Dealing with antiques

I have now started to have a closer look at the miniatures I bought last week in Stockholm. Mind, I know that there are scores of fake antiques out there, made in China and skilfully aged. I know too little to be able to judge. However, this is what I have found out about the half-scale stove:

 

You cannot see it very well, but it says "Skoglund Olson Gefle". Some research on the web, performed by my excellent research assistant (Staffan, my husband), yields the following. Skoglund & Olson was a prominent ironware factory in Gävle (Gefle with old orthography), the city where Staffan grew up. They produced stoves, fireplaces and all kinds of hardware, and they also produced iron toys and miniatures, notably cars and stoves. Another source warns that a lot of fake Skoglund & Olson toys are nowadays made in India and sometimes sold as antiques. It wasn't expensive, but people do not always know what they sell. I like it anyway. It fits nicely in my half-scale kitchen, although it is wrong style: the kitchen is early Victorian. Does it matter? I may make a half-scale Swedish kitchen one day. I have many times built a roombox around one particular piece.


Another beautiful item is this drop-leaf table that some vandal has spoiled by gluing on whatever it was, apparently plates and pots.

I have many times removed marks after glasses and plates from 1:1 furniture, but whoever vandalised this table made sure the glue would stay forever. I didn't want to scratch it so I dissolved the glue carefully with nail polish remover, then sanded with fine-grain sandpaper and soaked again and again in teak oil. It is still not perfect, but the worst stains are gone. I will repeat the treatment a couple more times.

This piece is signed and marked, and I am trying to find out something about the maker and the mark. All ideas welcome.

The table will go into my Swedish kitchen, to replace the made-in-China-and-wrong-style table. Of course I will have the replace the chairs as well. Maybe I can get some from Kotte Toys. Any idea which chairs would match the table?

Finally, for this round, I have scrutinised the wardrobe. It has no marks, but it looks old (see above, looks are no guarantee of authenticity). It was broken, but the tiny nails that hold the door and work as hinges were still there. It is extremely delicate, and I was anxious not to break it. A small piece was loose where the nail had been, and I glued it carefully.

Inside, there were some holes that I believe indicate that there used to be a shelf. I may make a shelf from balsa.

 I managed to put the door in place, but the nail didn't get in all the way, and I didn't want to force it.

It is hard to estimate the scale. It is 13 cm tall, including the ornament, so it is closer to 1:16. I don't do 1:16 scale, but I may put it somewhere in a way that wouldn't be conspicuous. I may also put it on a low chest of drawers, as a cabinet. But it is still a mystery where it comes from. If you know or have an idea where I can find out please let me know.

Half-scale kitchen

For the half-scale kitchen, I made a stove of the same model as in my Victorian house, just half the size.

The body of the stove is made from cardboard, simply painted black. The doors are bits of cardboard glued to the front. You cannot have as much detail in half scale because they become too conspicuous, so I just made simple handles from wire. The pipe is of course a drinking straw. The pots and the kettle came in some large lot, and strangely they fit perfectly in scale. I will make some utensils to hang on the rack.

Next I made a butler's sink with instructions in Vivienne Boulton's book, only she makes everything from clay, while I found an old butter container, the kind you get in hotels. I think I have had this container ever since I started making miniatures, just waiting for the right occasion. I wanted a butler's sink rather than a more modern sink like I have in the Victorian house simply because I wanted to make something new. Let's agree that this kitchen hasn't been modernised yet.

The room is very small so I cannot put as much in it as a typical kitchen would have. But at least a table is necessary. It is very easy to make a simple table: take a wooden strip and attach legs with blue tack...

However, this feels highly unsatisfactory for a furniture maker with self respect. Instead, I made it using my experience from making the Tudor and the Georgian tables - very difference experiences, but both proved useful. I also studied carefully the very first kitchen table I had in my very first kitchen. And this is what I did:

First, glued a smaller strip (a domino piece) on the underside. Cut four legs and the bars. Glued the legs at the corners of the smaller strip and glued on the bars - I promise, that took some time!

This feels much better. I had some half-scale dishes and food, but I will make more. And add more details. But so far, this is what the kitchen looks like. A bit crammed for a Victorian kitchen, but will have to do.

For a comparison, I took a picture of a full-scale and a half-scale table. It gives you a good sense of scale.

Kitchen chimney

I like to recycle and think of interesting and original ways of using rubbish. I had been saving bits of hard foam (from some electronic appliance), trying to think of this and that, and most of all I wanted to make a kitchen chimney. Miniature makers usually make chimneys of floral oasis, which is easy to cut to the shape you need. I have a large oasis cube bought for this purpose, and yet I had these bits of foam on my mind.

It is an interesting shape, and I wanted to use it somehow. So I took measurements based on the size of the room it was going to be in, as well as an old stove I wasn't particularly fond of (got it with a lot), just to see how it would fit. The foam wasn't easy to cut, and it crumbled horribly.

I used toothpicks to hold the pieces together, because it was pointless even trying to glue them.

Then I painted it with sand paint. It gives nice, uneven surface.

Then I painted it white. I also repainted the old stove and added some details, so I now find it quite nice.

I am very pleased that I managed to use all the interesting features of the foam. The large pot lids are made from champagne caps, and the small are buttons.

You may have noticed that the stove is in a room that I haven't yet described. I will do it in the next post.

More drawing room details

The right corner of the drawing room is where the master of the house has his books and his collection of weird things. You can see where I ran out of wallpaper and had to take another pattern, pretending it was a purposeful design. There is a Dutch tile stove and a low chest of drawers to put trinkets on, most of which are from ebay and thrift shops. The cello is a fridge magnet. The old map is cut from a magazine, and the butterfly collection is made with stickers from the Butterfly House in Stockholm. A grandchild made the roses from modelling clay.

 With all the furniture back, the room looks crammed, as it should be.

The pretty turned table was inside another dollhouse that my husband found at the garbage collection (of which more anon). I made the candesticks from broken juwellery. The little table to the left is made from kit, as is the cake stand.

The Oriental smoking table is made from a metal buckle. I made the box of chocolates and the miniature book, which is The Children's Book, by A S Byatt. The smoking utensils and the pretty plates are from ebay.

A little stove

I saw a picture on the web and thought: "I could make that!" The body is a makeup-brush stand, with a bottle cap on top, and the chimney is a drinking straw. I made the doors from foil and metal junk, the same way as for the large white tile stove.

Kitchen stove

For the stove I used some ideas from a book, some images from the web, but most things I invented myself. The stove is made from cardboard. The top is cut from a foil food container, and the rings are bottoms of candle holders. All metal rods are bits of junk Christmas decorations I bought at flea markets. The doors are pieces of cardboard with bits of plastic lace glued on to make an interesting surface. The knobs are paper clips and the hinges the other halves of the same. Hooks are clothing hooks.

This is what the kitchen looked like after all the imporvements

Using imagination

Among the many brilliant ideas that I borrowed from Eva Malmsten and that immediately gave my dollhouse a unique look was this Dutch tile stove. Stupidly, I don't have a good picture of it from my original dollhouse, so this is a more sophisticated environment, but the stove is the same.

I am sure I have never seen another bottle like this, before or after. It happened at the right moment. The top comes from a different bottle. In Eva's book, she glued several jars on top of each other, but I had the shelf height to fit it into. I used a envelope clip and a piece of broken chain, two thumbnails (with plastic cover removed) and a jar lid for base. The doors (it is just one piece) are cut from metal foil, the kind you get off champagne bottles. The handle is a envelope clip, and the hinges small pieces of metal that fell out of something I was dismantling.

I think this piece is still among my top-ten favourites.