Miniatures at Hever Castle

As promised, some photos of the miniature collection at Hever Castle, it features work of  John Hodgson, you can read more here, unfortunately I can't find anything about it on the Hever Castle website, but I guess it is still there, can any of our British friends confirm this please. Idske, do you know? I am definitely visiting you if ever I go to England again, lucky you, to stay only 20 miles from Hever Castle!

Some of the photos has a horrible glare from the flash, it was pretty dark in there and everything is behind glass, enjoy!

The Georgian house.

The Victorian house.

And it's garden.

And some room boxes.

Have a great mini weekend all.
Elga

Hever Castle

Well, Josje just mentioned Hever Castle over on her blog A Beautiful World, seems a few of us were there at some stage or the other and I thought I would share my photos of it. We were there early in March 2006, looking at the photos sure brings back many happy memories, I really enjoyed my visit to Hever and would love to go again.

The castle with the draw bridge on the right, I just loved the topiary trees.

Me in front of the draw bridge and my purchases from the gift shop, this was our last day in England and I had to spend the remaining pounds ;-)

Once you are through the gate you find yourself in a courtyard with a Tudor facade. We weren't allowed to take any photos of the inside.

The kitchen, guest quarters, etc that was added by the American William Waldorf Astor in the early 1900's after he bought the castle in 1903.

Me in the lovely winter gardens, I loved the beauty of the bare branches against the green hedges and lawn, our lawn in South Africa dies in winter, not a pretty sight at all.

After you walk for seemingly miles through the gardens, you get to a man made lake, just beautiful, it was really cold that day, if you look carefully you can see the top layer of water is frozen in places.

There is also a wonderful miniatures collection at Hever, more about that in a next post.

Have a great day
Elga

Finished Sewing Tables!

Two of my clients has finished the petit point for their sewing tables, it was so exciting to see what they have stitched for their tables.

First to finish hers was Peggy Bugg, Peggy actually stitched it with instructions as to size from me, and brought it to Castine last year where I helped her late one night to put it into her frame.

Peggy chose a design from Annelle Ferguson's book Traditional Needlework in Miniature, (goodness me, the prices that some sellers ask!!!) Peggy stitched her design on 48 count silk gauze with DMC. We both were so tired at Castine that we forgot to take any photos, Peggy recently send me this photo.

Lisa Salati just finished her table yesterday and send me a few photos.

Lisa decided to chart her own design based on the needlework of this fire screen in the Metropolitan museum in New York, I think she did a wonderful job in down scaling the design to make it work in 1/12 scale. Lisa stitched her design on 68 count silk gauze with Pipers silk.

Showing Lisa's screen out of the table, Lisa wanted the design to continue harmoniously in the bottom part of the screen that is hidden when the screen is in the table. She decided to add a pedestal beneath the vase after we talked about it a bit and found some other samples of 18th century embroidery that show vases of flowers on pedestals.

Thank you Peggy and Lisa for sharing your wonderful petit point, both your sewing tables looks really wonderful.

Elga

Crochet Inspiration!

I know we all keep things for one day, one such item that I have is a few wooden spools of antique silk that I bought many years ago, I bought all they had, there weren't many colors and I just never have found anything to do with it, until yesterday. Brae posted two days ago about a crochet afghan that she had commissioned on her blog, you can see it here. I did an internet search on granny squares as this is the general name for them, I fell in love with a square that I saw, but couldn't find any pattern for it, so I had to figure it out for myself, not something I have ever done before.

It took a few tries to get it right and I am pretty pleased with the first square.

Here you can see it on the curtain fabric I want to use in the room, together with the inspiration photo.

The colors of the antique silk is just perfect with this fabric, hopefully this will also inspire me to finish the brass bed for which the bedspread is intended. My square is 1 inch big, fortunately the bed is quite big too, I think I will need at least 6 by 7 squares. The colors in the middle photo is more true to the real colors.

Thank you Brae for the inspiration, I am so happy to have found the perfect project for my antique silks. By the way, I made my practice square with cotton thread and I must say the silk is wonderful to work with, a lot easier than the cotton.

Have a great weekend everyone.
Elga

A Special Gift!

A new follower and friend from the UK, send me a very special gift, one of David Edwards ivory ladies combs. Words can't quite describe how exquisite and fine this is, I marvel at the perfection of the cuts between each of the teeth of the comb, my photos certainly doesn't do it justice.

The comb on top of my sewing table.

A close-up, the comb is only 19mm (3/4") long.

Thank you for this really special gift, Anna!
Elga

Lester Margon Furniture books

Well, it seems quite a few people are talking about books these days, so I thought I would share mine with you over a few posts, a good time for me to do this as you will see very few posts on wood work this year. I will be working a lot, but won't be able to show you anything for the next year or so, as for now this work needs to stay confidential for a certain reason that some of you might be able to guess, if you think you know, no mention in the comments please :-)

Okay, on to the books, one of my favorite authors is Lester Margon, he traveled a lot in the first half of the 20th century visiting many museums, private collections, etc, took lots of black and white photos and made many measured drawings of magnificent antique furniture.

