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.........

Hickory Dickory - or Time Travel - A Mouse's Eyeview

Well now - I had had not the slightest intention of posting again before mid-February, but butterfly is once again responsible for triggering a post from me.

She hurtled downstairs yesterday waving a tag and saying "Phew, just made it, remembered I promised to enter the House of Bears challenge this month and I had made nothing!"   She then posted her entry to the Time Travel Challenge and left me thinking "But I wanted to enter last month's and had nothing to do it with.  How about this one?"

So I spent most of the day thinking on and off about The Time Traveller's Wife, the book the challenge is based on, and the fact that I haven't read it, so that wasn't really much use.   But surely there must be something I could do?   (Remember most of the dolls house stuff is now safely in the Czech Republic and I am still in England, surrounded by the chaos of packing boxes).

Still nothing came to mind.   Then, for something else I was writing, I serendiptiously found myself refreshing my memories of the fabulous Caroline Hamilton, founder of the Kensington Dollshouse Festival and read this about her on the Discussion Forum of the Dolls House Emporium:  "One of the dolls house magazines had a couple of articles on her and she had a 40s house I would love to see more of and a clever mouse house - the frontage was a piece of skirting board and wall with a hole in it and the rooms behind."

For the rest of the day the words "mouse" and "time" were rolling around in my head.   I'm ashamed to say that it took several hours for the connection between them to be made....

However finally it clicked and I rushed upstairs yelling to butterfly that I needed a mouse.   It didn't need to be a live one, and where oh where were the little furry stuffed ones I was given as a child?   Long, long gone I fear.   However we both thought there must be some mice somewhere in the house and yes indeed there were.   And not just any old mice but a beautifully dressed husband and wife, both sitting meekly in a forest scene which hasn't yet been packed up to go to the Czech Republic.   More serendipity......

And there is a very fine clock downstairs.   Slight panic when the glass front wouldn't open, and more panic when butterfly managed to open it and then it wouldn't close again.   But in the end it all worked out.

Mr Mouse has clearly always longed to travel and how better for a mouse to do it than to follow the words of the old nursery rhyme and run up the clock?   And what can his wife do but what females have always done?   Sit and wait........

Hickory dickory dock

The mouse ran up the clock

The clock struck one

The mouse ran down

Hickory dickory dock

"Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?"
From The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger

I'm offering up this cheekily simple take on time travel in the House of Bears Challenge which ends on January 31st - go on blog-followers, have a go - you've still got time.   

Oops, need to go and consult butterfly now on how to enter a challenge - this is my very first one!

To 's or not to 's......

A short (and almost picture-free) post today, brought on mainly by a feeling of guilt that if I don't write one now, there will be no post in January at all.   The weeks are whizzing past and we continue to clear our house ready for sale - a sale which had been due to complete at the end of February and which sadly fell through last night.

So everything is up in the air again but one thing is certain and that is that we (butterfly and I) have a duty to head to the Czech Republic the first week in March or there is little hope of the museum being ready to open around the beginning of June.   Followers of my journey to a museum of my own will remember that there is much work to be done on many dolls houses......   Not to mention all the shelves that have to be put up in the museum and all the sorting of tiny objects that has to happen so that they can be found easily when needed during the restoration process.

A chance remark by butterfly, who was blogging about my birthday present earlier this evening, reminded me of the vexed question of what these things that I collect are called.   Or rather how does one correctly write down what they are called?

In the Georgian period (1714-1830) in England these miniature buildings were not known as dolls houses at all - the common name for them then was "baby houses".   (I have never been quite sure whether that referred to the small people who played with them, or the fact that they were not full-grown houses.)   

There was a snide comment by the politician Horace Walpole in 1750 that Frederick, the then Prince of Wales, was busy "building baby houses at Kew" (rather than attending to his courtly duties I imagine).   The Prince had apparently been infected with the baby house bug by a visit to the Dowager Duchess of Brunswick who was trying to reproduce the court in miniature.

