Unhinged......

My goodness, time whizzes past at an extraordinary rate.   All too soon we shall be opening to the public for the first time (May 11th - one day only, to coincide with the local Farmers' Market) and that same night we head back to England.

I return to Bavorov about ten days later but without the incomparable help of Butterfly who celebrates her birthday today by not going into Small Worlds.   Instead she is following her other profession at this very moment by recording a voice-over down in my former cowshed.

There is still so much going on at once in Small Worlds that this blogpost is as tricky to write as the last one.   We have nearly exhausted the list of tasks ready for our willing but "unskilled" helpers and are moving on to only having jobs requiring a high level of skill.  Luckily I number some "highly skilled" helpers amongst my friends and relatives.

For the past few days my sister-in-law Mette, who has an amazing collection of room boxes lining the whole of one wall, and who writes for the magazine Dolls House and Miniature Scene, has been here weaving her magic on tiny soft furnishings.   Neither Butterfly nor I can work with needle, thread or textiles so Mette's skill has been invaluable.   The beds in the big Walmer are now made, so too in the former orange bungalow, which is also replete with beautiful silk cushions.   You will see these when the houses are revealed in due course.












In the meantime here is a glimpse of her work in twenty-fourth scale for the tiny pink Fairfield (half the size of most of my houses)



In the picture on the left it is standing next to Mouse Mansion which has its new roof and is waiting for the outside paper to be applied. Once again, note the weeny teeny front door...all that will change shortly.   Well, from the outside at least.

Meanwhile, inside, the mice are having a wonderful time...

they're deciding on the interior decor...   

So much choice, so little time to choose... 

because Mette needs to make the bedding and curtains before she leaves again for England.  

The post title came about because I have spent a couple of days trying to sort out hinges.   The department-store-to-be has suffered from a maker of great ambition but sadly lacking the practical skills to match.   If you have a large heavy piece of wood for example, it is no good at all trying to hold it in place just with two small hinges.....

Nor does it help to continue to try and fix a hinge to a piece of wood that is already riddled with holes and repeatedly glued together from abortive attempts to get a hinge to stay in place. 

So armed with some lovely long piano hinges (hands up whoever knows that's what long hinges are called - I didn't) I have been trying to remedy the situation on two of the houses.   However I am spatially challenged and cannot reverse patterns which means that I am capable of screwing the hinge on incorrectly, removing it because the doors won't close, turning it over, and screwing it on just as incorrectly again.    

Grrrrr......by the end of the second day I was ready to scream and chuck the lot out of the window in the best Czech style.   I have now abandoned the whole hinge horror to hand over to my highly skilled Dutch friend who arrives on Friday.   She can turn her hand to anything......little does she know it yet, but one of the things she will be tackling is the very large thatched roof on the English cottage.   There will be pictures in due course....

Thank you for following my journey so far.   I look forward to seeing you again soon.   In the meantime I am off to do some (full-size) gardening whilst the sun is shining.......

Busy, busy......

From a tidy, coherent workplace we seem to have descended into chaos again.   But it's a good sort of chaos, resulting from the many different things that are going on at the same time in Small Worlds at the moment.

In fact there is so much going on that it's hard to know what to write about.   I am tempted just to post loads of photos and let everyone become as confused as we are!

There has been much cleaning, scraping, mending, gluing, removing of unpleasant substances (mould, moth eggs, rust), writing of lists of what to do next, interspersed with some actual creativity for light relief.   (For those who wonder why these nasty things have infected my houses, remember where most of them were stored for nearly ten years.  We actually got away with relatively little damage.)

The plan had been to clean and roughly repair all of the houses during the past week so that they at least looked reasonable from the outside, even if unfurnished.   But this well thought out plan soon foundered on the rocks of temptation.   

Butterfly got her hands on the ugly orange bungalow and was swept up into a dream of what it could be like - and had to start making the dream reality.   That process will have a whole post to itself.   The same happened with the Cape Cod house.











