I am at the Orlando Miniaturia

..... And about to set off for the first Preview night 6 to 9 pm.  It is a great venue at Coronado Springs Resort Orlando.  Makes a good holiday place to visit and get in a show at the same time.  91 degrees today!

Early notice

I have been talking to Gail Tucker (MGM shows) for a while now about having a smaller scale show and she is in the throes of organising a couple of shows with smaller scale in mind.  I think half and quarter scale are not well served in the UK yet and there are a lot of people working in those scales.

The thinking at the moment is that she will have two distinct areas to shop around - 1/12ths and then an area for 1/24ths, 1/48ths and  maybe1/144th vendors.  This means if you are a smaller scale worker you can, at last, get to a show where you know there will be someone selling in your scale.  Hopefully several someones.

It is early days yet, but at least you can begin to work out if you can manage to get there as you have a year's notice to plan in:

  Sunday 13 March 2016 New  

  The Memorial Hall, Station Road, Royal Wootton Bassett, SN4 8EN

And
    Sunday 9 October 2016   New
   Thornton Hough Village Hall, Manor Road, Thornton Hough, Wirral, CH63 1JB

If you follow by email

I have just realised that if you 'Follow by email' rather than becoming a follower, you are probably reading the blog post which is embedded in the email.  You are actually getting a much poerer version of the real McCoy.  You need to click on the heading which acts as a link to the actual blog or you won't have access to photo albums or videos or a mass of other stuff. Not to mention that the blog just looks much better!  Obviously the choice is yours but do try clicking on the heading at least once and see if you prefer to read the blog as a fully formed entity rather than just in mail.

This discovery also answer queries from people who tell me they can't see the album link or can't leave comments and various other queries I have had over time and had never been able to resolve.  I hadn't realised they were following the blog from their email.

Wallington, Morpeth, Northumberland

I have just returned from a week in Northumberland where we (re)visited Wallington.  The last time we were there I hadn't been bitten by the dolls house bug and either I saw the collection of houses and forgot them (!) or didn't actually bother looking (!)

a few of the 18

This trip made up for that as I spent a good deal of time scrutinising their display of eighteen houses.  You are allowed to take photos in Wallington but sadly almost everything from the hundreds I took were fairly rubbish as they were taken through glass and consequently full of other reflections.  I have shared some of my photos of the outsides of them here which I hope whets your appetite but, as we all know its the interiors that fascinate.  If you follow this link it will take you to many images to slake that thirst:  Images for the dolls houses

the end of the Hammond House

The gem of the collection is the Hammond House. It has 36 fully furnished rooms, 1500 pieces of furniture and 77 china faced dolls.  It has lights in every room and used to have running water.  It was donated to the national Trust in 1970.

Mrs Graham Angus of Northumberland collected houses all her life and these were added to the Hammond House by her family on her death in 1973.  The oldest house dates back to 1835.

Wallington is one of the very best NT houses to visit: wonderful house, even more spectacular gardens and then this collection - what's not to like.

Fairfax House, York

The following photographs belong to Fairfax House who have kindly given me permission to use them here.  Please do not use them without permission.

When I went to the York show (7th June) we decided to make a weekend of it and pootled off to the lovely city of York on the sunshiny Saturday preceding the show.

After a picnic lunch off we went to visit the terrific Fairfax House.

Just as I had been doing in the Georgian House in Edinburgh the previous month I was on the hunt for various details of 1830 life.  Not so simple.

The house was originally early 18th century so its actual construction was fine for my house which would have been built around the same time.  The 'inhabited' time period shown there was about seventy years too early.  That said, changes were decidedly slower back then and a lot was 'still around' by 1830.  It was the right sort of size house to equate with the Philips sisters' house in Lyme Regis but, in comparison to theirs, it is very grand.

The house has a wonderful history of being a private house for nearly two hundred years and then a gentlemen's club, followed by being used as offices.  In the first world war it was co-opted into military use and by 1919 it was completely transformed into a cinema and dance hall.  This, of course, led to a comprehensive removal of a lot of its internal structures.  Fifty years later it was finally 'saved' and a wonderful restoration undertaken to try to get it back to the original state.

I was thrilled to find that its real entrance was exactly like mine.  I say 'real entrance' because you actually enter the building by way of the cinema entrance.  If you do visit, take a moment to get your bearings when you arrive in the vestibule as this is where you would have entered the house in its heyday.  It restores Georgian symmetry and the overriding sensibilities of the period.

The inner hall behind the vestibule was the main hall of the house with lovely staircases leading off on the left hand side (hidden here).  We can see stairs beyond in a further hallway which were much less important and probably not used for visitors.

vestibule

This house has the best and most interesting ceilings I have ever seen in a house of this size.  They were incredible room after room.  Bizarrely they had been preserved by being painted over with black gloss paint.  Preservation was not the decorators intention at the time and it was a real challenge to remove.

Milton on the ceiling

I am very cross with myself that I never noticed that the only bust on the ceiling which I recorded was Milton now I am left wondering if my hero Andrew Marvel was up there somewhere.  He wrote for an earlier Fairfax and  'Upon Appleton House' featured greatly in my English degree - indeed in my final exam!  Sadly the Fairfax 'I knew' was a hundred years earlier and his Appleton House is no more.