Actually I am a bit dubious about this piece of information - if it is true then there were two members of the nobility in Germany producing their courts in miniature.   I can find no other information on the Dowager Duchess of Brunswick doing any such thing but I do know that about fifty years earlier the Princess Augusta Dorothea of Schwarzburg-Arnstadt, having been widowed early, decided to devote her energies - and those of her servants and courtiers - to producing a miniature town.   You can take a tour of it here. The website is in German so click on "Rundgang" and find your way round her amazing creation.   Apparently by the time she finished the project she had run out of money and was deep in debt - and had presumably tried her courtiers' patience to the utmost.

Royal links to dolls houses are not infrequent.   Princess Victoria's dolls house can still be seen at Kensington Palace; the little Princess Anne, (1665-1714) sister of the Mary who reigned jointly with her husband William of Orange just before her, had a beautiful house.   It's particularly charming because it illustrates clearly that houses were intended as teaching tools for little girls.   The Princess kept careful lists of all the linen in the house, she named and labelled all the servants, she counted all the table silver and crockery and all these lists still exist.   

 And of course there is the fabulous house of Queen Mary which can be seen in all its glory at Windsor Castle.   That house deserves a whole blog post to itself but in fact it is not my favourite of her houses.   That one lives in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood.

It's a villa made of inlaid wood and reminds me in many ways of the full-size house we are currently trying to sell.... 

It's very easy to infect people with the dolls house bug and maybe that is what happened to me.   When I was a little girl I was taken for walks in Kew Gardens every day.   Queen Mary loved to stroll in the Bluebell Wood there and as the story runs in my family, she stopped to talk to me one day when I was about four.....I blame her entirely for this journey I am now on!

I seem to have digressed a very long way from what I had intended to write about - the title of the post gives you a clue.   Are these small buildings dolls' houses, doll's houses, dolls houses or dollshouses?   Our American friends have solved it - almost - by calling them doll houses.   Or dollhouses.......

A precisian (yes it does exist, butterfly has just convinced me) would probably make an argument for dolls' house with the apostrophe firmly indicating many dolls, their house.  But why should it not be one doll and her house thus placing the apostrophe before the "s"?   Who knows?   

All I know is that it is no use going to the magazines and books on the subject.  If you have enough patience to trawl through these images you will eventually find them all represented......

Followers of this blog - and it's lovely to know so many people are reading it - will have noticed that I have opted for dolls houses.  Probably grammatically incorrect but I am sticking to it.   At least it is easier than the Czech - domečky pro panenky - which does not exactly trip off the tongue.   We are still struggling to find a name for the museum which works in both languages and also indicates that it will be a work in progress, so that visitors will not expect a perfect end-product when they visit.   They will be able to see how we set about restoring a house and furniture, and maybe even join in sometimes.

At the moment a Czech version of the blog is in preparation.   I am interested to see how my valiant translator friend Heli will cope with the challenge of the paragraph on the apostrophe - it's unknown in Czech.....

This "short" post seems to have grown entirely by itself - I hope some of you are still with me and I look forward to seeing you again fairly soon, though there may well only be one post in February, just like January!   Thank you for following.....

    

Christmas is coming - oops, it's here!

Apologies for the long delay since my last post.   My excuse is that my feet seem to have barely touched the ground since I arrived back in England at the very end of November.   And now Christmas Eve is almost on us and one of the things on my long "To Do" list is to get a post up before the end of this coming weekend.   I might just manage it since at the moment there isn't a whole lot to report and all my dolls houses are in another country so can't have their photos taken.

As some of you will know, especially if you also follow butterfly's blog, we are moving out of our home of forty years and will be celebrating our last Christmas here.   So we went to great lengths to find the perfectly shaped christmas tree (butterfly is a perfectionist!) and from Christmas Day onwards we will sit with it by candlelight, trying to also have enough candles lit in the room to allow us to read, do quizzes, jigsaw puzzles and play games.  Sadly, trees do not photograph well but this will at least give you an idea of what we will be looking at over the Twelve Days of Christmas.  We turn into Christmas hermits....

