A Little Bit of This and That

Later this month we will have our annual miniature fair in Johannesburg where our club will have a table and exhibit some of our monthly club projects, I am busy working on our present project and also finishing up one or two older projects in time for the fair.

Our present project is a shaving stand, this is the prototype that our chair lady Lisa Martens made from Imbuia.

Here are two of my fellow club members Di and Aubrey very hard at work on their shaving stands at last month's workshop.

My daughter hi-jacked my kit and I decided to make the shaving stand in Cherry as the color will fit in better the rest of my miniature bedroom, Lisa also send me a photo of the original stand that she used for inspiration and I changed mine a bit here and there, you can see it on the left of the photo. On the right is a blanket chest that just need some nice hinges, we made this last year at one of our workshops.

My shaving stand with the drawer and central dividers added, we will continue working on them at our next workshop on 10 August.

I am almost done with the second side panel of my casket, just need to add the back stitching, my new phone takes really good photos of my petit point, you can even see the French Knots that I used for the hair and cuffs. The new photos show the detail much better, so here are the other panels too.

The first side panel and....

 the back panel, next I will stitch the two doors, still need to do the charting for them though.

I went to the tool shop that I mentioned in my previous post and bought some supplies for silver soldering, big bummer though, when I tried the torch, the knob for opening the gas flow was stuck fast. I phoned them about it and they just delivered a replacement at my door while I am typing this, although they are not far from me, they have a driver and you can order from them at any time and they will deliver straight to your door, now in a country where even local post can take a few days, this is a real bonus :-)

And last but not least, I couldn't resist showing our cat Yoda's favorite drinking spot, the running tap in my bathroom, of course this involves looking at me with big eyes and saying, "please, please open the tap, I am a thirsty kitty". Oh well, he melts my heart every time ;-)

Have a great mini weekend, everyone!
Elga

I am still here.......

Just busy with both real life issues and working very hard on a few commissions that needs to be finished in eight weeks time.

I finally finished the back-sticthing on the back panel of the casket.

And here is the back panel before I did any of the back stitching just to show you how the detail pops after adding the back-stitching  One of the biggest challenges of working on 90 count silk gauze is the small amount of colors available to choose from, there isn't too many threads out there that are thin enough to use on the small counts. Although the back-stitching is a lot of extra work I think the results are worth the effort.

I am more than halfway with next side panel, I took the photo with an eraser just to give you a sense of how small the panels really are :-)

And this Shaker candle stand was our project for February and March at our monthly meetings of the South African Academy of Miniaturists in Johannesburg. The table is made from Jacaranda wood, the glasses was part of a Christmas swap a few years ago, the readable book is from Barbara Brear, her books are simply amazing, and lastly the ivory elephant candle holder is an antique loose bead that I bought a few years ago at a miniature show.

Have a fantastic week everyone
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

2012/2013

Wow, this year has gone so fast, maybe because I was so busy ;-)

I am ending the year on a high note, I just finished stitching the first panel for my casket.

It is stitched on 90 count silk gauze with Pipers silk, I used French knots for some of the hair to give it texture and some of the details I outlined with back-stitching. There is a total of 5148 stitches in this tiny piece that measures 21mm wide by 18.5mm high. And I stitched this in 14 days, about 2 hours a day.

I also finished the first casket, posted it on Friday and the new owner received it today, I always stress when my hard work disappears into the postal system, so it always a relief to hear that it has arrived safe and sound.

I wanted to sign the casket in a way that would also reflect the stitcher's name since they are going to spend lots of hours designing and stitching for their casket. My daughter helped me to design the label for the underside of the casket, it has place for them to fill in the year when they have completed the stitching.

I made the hinges from very thin pewter, I made them big for lots of gluing surface, since they will be hidden by the stitching and only need to be functional.

The hinge for the lid.

The finished casket, I am almost done with the dome top casket and will show that one to you in my next post.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement this year, I am looking forward to next year and some new challenges.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! May 2013 be a great year for each and everyone of my wonderful Blogger friends. 

Elga

Casket: Ten Drawers

I have been working on all the tiny drawers of the casket over the last week or so, the casket has a total of ten drawers.

All the pieces of these drawers are so very small, so I will first show you how I work with them. Instead of trying to glue tiny pieces of paper to the wood, I find it easier to cut one long strip of paper and glue all the wood pieces to the paper.

Here all the sides are already glued to the drawer bases and I am busy gluing the fronts on, before gluing the fronts on I gently cut away the paper where the glue needs to go.

The trickiest part is gluing on the teeny tiny strips to the front that frames the velvet paper. I start with a long strip and glue it to the short sides with the help of my Lego blocks to keep it straight until the glue starts taking.

Busy drying. After the glue has dried, I cut the extra wood off and do the same to the other short side and then fill in the two long sides.

For the outside paper I cut long strips and start covering the drawers by first gluing the bases down. And yes, I forgot to take photos of the rest of the process. Basically I cut the drawers off the paper strip, cut out the back corners, glue the back first and then the sides. Once everything is nice and dry, I color all the exposed wood edges with the silver marker. Lastly I glue in the velvet paper and add the little drawer knobs which are jewelry findings.

All the drawers in place, you can only see four of the ten drawers here.

