very old ones on my supplies. The watch in mentioned later in the book: Pod borrowed it from upstairs. The egg coddler in not mentioned, but I thought it would be just something Homily would like to have and Pod would be able to carry (he borrows a full-size cup at one point). The bath tub, that you cannot see very well behind the table, is exactly what it is in the book: a tin from foie de gras. All utensils in the shelf are metal lids so they are period-correct (well, almost). The shelf is temporary; I will make something that Pod is likely to be able to make. Of course I know how to make a chest of drawers from match boxes, but where can I get match boxes?? Will ask friends. 

This is how far I got today. Very pleased and looking forward to thinking of more things to add. 

To be continued.

Lord Asriel's room

Our youngest son was visiting and admiring my dollhouse and roombox, and I asked him, mostly as a joke, whether he'd like me to make one for him. Interestingly enough, yes, he would, and when I asked what kind of room he wanted, he said Lord Asriel's study. Lord Asriel is a mad scientist and magician in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. He lives in a alternative world which means that his room could have absolutely anything. That was a challenge. What would a scientist with magical powers have in his room? To begin with, I made Newton's cradle with small metal beads. On the right, there is a strange object the origin of which I don't know, but I thought it looked just what Lord Asriel would have.

 

I decided that the wallpaper should be dark blue, and I used ordinary coloured printer paper which I splashed with gold paint. For the ceiling I used a bit of blue corrugated cardboard I happened to have, possibly a wine-bottle case. I made flagstone floor like the one I have in my Victorian kitchen only I cheated this time. I rolled out a bit of clay large enough to cover the floor and made patterns on it with a pencil.

 

I made a book case just like the one I have in my Victorian house, and I made a low table to put all Lord Asriel's instruments on. I wanted telescopes that could move, and I used cufflinks to make them. I used all kinds of springs and cogs and wires and weird-looking metal things and bottles. I made a standard lamp using a mini candlestick, a bit of a fluid soap pump and a brass button on top. I made a little table to hold the Golden Compass which I made from a schampoo cap and a hand from a broken clock. I painted magical signs on the compass with a golden pen. I changed fabric on the chair using a bit of a leather purse. I cut the map from a catalogue and made a frame from grill sticks. The Persian rug is cut from a pencil case. I used drinking straws for pipes. I don't remember how I came up with this idea, but it became an interesting feature. 

 

Of course I had to fill the book case with books. Since I don't print out anything from the web I had to use whatever I found in catalogues that would fit in Lord Asriel's library and that would be meaningful for me and my son. So apart from the obvious Oxford English dictionary I found titles such as The Secret of Life, Antimatter and How Professors Think.

This is the final view of the room before I sent it away to Sweden, carefully packed in my husband's car.The strange object in the left bottom corner is a bit of a broken latte whisk.