I have been employed on much more mundane tasks.   The nastiest of which was ripping out the moth eaten carpets in the Lundby house.  

 

One would think that the eminent Swedish dolls house manufacturer would have known better than to use felt for the carpets since it is notoriously prone to moth.   But as Butterfly pointed out, they probably didn't expect their houses to still be around some forty years on.

And she said the same when I was moaning about the rusty front of my baby Triang house which looks as if it has the measles. 

I have decided to leave all except one of the Triangs (I have six, including the rather bizarre Jenny's Home, of which more in another post) in their original condition, much though it goes against the grain given the scale of some of the wallpapers in them.   

This means that I will probably not be repainting the rusty window frames or replacing the very tattered strips of curtain material in the bent latticed windows.  

I am giving them all a thorough clean, gluing down bent and twisted roofs and straightening windows and frames. I will try to furnish as far as possible with authentic Triang furniture though I shall probably include some Dol-Toi and Barton, both of which were contemporary with Triang at some point in its very long existence.   Shed on the Pond is an excellent website for anyone who wants to know more about the long history of Lines and Triang Houses.   And indeed a lovely blog on dolls houses in general.

Yesterday afternoon I unpacked every piece of Lundby furniture I could find, including that donated to me by a friend just before I left - a very special gift which also included a large mouse family clearly from the same clan as these.   

It was very exciting to realise that an ugly little Georgian house that was standing around looking miserable actually looked far better without the pobbly outside wallpaper; and with its many rooms it is ideally suited to the housing of the extended family of mice - though they will have to make a big leap to get out of the teeny tiny front door!  
 
My sister-in-law, a highly skilled miniaturist, who is arriving next week to lend a creative hand, has suggested some sandalwood furniture to keep away the moth since all the mice are made of the dreaded felt.....

The Lundby furniture took up my entire workspace - it would have made a wonderful picture for WOYWW.  

Shame it was Friday.....

Cue digression:  Much as I enjoyed participating in WOYWW recently I think it will be a rare occurence for me.   Fascinating though it is to visit other blogs, and also to receive visitors to mine, it is very time-consuming and I really need to be focusing on other things at the moment.....

I realise I haven't even mentioned the coming together of the big Walmer dolls house which has been standing around in many parts since we arrived,
the burgeoning department store, the re-creation of the haberdashers, the birth of an Essex pub complete with pargetting - all to come in future posts.   Quite apart from the cursing and swearing that went on yesterday as I tried to reassemble Jenny's flaming Home.   I'd better hasten to Small Worlds now to get on with it....

Lovely to have you following me.   The journey is really getting exciting now so I hope to see you again soon.   Thank you for reading so far.....

If you go down in the woods today....

This is just a short post to wish everyone a Happy Easter - the snow is rapidly disappearing here in the Czech Republic and the Easter Bunny should be able to hide his eggs safely tomorrow without borrowing Santa's sleigh.

Last week there was a Farmers' Market here in Bavorov and since the window of Small Worlds is directly opposite the rear door of the castle hall in which it is held we prepared our first window display - a woodland scene - in time for it.

The task was not too difficult - some of my friends will recognise the characters involved.  Especially Lynda who, indefatigable in helping to pack up our house in England, was the one who removed them from their previous display on the landing and packed them carefully for their journey to the Czech Republic.

We did a test run in the room, before setting up in the window.  In the end quite a number of things were rejected, amongst them the Wombles seen at the front.   They definitely belong to Wimbledon Common rather than a Czech wood. And all fungi were reserved for an autumn display.

Sadly we forgot to take photos of the window before the Easter Bunny came along and transformed it today ready for the Easter Holiday.   Velikonoce, as it is known here (the name comes from Veliké noci - the Great Nights) is a very popular festival and as you walk through the village many people have put decorations in their windows.   There are some strange customs as well..... 

Photographing the window from the outside has also not been very successful - much reflection in the glass, either of me or the house opposite.   Butterfly, who has a couple of Easter offerings of her own,  then contorted herself from inside the room and tried to take photos at an angle......

