Anyone who follows my photostream knows that I love and collect 1:12 size miniatures which I photograph in realistic scenes. The artifice of recreating in minute detail items in 1:12 scale always amazes me, and it’s amazing how the eye can be fooled. Part of that artifice requires making sure that everything is in place as if the inhabitants of a room have just stepped out and will return at any moment, and I often spend far more time setting things up and adjusting the position of items, sometime by millimetres, to make it just right.
As well as photographing the miniature room as a whole, I sometimes photograph individual items within the tableau. On occasion it is so I know what is set where in a room if I decide to recreate it later, but more often than not it’s because I think the miniature artisan item deserves its own focus, be it a hand made hat, a hand painted teapot or a realistic biscuit tin containing biscuits.
The theme for “Smile on Saturday” for the 20th of November is “collage”, and whilst I have toyed and made a few different collages, I decided to use this one, to show some of the finer details that go into making a scene realistic. I hope that you like my choice for the theme this week, and that it makes you smile.
The details I have displayed around the main photograph are from top left to top right in an anti-clockwise direction:
A black dyed straw hat with purple roses and black feathers, which was made by an unknown artisan. 1:12 size miniature hats made to such exacting standards of quality and realism are often far more expensive than real hats are. When you think that it would sit comfortably on the tip of your index finger, yet it could cost in excess of $150.00 or £100.00, it is an extravagance. American artists seem to have the monopoly on this skill and some of the hats that I have seen or acquired over the years are remarkable. This hat is part of a larger collection I bought from an American miniature collector Marilyn Bickel.
The shelves of the Welsh dresser in the background are cluttered with different patterned crockery which have come from different miniature stockists both in Australia and the United Kingdom. There are also some rather worn and beaten looking enamelled cannisters and a bread tin in the typical domestic Art Deco design and kitchen colours of the 1920s, cream and green. Aged on purpose, these artisan pieces I recently acquired from The Dolls’ House Shop in the United Kingdom. There are also tins of various foods which would have been household staples in the 1920s (when this scene is set) when canning and preservation revolutinised domestic cookery. Amongst other foods on the dresser are a jar of Marmite and some Oxo stock cubes. All these items are 1:12 size artisan miniatures made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire, with great attention to detail paid to their labels and the shapes of their jars and cans. Marmite is a food spread made from yeast extract which although considered remarkably English, was in fact invented by German scientist Justus von Liebig although it was originally made in the United Kingdom. It is a by-product of beer brewing and is currently produced by British company Unilever. The product is notable as a vegan source of B vitamins, including supplemental vitamin B. Marmite is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, salty, powerful flavour. This distinctive taste is represented in the marketing slogan: "Love it or hate it." Such is its prominence in British popular culture that the product's name is often used as a metaphor for something that is an acquired taste or tends to polarise opinion. Oxo is a brand of food products, including stock cubes, herbs and spices, dried gravy, and yeast extract. The original product was the beef stock cube, and the company now also markets chicken and other flavour cubes, including versions with Chinese and Indian spices. The cubes are broken up and used as flavouring in meals or gravy or dissolved into boiling water to produce a bouillon. Oxo produced their first cubes in 1910 and further increased Oxo's popularity.
Sitting on the table in the foreground of the main photo is a McVitie and Price’s Small Petite Beurre Biscuits tin, containing a selection of different biscuits. The biscuits were made by hand of polymer clay by former chef turned miniature artisan, Frances Knight. Her work is incredibly detailed and realistic, and she says that she draws her inspiration from her years as a chef and her imagination. McVitie's (Originally McVitie and Price) is a British snack food brand owned by United Biscuits. The name derives from the original Scottish biscuit maker, McVitie and Price, Ltd., established in 1830 on Rose Street in Edinburgh, Scotland. The company moved to various sites in the city before completing the St. Andrews Biscuit Works factory on Robertson Avenue in the Gorgie district in 1888. The company also established one in Glasgow and two large manufacturing plants south of the border, in Heaton Chapel, Stockport, and Harlesden, London (where Edith’s father works). McVitie and Price's first major biscuit was the McVitie's Digestive, created in 1892 by a new young employee at the company named Alexander Grant, who later became the managing director of the company. The biscuit was given its name because it was thought that its high baking soda content served as an aid to food digestion. The McVitie's Chocolate Homewheat Digestive was created in 1925. Although not their core operation, McVitie's were commissioned in 1893 to create a wedding cake for the royal wedding between the Duke of York and Princess Mary, who subsequently became King George V and Queen Mary. This cake was over two metres high and cost one hundred and forty guineas. It was viewed by 14,000 and was a wonderful publicity for the company. They received many commissions for royal wedding cakes and christening cakes, including the wedding cake for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip and Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Under United Biscuits McVitie's holds a Royal Warrant from Queen Elizabeth II.
