Step by step: larder

There was no larder in the original Victorian house, but there was a cellar where storage of food, preserves, wine and other stuff started. There was no space for a cellar in the cabinet house, so some of the objects were in the kitchen and some were saved for later. And "later" came with Womble Hall that had a suitable room for a larder, to which a door leads from the working kitchen. The larder appeared briefly in some pictures in this previous post.

To display miniature food you need a lot of shelves and other storage so this is where I started. Then I just kept adding stuff, such as glass jars. Eventually, I built more shelves and also aged them with diluted stain for otherwise they didn't look natural.

Most of the food is handmade by me, although there are some things that came in large bundles. Of course cheese and bread would not be left on shelves, particularly with mice running around, but with closed cabinets of course you cannot see the stuff. So this is typical poetic license.

There is a lot more I can do in this room, like adding wall units or hooks to hang things from. The problem with overcrowded rooms is that eventually you cannot see anything in the background, and this room is narrow and deep. But even as it is I think it is a nice complement to the kitchen.

Mini jars

A couple of weeks ago someone in one of my miniature groups showed a set of tiny glass jars filled with glitter, from The Works (a hobby chain in the UK). I have been hunting these jars forever, but I won't pay a fortune for them on ebay. I happened to be near The Works last week, and bought a set for £1.

 

I want the jars, not glitter, but the first rule of miniature making is never throw away anything, so I started thinking where I can keep the glitter, and just some days later I happened to be in another hobby shop and bought this very useful mini storage box.

 

At the moment I cannot think of any use for glitter, because I don't do glitter-themed environments, but who knows. If it had been red it would have been useful to make fire.


Anyway, this left me with eight empty jars that I wanted to fill with something interesting for my larder. I have some jars made from plastic bottle caps, filled with salt, couscous, seeds and stuff. But jars invited preserves.

I posted in my miniature group, and the responses puzzled me. Friend after friend said: Candles. Ignorant as I am, I couldn't see any connections between glass jars and candles, but apparently there is something called Yankee candles, and if you make a candle shop, glass jars is exactly what you need.  Always something new to learn from miniature-making.

However, I wasn't making a candle shop, and a Victorian house would probably not have Yankee candles, and what I wanted was preserves or pickles. So this is what I made:

Left to right:

Coriander seed.
White pepper.
Snowdrop fruit (will probably dry up).
Air-drying clay, painted.
Lentils.
Eucalyptus seeds.
Unidentified seeds I had before.
Green lentils.

Apart from clay gherkins and snowdrop seeds that maybe also look like cucumbers or green peppers, I am not sure exactly what the things are supposed to represent. I may add glue to yellow lentils and pretend it's orange marmalade. White pepper may be green tomatoes? I will probably paint eucalyptus seeds dark red for beets. In fact, I had these fake beets before, but I made a big mistake. Of course there must be liquid in preserves if they are to look natural, and one of these days I will get scenic water to add features to my kitchens and bathrooms. But at the moment I haven't got scenic water, so I thought: what could I use instead? Antibacterial gel maybe? Bad idea. It all got murky within a day. So for the time being there is no liquid. There is room for improvement.

By the way, painting cucumbers was harder than you think. I tried and tried and tried and never got the right shade of green.

Here are the jars on their shelves:

Actually, you cannot see them well. I will have to re-arrange the shelves for better display.

Further basement development

I have now let the two kitchens in the basement change place. The working kitchen is now on the right, with a door leading into the larder. I took the old wallpaper from the Victorian kitchen just to see whether it would fit. I think it does. It is of course worn out, but it is easy to make new, with splash technique. So this is it.

I have decided that the lower hall will be mostly delivery, so it doesn't have to be splendid, like the main entrance. I haven't decided on floors and wallpaper yet. I think the floor will be dark tiles. What I have tested is to put in a fake staircase in the rear corridor. There is no staircase from the basement into the main house, because the basement is sold separately, and not everyone may want to invest in a basement. There is no way I can cut a stairwell, but I can make a fake staircase pretending to lead to the ground floor rear corridor. These corridors swallow a lot a space, but they also create a sense of other, non-existent, hidden space.

The vegetable crates are borrowed from my market stand. Victorians weren't keen on vegetables, but maybe my dollhouse family is an exception. This is very preliminary; at this stage it is easy to change my mind.

But my real challenge today was the larder. I like the idea, but the space is weird. At first, I put in the rest of the flagstone floor from the kitchen. It looked good, but the trouble with flagstone floors is that they are thick and uneven. It doesn't matter in a larger room, but in a small room where every millimetre counts it became impossible. As I was looking for something to make fake paper flagstones I found a printout of green tiles. By cerendipity, the sheet fit the room precisely. With such a colourful floor I decided that the walls should be plain white (walls were likely to be whitewashed in a larder anyway). I took out the three walls and painted them, then put them back.I admit that it looks very strange. Mind, I didn't build it this way! 

 

But when I made some shelves it started to look better. In fact I think it will be a very interesting room to display the numerous food items I have. The old kitchen was crammed, and the individual objects could not be properly viewed. I will make more shelves higher up on the walls.

 

At the moment the shelf unit is drying and not to be disturbed. I made it from balsa, supported by a couple of harder craft sticks.

 

I will age the shelves either with tea or with diluted watercolour.  I will eventually glue them to the walls.