I hope nevertheless you can get an idea of the woodland scene.  

There has been a pleasing amount of interest from passers-by, with parents holding up their little ones to see more closely.   At one end of the window we have details of the coming opening hours and the delightfully expressed information about the collection that Abbeybufo of Stitchwords produced whilst peeling potatoes one day.

I leave you with a series of close-ups and my very best wishes for a Happy Easter - oh and the title of this blog makes my last offering inevitable.   It comes direct from my very own childhood - as Abbeybufo has it in her introduction to Small Worlds: 
"Do you remember when you were little? I mean really little, when everything in the grown-up world was too big for you, and it seemed there was always someone bigger telling you where to go, what to do …"

I'm happy to say I remember it well and I hope that following my dolls house journey brings back happy memories for all of you too.

Veselé velikonoce 

to one and all

PS After the somewhat ribald comments flying around about the young lady squirrel's loose morals I feel I owe it to her to post a further picture in her defence... 

WOYWW 199

This is my very first WOYWW - partly because this is the first time for many years I have had a workdesk..... 

Some of my readers will have no clue what WOYWW (which stands for "What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday")  is - a wonderful excuse to take a peep once a week at what other crafters have on their workdesks. This delightful snooping activity was dreamt up by Julia Dunnit of the Stamping Ground and you can find out all about it here.

Butterfly is sitting nearby and I shall be consulting her on what I am supposed to be doing.   I do know that it includes visiting as many other WOYWW blogs as I can - a great way to procrastinate from the cleaning operation on many dolls houses that is scheduled for today and Thursday.

So what's on my lovely new workdesk this Wednesday?  

Well it started like this - lots of  empty partitioned boxes and a mass of tangled wires, miniature lights, bulbs, switches and plugs, all collected over many years.

Years of neglect in fact......

Some hours, many dropped bulbs, much coffee (spot the coffee mug) and a fair amount of swearing later I am delighted to report that my workdesk now looks very different.


Like this:


Now all I need to do is find an empty storage drawer under the dolls houses to take the  tidy boxes and clear my workdesk for the next task!
  

To admire Butterfly's talent for organisation take a look at her WOYWW post today....

I'm off to peer at as many workdesks as I can now and hope to meet some of you on the way.....

From chaos to coherence....

Just over a week since we began creating order out of chaos and now we can feel that excellent progress is being made.   I didn't actually believe that in such a short time we would be able to start real work on the houses themselves but tomorrow is the day!


When I last posted we were expecting the carpenter and the painter, the first to put up the remaining more complicated shelves, and the other to paint the few items we had brought this time round from the UK.   

The painter did his normal crack of dawn job on Friday and Saturday which meant that we couldn't do much on Saturday as there were wet items in the usable space.  

So we ferried a number of boxes, mainly papers, home to sort them there.   So now there was chaos not just in Small Worlds but back at the ranch as well  (and it's still there.....)

We headed back to Small Worlds on Sunday and really broke the back of the work.   It was just as well that it was Sunday actually because we were able to spread into the corridor between us and the library to stack the empty cartons which were rapidly piling up.  Not to mention vast amounts of bubble wrap as the houses emerged from their protective covering. 

It was at this point that I began to find things I hadn't seen for twelve years.   Very exciting!  I have no clue why I saved some of them actually.....
But we both squeaked with delight when one particular family emerged.   Mother is clearly so excited at seeing the light of day again that she can't control herself!

The carpenter's construction rapidly filled up, partly, as you can see, with bread bins, (wonderful to build room settings in) and houses were found places on the counters though most of them have another move ahead before they find their final resting place. 

 

By the time we left on Sunday, having stuffed the car to the gunnels with rubbish - tip run scheduled for today - all that still had to be sorted was the working area.