With the top row unpacked there are five now, so where are the rest?

Well, now you can see seven drawers in the blue casket, we are getting there slowly.

The top row of secret drawers unpacked from the blue casket, they are a bit shorter than the middle row because the drawer knobs need to fit in behind the sliding panel.

The blue casket completely unpacked and yes, there are ten drawers ;-) And remember under the center top removable ink tray there is another little hidey hole.

Have a wonderful day
Elga

More Drawers.

The casket is coming along nicely, I finished the wide bottom drawer and I like that here at least you can see quite a big piece of the marbled paper.

Putting in the tiny strip of velvet paper however........ you can use your own imagination here ;-)

And then I made some more secret drawers as per the original.

Here they are busy being pushed into place.

Pushed in all the way, now I need to make the four short drawers that will go in front of the secret drawers and the two long ones for the last two open places. All six the drawers are the same width, so, I discovered that I have to cut a total of 240 drawer fronts and backs for all twenty of the caskets, wow!

So far each casket has a total of 65 wood pieces times 20 caskets equals 1300 tiny wood pieces in total and there are a lot more to come, what was I thinking?!?! :-)

Elga

A very tiny drawer!

When I first realized just how complex the construction of the real caskets was with all their secret drawers, I really wanted to recreate it in the miniature casket too. Because of the size of the caskets I at first wasn't sure that there would be enough space, especially considering the thickness of the wood, but when I stumbled over the idea of using plywood, I thought it could be just possible. And well, here it is, I made the tiniest of drawers for the pincushion and I just love it.

I photographed it with a regular sewing pin to give you an idea of the size of the drawer.

The secret drawer in its place, now what shall we hide in there?

Well, these two little things were for sure the most difficult items to build for the casket, just because there is almost nothing to hold on to, tweezers were definitely used a lot here. The rest of the drawers are going to be huge in comparison and easy to build after this tiny one.

I am really enjoying this project and it is a lot of fun to see it come together as I pictured it in my mind.

Enjoy the rest of the week.
Elga

Casket: The pincushion and sliding panel

The last few days I spend on working on the pincushion with it's secret drawer and the finishing of the front panel. A lot of time was spend on just thinking and trying out ways of making the pincushion so that it would be fairly easy to take out so that one can have access to the secret drawer. In the end I decided to use some of my lace pins cut short, the heads are probably a bit large, but I think pins in the 17th century probably had bigger heads than modern ones.

For the sliding panel front I cut very small strips of wood and glued them around the edges of the sliding panel to create a frame for the velvet paper. The real old caskets had some flat tape added to finish of the velvet, but first of all finding a flat tape less than a mm wide just isn't possible and the applying it is another story. Although my method might not be quite historically correct I like how it looks. The brass escutcheon is from Cat's Paw and was colored by the permanent silver pen to get the right look.

Here you can see the pincushion out of it's compartment and you can see the space for the secret drawer that I will build tomorrow, I just ran out of time to still do that today. I also plan on starting the big drawers this week.

Have a great week.
Elga

Casket: The removable ink tray

Today I built the tiny tray that fits into the center front of the top compartment of the casket. Ha, this was the most difficult part so far to build, no surprises there, and you dare not sneeze or breathe too hard, guess I don't have to explain that one. I won't say anything about sawing the little pieces, except believe it or not, I am actually using my table saw for it.

Here you can see the little tray outside of the casket, the two small compartments on either side are meant for ink containers, you can see it clearly in this photo of the original casket, click on fullscreen and roll your mouse over the image and you can see all the fine details of the casket. I think I have an idea for adding the little lids, I will probably glue them permanently in place.

And the tray in place in the casket, I also made an envelope to put in the letter slot.

Elga

Casket Progress

I just want to say thank you to everyone who so regularly leaves comments on my posts and for cheering me on. The Chippendale chairs has arrived safely at their destination I am pleased to say.

In the mean time I have been working on the caskets and here are a few photos. I have decided to build them finished in batches of two, of course the first two will take longer as I am cutting the parts for all twenty at the same time. So far each casket has a total of 21 pieces.

Here the sliding panel lying on the left is finished now on the inside and I have started to work on the inside of the top compartment. The back is already glued in and the sides, base paper and front is ready to be glued into place. The real caskets had no joints and was held together with glue and the paper, but to put the paper into the miniature one after gluing together would be almost impossible, so the mini one does have grooves everywhere and the paper is glued in place first. The squares on my cutting mat are one inch square, so that gives you a pretty good idea on the size of the caskets.

The sides and fronts of the top compartment glued into place, the blue casket has the sliding panel in place and the pink casket shows you what is going on behind the sliding panel.

The back of the caskets, the sides and back of the top compartment rises slightly above the casket itself, the lid will fit around here, the antique ones were made like this.

The top compartment finished, well almost, it will still get a few more pieces that will be removable to reveal a secret compartment and a secret drawer. In front of the blue casket you can see all the pieces that makes up the top compartment as it looks now. The small slot in the back behind the hollowed out divider is meant for keeping that special love letter.

Top view of the casket, if you look carefully, you can see two small pieces of wood covered with paper on the long sides of the center front compartment, a lift out box will rest on the wood pieces and create a secret hidey hole beneath.

Have a great weekend everybody
Elga