In the other room, our giant ficus plants have had to wander upstairs to make space for the Giant Book Sales and so the Gisela Graham figures we collect each year at the post-Christmas Sale at the local garden centre are now hanging from bare branches, and one can actually see them much better.   

Cue digression:  We have four giant ficuses, lovingly grown over 25 years or so from Ikea plants of the week into the trees that they are now.   We are looking for permanent or temporary homes for them - possibly a church hall, big conservatory or some other large space.  I am happy to transport them a considerable distance to bring them to anyone who might be able to offer them lodging.   It is heart-breaking to have to abandon them when we leave for the Czech Republic at the end of February....

But now to happier things.   This blog post is really a Christmas stocking filled with assorted goodies that I hope you will enjoy - a Christmas interlude in an otherwise over-hectic time for me since it not only includes moving out of our house and setting up the museum but also that most hated of activities - buying a new car.   I cannot think of anything I hate more except perhaps going to the hairdresser.....

So the first thing you can pull out of the stocking is a refinement on the wonderful collection of Christmas creches I showed you at the end of my last post.   I did write about this amazing automated creche in the comments section of that post but just in case you missed it - here it is again.   Such giant creches, known as Betlems, are very common in the Czech Republic and Slovakia but I have never seen one quite as amazing as this.

Whilst I was still en route to England I had the opportunity of not only visiting that wonderful collection of creches but also the privilege of seeing a private collection of dolls and dolls houses near where I was staying outside Bonn.   I have permission to put some photos up and tell you a little about the collection though, since it is not open to the public, I can't of course give any details.  

The collection has been amassed over many years by a now elderly lady who began it when she dug out the body parts of tiny porcelain dolls from the rubbish dump used by a toy factory.  

This led to her reconstructing many hundreds of tiny dolls and then creating settings for them to live in.   Alongside this she was also collecting larger dolls and she now has a fantastic collection, all beautifully displayed upstairs in her not-very-large house.

There was so much to take at once that I simply did not know where to look.   Crammed onto the wide landing and into the small front room upstairs was a feast of wonderful things.   As with the creches, I am simply going to post photos without any commentary - they speak for themselves.   Remember that you can click on the photos to enlarge them to see more detail.....

She told me that one of her greatest pleasures, now that she is retired, is to take her early morning cup of coffee upstairs and simply to sit in her front room, surrounded by all the wonderful things she has collected and made.   I have already arranged to go back for another visit, this time with butterfly, so that we can get inspiration for the Bavorov museum.

This would seem a good point to post the delightful poem that my friend Andrea, of eclectic meandering, found in The Guardian and painstakingly copied into the Christmas card she sent me: 

Doll's House by Jacob Polley

A table set with tiny plates,
the chairs around a paper fire:
diminishment has simplified
the aims and objects of desire,
while blinder faith must still provide
the mincemeat in the wooden cakes,

the creaking stair and wind outside.
For you have held your breath to peer
along the shelves of depthless books
lining a room where nothing's read;
and now, effortlessly giant, look
up to the eaves and in at the beds.

Be brave. To live is not to fear
despite the scale of what's at stake.
Two children lie in matchbox cribs.
Next door a couple, stiff as pegs,
are tucked together, rib to rib,
the bedsheets bound around their legs.

What happens if you turn away?
Every god has asked the same,
crouched at a sideboard, just in case
sudden little laughter shakes
a heaven like an empty house
where not a plate nor day will break.

That feeling mentioned in the last verse - that something goes on whilst one's back is turned - is so very familiar to me!

Time now to pull a musical break out of the stocking - the fabulous group Chanticleer singing Everywhere I go.   Watch out for the rapid changes of costume.....

At the very bottom of this Christmas stocking you can find yet another wonderful display, this time from America. It is almost enough to put me off trying to produce anything half as good in my museum!  If you have wrapped all your presents and made all your mince pies then just sit back and enjoy it......

Finally, as Christmas rapidly approaches - in one hour's time it will be Christmas Eve here in England which means that my Czech and German friends, who are an hour ahead, are already celebrating Christmas - I should like to thank you for joining me on my museum journey and wish you all a joyous Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.   

See you again in 2013.......