Last weekend I did my first overnighter dolls house show. The Sarasota Festival of Dollhouse Miniatures (19th and 20th January 2013)
Molly Cromwell's shows are certainly events. They are actually usually spread over four days, as was this one. There are some terrific classes on Friday and Monday and the show itself is over the weekend. I am ruminating on signing up for a class next year; I have really been bitten by this mini bug.
The show is held in The Ramada Waterfront Hotel so it is more than convenient to stay there and flit from room to show. Even better if you have non-mini folk with you - often known as 'husbands' - as they can do their own pootling around (bar and swimming pool) and you don't need to make complicated pick up/drop off arrangements with each other. The hotel offers bed and breakfast and at a discounted rate if you are going to the show and it is a true discount. My other half is the very best at scouting discounts - he did his Expedia and Kayak et al mooching around and the Molly discount still came in at the lowest rate. It is probably the best rate in Sarasota and right where you want to be.
This is a small show - under 50 stalls - but there are hours of interest to be had. I have written a piece for DH&MS magazine (prob May issue) so I don't want to say the same things twice by writing it all again here. I chose six of the best vendors to highlight which was no mean task. There were at least a dozen absolutely outstanding artisans there. The whole show is about stuff you can't just buy in a shop. Ninety per cent or more is actually made by the people there, so each piece really is (pretty much) a one off; miss one and you have missed it.
If you opt for the General Admission on Sunday ($7) there will still be tons of wonderful things to buy, but if you are travelling a long way and staying overnight you should buy the great value weekend preview ticket ($18). This is what I did this year as we had planned to stay over and build in other things that we wanted to do on the way up and down between Naples and Sarasota. So rather than do a rushed mini shopping trip this is a way to have a really nice inexpensive weekend break with a dolls house show thrown in for good measure.
The preview ticket buys you what it says - Saturday preview/early sales, a pizza and sodas get together after the sale with a chance to meet each other and the vendors , prize draws and, of course you get to come back again Sunday for the 10am - 4 pm General Admission show. Actually with the preview badge/ticket you get to go in at 9.30am!! What a bargain.
Instead of showing you the vendors I chose for the magazine article I'll just share what I bought with you. You can see all the show pictures in the Sarasota web album.
My first stop at a stall was the True2Scale couple.
It is hard to see from my photo of their stand in the web album all the lovely things they do as mostly they are packages like these. Please go to their site and have a look around. Here's what I bought from them.
I have been wanting the pitcher and forsythia that they sell for ages and I still want to fit in their lovely Eiffel tower display stand in Chocolat - it might happen; but I managed to resist it for now. However I didn't manage to resist the lovely dishes and decals, even though I have no idea where I can use them! The cake boxes will certainly have a home. I intend to just manage with these few on top of the counter along with a stack of unassembled ones in the shop ready to be made up and filled with the best French (chocolate) patisserie for each customer. I chose their pretty white ones in hopes that my pretend flattened boxes look like a match.
I then trotted off to the stall I should have gone to first - Ron's (Dollshouse Shop, Orlando) to trade four of my five Little Women for something else. I had decided before the show I wanted a better pretty pleater. I have just followed a curtain workshop with Hazel Dowd and had mentioned to her how I couldn't get on with these contraptions and I asked if it was worth binning it and buying a silicone (?), rubber (?) one I had seen and she agreed whole-heartedly. She said she had had hers for a zillion years (she did actually state a number but I have forgotten) and they are great. It looks better to me than wood, as it is flexible and less likely to cling on to the fabric fibres. Ron had kindly brought one along for me. I added in these three cute cake stands and a five dollar bill and we were done and dusted.
I snagged a sweet little cash register for Bentleys. I didn't really want want one in the shop as most of Ellen's business is done by ordering goods and then settling accounts as they go along, but she is branching out into selling bits and pieces like collars, hat and dress trims, perfume and gloves directly from the shop to the casual shopper and so she probably needs a cash register. This was labelled as $15 but the trader let me have it for the same price as his two clunky, ugly ones which were $12. It just needs a bit of judicious photocopying of old money signs to go in the display area. The cash drawer opens too. I suppose I need to find out if Ellen's 1911 shop would have had one like this...... time to Google National Cash registers!
I had the usual 'I am weak for fabric' itch that got scratched a teeny bit on Saturday and Sunday. Gulliver's Emporium has the nicest of stuff and for silly prices. Sadly, a note on her stand said her business is closing and she was open to offers for her stock. I wish, I wish. It is the oddest thing, when given a basket full of lace trims the first piece I pick up - right out of the middle, under layers of other stuff is (probably) the most expensive. Sooooo lovely - old, French, silk lace, ecru-coloured trim. I was a good girl and put it back. Talk about champagne taste and beer pocket, it seems I also have an inbuilt champagne magnet. Everything I bought was only a couple of dollars each - and less!! I have to be firm with myself as I just seem to collect fabric and trims and do nothing with them. I just covet them. Her colours are lovely and her patterns perfectly scaled. The fabrics are fine silk and cotton. I have a lovely cotton lawn here. She also had the last of some very fine silk velvet. I averted my eyes.