The first book, all of these books have black and white photos, there are lots of measured drawings but not of every piece of furniture in the book

Two of the pages out of this book.

The second book.

And two of the pages out of this book.

The third book.

And two pages out of this book, these 3 are quite rare and often go for very high prices on Amazon, I simply kept on checking until I found affordable copies, many sellers also don't want to ship out of the USA, but in the end I managed to get them all at reasonable prices and they are worth every cent I paid. A word of warning though, only experienced wood workers will be able to use the drawings for making furniture, only the basic measurements are given, no details of construction, etc.

The fourth book however does give descriptions on how to make the furniture, but once again I think only if you are experienced in making furniture. Some of the furniture in this book are also featured in the other 3 books.

One the patterns out of this book that I actually made two years ago.

My 1:12th scale version that I made in 2011 and donated to IGMA's Guild School auction, I still want to make one for myself some time.

The screen can slide up and down, for those of you who missed the original posts on this piece, you can see them here.

Have a great week everyone
Elga

Something quick and easy for a change

Yesterday we had the first workshop for this year at our Johannesburg club. We made a letter holder in cherry wood. It was fun to finish something for a change in a few hours ;-)

Here is my letter holder.

And here are all the pieces, from top to bottom: the base, front, back, center divider and the sides to the left and right. We could choose the shaping of the back, divider and sides for ourselves, I didn't feel like making curves and decided to use angles. On the back and divider I just cut off the corners at a 45 degree angle. For the sides I first cut off what I didn't want at an angle (on the left in the photo) and then finished the shaping with my craft knife (on the right in the photo). After the glue was dry I shaped the sides with a file to continue the angle of the back and divider as you can see in the first photo.

Showing the letter holder on the desk in the study.

Have a great week everyone
Elga

Miniature chairs

Just a short post today, I wanted to share this link to a blog featuring the work of second year students in interior design from the Philippines, they made miniature chairs from all time periods, no scale is mentioned anywhere, enjoy.

I posted a photo of my Boston Queen Anne chair, just to make sure you don't miss this post.

Have a wonderful weekend.
Elga

Dome Topped Casket

I finished the first dome topped casket last week and it is already safely in New York with its new owner. South Africa's shipping costs are quite high and lately DHL, a worldwide courier has dropped their prices here that makes it an affordable option. I love the fact that I can track the parcel through each airport on their website, I posted this one on Wednesday morning, it departed Johannesburg on Wednesday evening, arrived in London the next morning, went to Germany on Thursday evening (I think the planes to the USA from London was full), arrived in New York at 7:15 am on Friday morning and was delivered just before noon. Pretty good I think, I wonder if the casket enjoyed its world trip ;-)

Here you can see the casket all closed up, it is 30mm (1 3/16") wide by 36mm (1 7/16") high.

With the top lid open, they loved to put a picture front to back in this tiny compartment, it would then reflect the right way in the mirrors. The caskets were generally stitched by girls between the ages of 12 to 15 and it definitely had a play factor to it too.

With the second lid open too, getting it to stay like this is a fine balancing act :-)

View from the front.

The top compartment reflecting in the mirror of the domed lid.

With the sliding panel, ink tray and pincushion out.

And with all the little drawers out.

It is going to take a few months to do the stitching, having the final dimensions of the casket, I sat over the weekend and worked out the total amount of stitches needed to cover the casket, around a whopping 46000 stitches, WOW! I worked out that it takes me about an hour to stitch a 160 stitches, so that means a total of about 290 hours of stitching time. I can only stitch about two hours a day on this fine count, I don't want to over strain my eyes, so I have had to accept that getting to a finished casket is going to take longer than I thought, so what else is new, I really should know that by this time, as every project so far has taken longer than I thought it would. Now if only I could add another 8 hours to my day, maybe things would work out in real as in my mind:-)

I have started the back panel of the casket right next to the side panel, I will just fold it at the corners of the casket. I think that one long strip will be easier to handle than three tiny pieces of stitching, the empty space between the panels will be covered by I think a flat silk ribbon as they used flat tapes way back in the 17th century. My casket is based on this one in the MET museum and tells the Bible story of Joseph, the panel on the left shows Joseph with his aged and dying father Jacob, Joseph promised Jacob to take him out of Egypt and bury him with his forefathers and I think this is what is happening in this scene. The back panel shows Joseph running away from Potiphar's wife and Joseph then in prison with Pharoah's chief baker and wine taster. You can find the story of Joseph in the last few chapters of Genesis, I went and read it again to figure out which part of the story each panel depicts.

Have a wonderful week everyone
Elga