Better Late Than Never....

On my way to Pat Arnell's for Wednesday Witches, this afternoon, I stopped at her Mini Time Machine Miniature Museum to pay my membership dues.

Walter and I have been members since the beginning.  In fact, my card number is the first number behind the immediate family.  Pretty cool.

Anyway, I can't show you everything that I bought at the gift shop in the lobby.  Some of it was for Christmas gifts.

This is what I can show you...Of course Tessie wouldn't wait until Christmas to open them, so I may as well show you some of the things now.

All of the tiny animals that you see by Tessie's feet were in little bins on the front desk.  She now has a menagerie.

Then I bought postcards.  This first one doesn't do the piece justice.  This is a floor to ceiling tree sculpture in the Enchanted Relm.  This room contains all of the fantasy castles, house and other structures. 

See the little hole at the bottom of the tree?  That's a 1" scale room.  The tree has a lot of rooms that house a family of mice.

Imagine the tree a lot larger...Remember?  Floor to ceiling.  And the ceilings are quite high.

I wish that you could see the other side.  That's where most of the rooms are.

This house is the Daneway House from England. It was the oldest house I restored for Pat when I was working at the old museum on her property. It is about Barbie Scale(1/6").

At the time, I thought that was a  huge collection of minis....This new building is 15,000 square feet! Quite a lot bigger.  If you get a chance to see it, it is worth the trip!

Back to the house.  It was dated 1775.  When we got it, it had 6 to 8 coats of paint on it that had to be stripped one layer at a time...I had to work carefully to make sure that nothing was ruined in the process.

We  found that it was originally a cabinet house and stained, rather than painted. The original only had paint on the roof and faux marble on the fireplaces.

The kitchen was painted a bilious yellow with poster paint.  In researching, we found that nanny often kept kids busy by handing them a can of paint and a brush and letting them repaint the dollhouses!  I would like to have a serious talk with some of them!  Yellow poster paint, combined with the other coats under it is tough to get off!

The table that it sits on came with the house as did all of the furnishings.  In the lower left room, there is a complete set of W. Shakespeare's work in miniature books that can actually be read.

This last one is a Nuremberg Kitchen from the turn of the last century.  When this one came in, the right corner sat about 4" off of the table....Can we say warped?  Very!

I had to straighten that and then a lot of the original paper had to be redrawn because of water damage.

Again, the pieces that you see in it were with the kitchen.  The stove on the right actually had candle wax inside the oven.  They let the children heat stuff on the burners! Pretty amazing what kids used to get to play with!  Maybe a precursor to the Easy Bake Oven?

Well....Another day with no mini-building. And on top of that, Tessie is running out of Footprint Fudge!  Double work tomorrow.

See you then.