This morning we headed to the tip with more than a dozen giant collapsed cartons, many banana boxes, around fifty empty shoe boxes and several bin bags of bubble wrap.   Then back to the ranch to collect my trestle table (horribly heavy - I can't believe that ten years ago I was hefting it by myself onto the trestles.   Not any more.)

Butterfly was then in her element, creating a workstation for each of us whilst I powered through seven Ikea wooden drawer units.   

Butterfly's workstation is under the window, mine is in the centre of the room, we are each equipped with the most necessary tools, and between us is a cunning unit with glues, more tools, paints and other useful items.   And we even have coat hooks and a radio!

And so that we don't get bored when not in Small Worlds, we have also more or less finished the flyer design and are just waiting for the final Czech version to get some printed......

Thank you for staying with me throughout this journey.  If you want to look at things more closely, remember that clicking on any photo will enlarge it.  I am so much looking forward to starting on the houses and will do my best to keep you up to date with what is happening in Small Worlds.   See you soon.....

Back in Bavorov

It may be a long time since my last post, but when we unlocked the museum door on Monday, it seemed hardly any time at all since I locked it and left it in November.

We is me and butterfly, whom many of you know, and we have arrived in the Czech Republic two months before I normally come to prepare the dolls house museum for its official opening in May.

And I am delighted to announce that at long last the museum actually has a name - Small Worlds.    My thanks to everyone who struggled along with me to find a name that would work in both languages.   This one works better in English than Czech but I am content with it.   Having a name has meant that publicity material can now be prepared.   I am immensely grateful to my daughter-in-law, Laura of Laurart, who is designing the artwork (if you hurry along to this post on her blog you could be in with a chance of a delicious prize, just for leaving a comment).

And my thanks go as well to Abbeybufo of Stitchwords who in an idle moment peeling potatoes (hmm, is that really an idle moment?) not only came up with the name but also the blurb for the flyer.  

At the moment, as you can see from the photos, all is chaos in Small Worlds.   The first thing we did on Monday was to make drawer dividers from cardboard boxes so that we can sort everything into findable places.   I swear that such boxes are made far stronger than most modern furniture.   

Butterfly has a non-working finger at the moment, just what she needs with much dolls house crafting ahead, and it made cutting the slits in the strips very painful.   But by the end of the morning all 13 drawers were equipped with dividers and the terrible job of unpacking and sorting the multitude of shoe boxes could start.  Bear in mind that I have not seen the contents of some of the boxes for more than 12 years........

When we left yesterday afternoon for a well-earned rest, the room looked like this.   Some good friends were coming in the evening to pay us a welcome visit and we coaxed them to Small Worlds first so that we could have their help in moving on to the next stage -getting the shelves up along the wall at one end of the room.  

Like everything we are doing in there at the moment, something else had to be shifted first - in this case many dolls houses.

The trusty Ikea shelves, undaunted by their move from being bookshelves in the UK, are much easier to put up with three or four people and apart from some gentle hammering where too much paint had been applied, they went up quite smoothly.

It wasn't until today, when butterfly was shifting houses onto them, that we discovered nearly all the houses needed the shelves to be just a little further apart.   

But in fact it doesn't matter since this is all work in progress and there is much more shifting around to come in the next days and weeks.    We have now come home for another well-earned rest (four minutes walk from Small Worlds to my house) and the room now looks like this -

Butterfly reckons we have made good progress......actually I think she is right but the next few days are fairly daunting as we continue to unpack and sort.   Once that is done we can get on with the fun stuff of renovating the houses!    

Tomorrow evening, the carpenter (who, along with his delightful daughter, featured in this post) is returning to put up the final set of shelves in the space we cleared today.    We could do it ourselves but would probably end up not on speaking terms so it seems worth the small amount of money it will cost!

I'd like to welcome those who have come to visit my blog from Words and Pictures - I hope you will continue to follow the ups and downs towards a dolls house museum in the Czech Republic and will enjoy the journey.   And welcome back to all my faithful followers - I am sorry that posts have been few and far between in the past weeks but I can promise that there will be many more posts  as things begin to fall into place here.........