...not that i have any delusions that someone's out there reading me. but if i don't write for an audience, i get all rambly. yes, i get rambly anyway. you should see me when i don't have an audience.
it all started when we put in a bid on a house that had far too many rooms for us. i was going to have a room just for crafting. jb kept calling it my sewing room, but that just doesn't seem right. i mean, yeah, i sew, but there's also my jewelry (www.newmoonpie.etsy.com, for now), and i just learned to crochet (taught myself with the klutz book of crochet), and then i started thinking...
now that i was to have a room just for my crap, i could take possession of my dollhouse once more. it's at my parents' house and i haven't looked at it since i was in my early teens. not that i'm ancient now, but we're talking almost 20 years ago.
i started to remember all the stuff i used to make. i was obsessed. much like i do with jewelry now, i'd come up with ideas all the time for things that would clearly be better at 1:12 scale. i was a madwoman. i made dice, i remembered a few days ago. accurate dice. SCALE dice, with the dots actually placed individually - not by pen, which probably would have staved off my impending blindness for at least a few more years - using polymer clay, the tiniest little dots. and damned if it's not to scale. okay, it might be a little bigger than scale. possibly about 3 cm square.
and i have no idea where the inhabitants of the dollhouse wound up. they had a rough life. completely made of rubber, they were poseable, and i remember that Mama Minute's wire core began to pop out of her skin, after too many episodes of me trying to make her sit in a chair. ultimately, my cabbage patch minis wound up living in the house, but they aren't exactly proportionate, so i'm sure they ended up stuck in the staircase, or sleeping in a bed that was juuuuust too small.
the coda to the house contract is that the current inhabitants - a family of termites - hadn't kept up the major systems in the house, and clearly the home's owner hadn't, either, as he denied that everything was about to fail. so we walked. and now we're looking for a new place.
and despite not having a room of my own to work in, i spent a good $10 on blocks of sculpey. i was always a fimo gal, myself, but the sculpey was on sale, and money doesn't grow on trees.
jb looked at me funny when i tried to explain what i intended to do. he must be assimilated.
so i did a little (ha!) research on the internets, and i found a lot of dollhouse sites. and, glory be, it's the same crap that was for sale 15 years ago. lots of antique crap, and lots of really outdated stuff. i found a cell phone, and i had to laugh... to scale, it would be about 8 inches tall, and 4 inches thick, with a massive antenna spouting out of the top. i'm tempted to make one just for the kitsch factor.
plus, there's plenty of stuff that's just WRONG, on so many levels. although i haven't found a mammy doll, i'm sure they exist. and i did find a "jewish bible." um, i don't think that's what the jewish folk call it. ::shakes head::
and in addition to all of that, the market has a glut of tiny gum ball machines, wee typewriters, and more mini-sheet cakes than ANYONE can possibly use.
with the exception of some wonderful crafters on etsy (www.etsy.com), who have pop-tarts and sushi trays and all sorts of unique stuff, most of the dollhouse market is frozen in time. maybe that's the point. and i don't want to be derivative, let alone outdated and derivative, that's for damned sure.
so i'm going to do what i did when i was 11; i'm going to make the stuff that surrounds me, only to 1:12-inch scale. last night was my first real attempt at minireality. while i was waiting for jb to return from harris teeter (a dangerous place for him), i made my favorite dinner out of clay. so when jb came home with bags filled with cheeses and salmon and fresh artisan loaves of bread, and bottles of good wine, i presented him with the exact same thing, only REALLY FRIKKIN' TINY.
his reaction was a good one. he was impressed, and i could tell he got what i was trying to do. i had a little wheel of gouda, with its waxy red rind, and one wedge taken out to reveal the creamy insides. i had a wedge of buttery-yellow emmenthaler. i had a wedge of mimolette, with a slightly darker orange-red rind. and i had flakes of salmon, which was where jb's suspension of disbelief sorta deflated. he wasn't buying that at all, even when i held up my little salmon pile next to a plastic deli container of salmon pieces. frankly, i'm astounded at the resemblance. just astounded. so fine, no miniature salmon for jb. tlhbbbthhhhh.
i've been making lists of stuff I Must Recreate In Miniature. obsessively making lists. on very small post-it notes, no less. i shall make my fortune this way - O YES, i shall. or, at the very least, i'll bring MODERN miniatures to the forefront... of... i have no idea. what the hell's the market for this stuff, anyway?
it doesn't matter. like the jewelry, i don't do it for the money. i couldn't. i'd starve. so tonight, i make a little tiny plunger, and i try to ignore the incredulous looks from jb.