I snagged a pair of shoes for $5. I don't recall the name of the seller. Poor, poor photo - bad lighting and magnification too large. They look very dainty in the flesh. I actually stopped to look at the wonderful plants and flowers on the stall - made by the vendor's mother-in-law, she told me. I wish I had picked up a card or noted her name so I could find her again.
[footnote 1 March: They are from Clara's Cuties]
These are destined for Bentleys Salon. I bought them for Vianne in Chocolat but then remembered that her daughter complained that she wasn't like everyone else's mother because she only ever wore red or coral shoes. Chocolat's loss is Bentleys gain.
I bought this trio from a very kind gentleman, on Marie's Minis, who agreed to model them for me on his hands to show their scale (the photo ended up out of focus!). They sell very nice floral items and fruit and veg and many related items. There is an on-line link to contact them but not a shop on line. Again things bought for one place will probably end up in another. The bowl of nuts was for Chocolat; I then remembered it is set in Lent so seasonally they are more suitable for the October setting of Bentleys. The hyacinth is for Chocolat to help pin down the timing. The jug and bowl may just join my Little Women stock of Victoriana for an (as yet) undreampt of project.
From Feather Your Nest I got this little set for $34 which I thought was a good price as I had been looking at the stools in various places at around eight dollars plus. It was absolutely bought for Chocolat as there is something like it in the movie BUT my Chocolaterie project may be in the throes of veering away from the original so this could end up in Starfish Cottage or maybe just kit-bashed for Chocolat. I put a cup and saucer on it to give you a sense of scale.
And now for something completely different ...........
Shows for a lot of people are a great excuse for meeting old friends and making new ones with a shared interest. For me, they are purely a shopping-for-goods-and-ideas expedition. Those who know me know I will run a mile from any socialising - not out of snottiness I am just very nervy about meeting new people. Shy seems such a feeble word - I would prefer to have a full blown phobia. Any way I avoided reminding anyone I had met them before, didn't go to the pizza party and then, blow me down, ran straight into a lady who my neighbour had tried to 'set me up with'. My dear friend next door here in Naples knew someone who knew someone who was into miniatures and she emailed my details through the grapevine to connect us. Susan Werner and I went politely through the motions and let the 'hello' fade away. At the show Susan spotted the accent and the name and introduced herself. She was exceedingly nice as are most strangers when you get to know them! Her work is very special. I loved so many of her things. She seems to be very capable in all kinds of media. Needless to say I mostly craved her chocolates. Her Etsy shop seems to be under construction but maybe her Blog - Tabitha Corsica will let you find a way to contact her if you are interested in her work. Click on this picture to enlarge so you can see the excellent detail.
Seeing these chocolates did confirm what I begin to think is going to be a problem for me. If properly in scale a chocolate is going to be something like 1/12th of an inch which is bordering on invisible. Chocolat will take thousands of them to make any impact on the window and shop displays and will simply be a zillion tiny flecks when they are en masse. I am veering towards making the shop a chocolaterie and a (chocolate cake) patisserie with a few seats for customers to eat a cake or drink a cup of hot chocolate. This way the number of chocolates required gets reduced. I really have to master the art of polymer clay next summer, like everything else in this business I have never done any.
So that's pretty much the tour round the show, spending all my pocket money with me.
I seem to be in all sorts of organisational dilemmas right now which is very bad news for a pedantic control freak. In this game I am often doing 'stuff' which affects more than one project - taking a trip to California, buying things at a show, writing for a magazine. I am already having computer filing traumas trying to put material away tidily. There is an effect on my Blogs too. For example, this show visit is written up here because, chronologically, I am working on Bentleys but some of the things I want to share cross over into other projects or just dollhousing generally. I already have to divide my recording of the actual day between my Clavering Blog (my diary) and the mini Blogs and I am endlessly finding myself having to leave stuff out of Clavering because it is being written about somewhere else and vice versa.
When I was typing this post for example, I also had Clavering, Chocolat and Starfish Blogs open and have copied and pasted bits and pieces across to them. I now understand why many mini bloggers just have the one blog and simply record what they are doing chronologically whether it is minis or not. I decided against that because most folk following the diary would rather stick pins in their eyes than read about minis and mini followers couldn't care less what I was doing last month. So, for those of you who are looking at all my mini blogs I am sorry there is so much (or too little!!) crossover. It is the best I can do. I am open to suggestions.
I left you at the end of October bemoaning the fact I would have nothing to share for the next five months. Not so it seems....
On the sixth we took off for a trip down the West Coast from San Francisco to San Diego. This was a treat for my birthday organised by my other half. If you are interested in the tour itself that will appear in Clavering. There will also be a couple of small posts in Chocolat and Starfish Cottage as I bought a couple of things for them but the main chatter about the shops and museum we visited is here in Bentleys.