I have 181 photos to choose from here each one equally delicious - how do I choose?

shopping

fabric

fabric sample book

I hope the ladies were as stuck for choice as I am.

looking at fireplaces

and their lovely slim surrounds

trying to see how the fire grate sits in the box

This looks a bit post Rumford to me and so not in the period they are covering but it is in mine so helped me.  Wouldn't want to pick up those fire irons though when the fire was lit!!  They didn't sit on the dogs.

a house with fenders

This is also a rare house in that several of its fires had fenders.  It drives me crazy in stately homes - mostly they do not have fenders.  Primarily wooden houses plus , wooden structures, rolling logs or coals would be a fire waiting to happen.  I wonder if it is because the generations working on these things now are so far removed from such things as lighting a fire.

I was born in 1945 but even then there were enough connections backwards to reach into Victorian ways of being and enough tips and methods still being passed on down.  We seem to have reached a stopping place post sixties where such things got swept away.  Rant over.

a gilded pie

fish and birds on a range

I think I will be on a lookout for a contemporary cook book next.

inner hall with main staircase

I'll leave you with a lovely piece of plaster-work and a strict instruction to get yourself to York for an overnighter.  Make a date in your diary for the weekend of 21/22 November.  The York dolls house show is on the 22nd.  You can do it very frugally if you stay a little outside the city (about fifteen minutes in our case) in a Premier Inn which did very well.  Do try to eat at Trinacria or at least pick up one of their ice creams.  It is just steps away from the show near the race course.  I can honestly say it was the best meal I have had in a long time and I am a bit of a nit-picky foodie.

Arts and Crafts

Departing from the period I am currently doing we did visit an example of an Arts and Crafts building which was interesting.  In a way it is an ideal place to go and look at the detail of the period as it is, somehow, overloaded with detail.

Goddards was the home of Noel Terry and his family.  He of Terry's chocolate deliciousness.

I think it was built at the end of the Arts and Crafts period rather than in its hey day and is almost a pastiche of all that was meant by that term.  I came away wanting the house and its position and their lifestyle but also not quite in love with it.  It seemed very masculine.

The upside is you are allowed to take photos (no flash) so you would be able to garner a zillion ideas for your own project......   and tea was lovely....

The Georgian House, Edinburgh

At the end of May I had a wonderful week away in Edinburgh visiting my daughter and her husband but also taking in visits to anything related to my project.  I have lots of images and notes for the period that I am doing (1776-1830) but the details of houses are hard to come by. For example how did the bell pull enter/exit the wall, what were the hinges and other door furniture like and many more questions I couldn't find answers to.

Quite rightly, if you see pictures of rooms and houses they are there to give you the view of a whole room or a building, whereas I wanted to look at the nitty-gritty.  This nitty-gritty is hard to find for the casual 'historian' because most Georgian houses you see have been overlayed by an additional three hundred years of people living in them and/or the subjective foibles of any historical restorer.  Indeed I would claim, quite often, even they get it just plain 'wrong'.  Yes, that surprises me too.

So, with all that in mind, we were off to see the main reason of our trip - The Georgian House in Edinburgh.  Please do click on the link and take a look.

Anyone doing a Georgian/Regency property and who can get to Edinburgh should do so.  A day spent in the wonderful 'New Town' which has been beautifully preserved (not artificially) is just a joy.  You are really immersed in the time.

It is best to begin on the top floor of the house and watch the video about life in the house during that period and then work your way down to the basement.  If you are interested it will probably take you about an hour and a half to complete the tour.

There is information in every room which is interestingly written and informative and each room's docent couldn't be more welcoming, enthusiastic and knowledgeable - its a really lovely place to visit.

The following photographs belong to the National Trust of Scotland who have kindly given me permission to use them here.  Please do not use them without permission.

serene ceiling rose in the hall

willow and lots of glass and always a tablecoth

such a pretty fireplace

I have one almost identical to this.

simple colour scheme 

Pretty sure this is my colour scheme.

lovely square piano

Might have one made as my birthday present from the family. Miniature of course.

this is a plaster trim and in the same room

there is a trompe l'oeil one painted  above the doors

Hope to do this in the hall.

view of the room

This is pretty much the basis for my drawing room.  I am surprised by the picking out of trims with white but their information did say the decor came from research on another house and is true to the period so who am I to argue. I like it so much more than the concept of everything being painted in the same colour which is the general rule for this time.

lights in service areas

window seat

I have one - need another

nice 'desk' arrangement

Table with flap down front and writing box on top - very Jane Austin

the 'right' sort of barrels

A huge amount of stuff came in barrels; water, ale, small beer, wine, all kinds of dry goods, pickles, wrapped meats and on and on and on.  Other food storage was glass (surprised me) and stoneware.

functional dresser and batterie de cuisine

the wine cellar 

the bells (no tabs!!)

These bells should have little tabs on strings.  You often got to the board after the bell had stopped ringing/moving but a little tag on a string kept moving for a while afterwards so you could tell which room you needed to go to.

a vented storage room door

This was a technique used in pantries up to my childhood - there would be holes at floor level preferably to the outside and holes at the top (both usually through walls.  (meshed to keep insects out).  Hot air rises, so cool air was continually drawn in through the vent at the bottom and left the pantry at the top as it warmed up.  A pantry was always several degrees cooler than the kitchen.

an original lock and door knob

Doorknobs were generally black, not the brass we see everywhere.  Brass came late in the century and was only in the grandest of houses - gold coloured metals seen in palaces were often that - they were gilded metals.

This is just a tiny fraction of the details you can discover for yourself if you look carefully.  A tour of a house of the period can answer literally hundreds of questions you might have when you come to decorate, furnish or build your project so much better than any book or the hours spent trawling the web.  

In the case of this tour, for us, it was free as we are members of the English National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland  has a recipricol arrangement with them.