In the foreground on the table there are several packets of Edwardian cleaning and laundry brands that were in common use in the early Twentieth Century in every household, rich or poor. These are Sunlight Soap, Robin’s Starch, Jumbo Blue and Imp Washer Soap. All these packets were made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. Sunlight Soap was first introduced in 1884 by William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme) and introduced to the market in 1904. It was produced at Port Sunlight in Wirrel, Merseyside, a model village built by Lever Brothers for the workers of their factories which produced the popular soap brands Lux, Lifebuoy and Sunlight. Before the invention of aerosol spray starch, the product of choice in many homes of all classes was Robin starch. Robin Starch was a stiff white powder like cornflour to which water had to be added. When you made up the solution, it was gloopy, sticky with powdery lumps, just like wallpaper paste or grout. The garment was immersed evenly in that mixture and then it had to be smoothed out. All the stubborn starchy lumps had to be dissolved until they were eliminated – a metal spoon was good for bashing at the lumps to break them down. Robins Starch was produced by Reckitt and Sons who were a leading British manufacturer of household products, notably starch, black lead, laundry blue, and household polish. They also produced Jumbo Blue, which was a whitener added to a wash to help delay the yellowing effect of older cotton. Rekitt and Sons were based in Kingston upon Hull. Isaac Reckitt began business in Hull in 1840, and his business became a private company Isaac Reckitt and Sons in 1879, and a public company in 1888. The company expanded through the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It merged with a major competitor in the starch market J. and J. Colman in 1938 to form Reckitt and Colman.
Sitting atop a stack of neatly folded 1:12 size linens sits a wicker sewing basket. Sitting open it has needles stuck into the padded lid, whilst inside it are a tape measure, knitting needles, balls of wool, reels of cotton and a pair of shears. All the items and the basket, except for the shears, are hand made by Mrs. Denton of Muffin Lodge in the United Kingdom. The taupe knitting on the two long pins that serve as knitting needles is properly knitted and cast on. The shears with black handles in the basket open and close. Made of metal, they came from Doreen Jeffries’ Small Wonders Miniature Shop in the United Kingdom. The blue cotton reel and silver sewing scissors come from an E-Bay stockist of miniatures based in the United Kingdom.
In the foreground on the table there is a packet of Edwardian soap that was in common use in the early Twentieth Century in every household, rich or poor. This is Imp Washer Soap. The packet was made by Little Things Dollhouse Miniatures in Lancashire. Imp Washer Soap was manufactured by T. H. Harris and Sons Limited, a soap manufacturers, tallow melters and bone boiler. Introduced after the Great War, Imp Washer Soap was a cheaper alternative to the more popular brands like Sunlight, Hudsons and Lifebuoy soaps. Imp Washer Soap was advertised as a free lathering and economical cleaner. T. H. Harris and Sons Limited also sold Mazo soap energiser which purported to improve the quality of cleaning power of existing soaps.
Sitting on the large kitchen range in the background is a 1:12 miniature replica of a copper kettle and a steel iron. The kettle’s lid may be removed.
Sitting on the table is a cottage ware teapot. Made by French ceramicist and miniature artisan Valerie Casson, it has been decorated authentically and matches in perfect detail its life-size Price Washington ‘Ye Olde Cottage Teapot’ counterparts. The top part of the thatched roof and central chimney form the lid, just like the real thing. Valerie Casson is renown for her meticulously crafted and painted miniature ceramics.