Friday 9th November
We arrived in Sacramento and visited a doll's house shop called The Elegant Dollhouse. This was run by what I am finding is the usual lady of a certain age who has been there for years and is sharing her own passion for the hobby as much as running a business. I spent a reasonable amount of time in there and was reminded how much difference there can be between American and English dolls houses and their 'fillings'. In her thousands of items I couldn't find anything on my list of Bentleys' needs. I only managed to spend twelve bucks and some change and nothing for Bentleys.
I bought another paper project - roses - so I have something to do here, assuming we ever manage to settle back in this year.
The other couple of things were for the other two projects.
Saturday 10th November
We set off again on our lovely coastal drive towards Carmel stopping off in a great little town called Pacific Grove (Monterey Bay). It was filled with lovely little artisan type shops.... Our destination... Number 213 Forest Avenue was what seemed like the only closed store on the street!! We are pretty resigned to looking up dolls shops on the web then driving there only to discover they don't exist any more, so it wasn't a huge surprise. We really must try ringing them before setting off. We keep saying that.
We got to the main event of the day - Smallsea Museum but dangled the satisfaction a little longer by having lunch first in the adjacent restaurant (serendipity). Smallsea is located in a great mall called The Barnyard in Carmel. It is full of interesting small shops (and restaurants!) in a pretty layout of different Barn style buildings with not a generic store in sight. The museum was just such a joy and was the highlight of this trip. the chocolate shop was pretty good too.
The collection is described as A Metropolis in Miniature and is the creation of Diane and Howard Birnberg. They build the structures and collect fine miniatures from all over the world.
Diane Birnberg was utterly charming and spent a lot of time talking to us about her passion. For those of you who already know this gem of a museum, they are currently working on a couple of huge new projects. They will also be moving the entire Metropolis to larger premises next year.
On of the projects is to put (I think she said) three of their smaller shops into a large store setting. The other big project which has been in the pipeline for some years is a two-wing museum (for English readers this means Art Gallery). Diane said she has been collecting hand painted miniatures (and a piece of sculpture) for five years ready to begin. I hope I will be able to return to Carmel some time, maybe when this is finished, to see this all again.
I have more than a hundred photographs from Smallsea and that's after editing out as much as I could bear to part with. This has led me to realise I really do have to do something about getting Cloud storage for my computer. I hope to sort that in the next week or so and I'll let you know where you will be able to find these pictures and all the rest of my mini stuff albums. It has proved nigh on impossible to choose examples to post here. Just to give you an idea of the scale of this museum they have over a thousand figures in their various settings. The figures are all just wonderful in themselves but the quality of the buildings and settings and the care which has gone into the selection of the thousands of items which make up Smallsea is just mind-blowing. This is more than a full-time job, it is a life.
Monday 12th November
We had a bit of a panic moment this morning when we realised Monday was part of the Veterans Day weekend which is a holiday for a lot of people. We wondered if the two shops Ken had planned for today would be open. (Always assuming they were still there) Luckily the gods were smiling on me on my birthday. Our first port of call on a blue sun-shiny day was Lariann'es Small Wonders in Ventura.
This was such an incredible dolls house shop. There were so many beautiful things to look at it was exactly the equivalent of going to a major doll's house and miniatures show. I spent over two hours in there and could, in all seriousness, have spent the whole day. Much of their stuff is beyond my budget but it was a joy to look at it all and dream and get ideas and find the occasional item to buy. My daughter had sent me dollars for minis for my birthday so it was even better! I ended up with several bits and pieces for sixty bucks. The joy of having gift money is that it allows me to buy something like Dale R Kendall's lovely laser cut doilies which the rest of the time I just tell myself is frivolous. I have wanted them since I started this game and now I own some. (a picture of these will be in Chocolat as they are for that project).
For Bentleys I bought a lovely Bespaq book holder which I will be using for a potted plant stand. It looks very clunky in this photo - no idea why - I promise you it is very fine in an Arts and Crafts way. The hot water bottle and probably the basket are also for Bentleys. The lock and hasp are for Starfish cottage.
The staff were incredibly helpful and nice. Even kinder, when I got back to Naples I discovered I had been charged the full price for my book holder. It was from a 50% off shelf and marked accordingly on the bottom which obviously the lady hadn't noticed. I emailed them and they immediately emailed me to say they would send a cheque for the difference. This is a shop worth travelling half way across the planet for. Certainly one to go to if you are anywhere within range at any time.
Back in the car and we were off to My Doll's House in Torrance. This was another really interesting shop. It was very much a family business staffed by mother and son when we were in there, both of whom had a real love of dolls houses.
The son kindly gave us a lot of his time and was really interesting to talk to. He showed us several absolutely wonderful houses made by various people and their equally lovely contents.
My particular passion was for a room box made (I think) by his grandfather. It was fashioned from a leaf of their dining table and was breathtaking in its simplicity and beauty. The wood was perfectly cut and polished. A really, really beautiful piece of work. I so hope that it will go on and on being loved and cared for.
I also hope this birthday doll housing becomes an annual event!
If this post has whet your appetite for more pictures don't forget to come back next week by which time I hope to have sorted out a place to store all my dolls house photos.
