17th century terrestrial globe for William and Mary House

I'm thinking ahead to the time I work on the study / library / workspace in the WAHM.  I really wanted the scientific gentleman of the house to have a nice terrestrial globe (among his other instruments) and decided to refinish a store-bought one to look more 17th century. 

STARTING POINT

Here's the 3 inch (7.5 cm) globe and stand I bought -- it's by Euro Minis and it's dirt cheap :)  Typical faux-mahogany stand, and a pretty garish globe, but the basics are usable.

INSPIRATION!

Here's my inspiration -- two 17th century globes and a Mercator projection circa 1665.  One thing I love about miniatures (particularly working with a specific historical period) is how much I learn as I go along.  At the time of this Mercator map they knew where western Australia was, something I didn't know.  So recreating the inspirational globes led me to this process:


1.  Take the globe apart (this was surprisingly easy, besides it's fun sort of wrecking stuff :)).

2.  Paint the wood of the base a combination of burnt and raw umber to mimic walnut.  Paint the legs black to mimic ebony.  Give it two coats of satin varnish.

3.  Paint the globe's support brass/bronze.

4.  Repaint the globe itself, which took a while :)  I painted the whole globe a dirty parchment colour, then roughed in the continents using the Mercator projection as a guide with a darker colour.  Then I did a more detailed outline of the continents with a black pen, and finally cleaned up the sea/land meeting points and sketched in some "lettering".

5.  Reassemble the globe, with axis straight up and down (as in reference images of globes).  Since I had to break the original wooden stick that held the globe in place in its support, I used a length of brass wire as a replacement and I added a little flat brass spacer and bead just for detail.

And here's the finished piece!

Marble fireplace in WAHM Bedroom, and Thing-a-day!

I enjoyed marbling the Blue and White Room's fireplace so much, that I had to do something to the very white and plain fireplace in the bedroom!  I used some cream and yellow ochre and white, and then drew in the veins with grey.

I'm participating in this year's Thing-A-Day Project, which challenges its participants to create one thing every day through the month of February.  So far I've just been doing jewellery projects, but I know some of the things I'll do will be minis, and I'll post them here.  If you want to follow along, you can see all my TAD projects at my artists' blog, Dangerous Mezzo, or you can see the work of hundreds of participants at the main Thing-A-Day website :)

Okay, this isn't a miniature post, either :)

I've been doing other things besides minis lately, so this isn't a mini post either, sorry!

I went to the store on Thursday to buy stuff to make baklava with the Knitwits (it went brilliantly and now home made baklava is my most favourite dessert ever :) and the store had tulips on sale.  It was fate.

The funny thing is that I've never really liked tulips all that much, but since researching the 17th century, I have come to love them because of the amazing vases designed just for them.   I also planted some wild and wonderful frilly ones in my front garden that delighted me for weeks this last spring, so I've had a change of heart towards tulips and I'm very happy.  It seems beastly to dislike a flower, somehow.

And here's a photo of the entire Welsh dresser that David made for me a couple of years ago for my blue and white ware and pewter.  He designed it extra tall just to fit into this little space we had in our dining room area:

Not a miniature at all -- but a really pretty vase!

I've finally got myself a 1:1 tulipiere or five fingered vase of my very own!  Isn't it pretty? I saw it on eBay a few weeks ago, agonized over it, and finally broke down and made an offer which the seller accepted.  (My grandmother always had a saying, "If you like a thing, you like it so much better".  I don't know what the hell she meant, except that if a material object calls to you, and you can afford it, you might as well give in and get it :)   It now has a proud place on my Welsh dresser!

I just had to share this with the only group of people I know who might begin to understand why I'm so excited about this damned thing :)

Thanks for letting me burble at you!  Next post will really be about minis, I promise.

TIny tulips from Thailand!

I received a tiny package of spring in the mail from Thailand, yesterday.  Look at these little lovelies! 

Aren't they perfect?  They're clay tulips (made, I think, from Luna clay) in blue and white containers from new eBay seller happymemyshop, who sometimes has 1:12 scale flowers for sale.  They are so much prettier than they were in their photo, and they are superbly made and finished.  Hey, it's a circa 1700 room with blue and white Chinese export pottery, there HAVE to be tulips in there, somewhere :) And until I get my act together and make some, I figured I should pick these up when I saw them.

Miniature crewel work kits

Original 1:1 firescreen crewel pattern by Phillipa Turnbull of http://www.crewelwork.com

I love crewel embroidery, mostly because I associate it with the Jacobean period. Of course, crewel work was popular all through the 17th and early 18th centuries, as well, and had a revival in the 19th century along with other "Olde English" handicrafts. (It also had a revival in the 1970s when it was, apparently, used mostly to produce orange owls ... :))  I'm longing to learn how to do it in 1:1 scale, but I'm intrigued with 1:12 scale crewel work, too.

There's a single 1:12 crewel work firescreen in Sue Heaser's book Embroidery Projects, which I look forward to trying.  And I've just heard that miniaturist Cookie Ziemba has come out with a series of darling miniature crewel kits which are for sale on her blog, Cookie's World of Historic Dolls Houses and Miniatures! 

I find it interesting that there are so many handicrafts I've been interested in trying, and that it's taken getting into miniatures to make me actually explore them :)

Petit point pole screen

(How alliterative :)

Here's the 17th century Ming Dynasty dais cloth that was the inspiration for this piece of needlepoint.  Isn't it beautiful?  I love the fact that the dragons are so stylized that they become almost abstract. 

I finished the stitching last night and made up the screen today!

 Here's the stitching all done. (This is on 40 ct gauze.  I used a method of mounting the gauze for stitching recommended by one of the members of the Yahoo Petitpointers group -- gluing and then taping the gauze to a mountboard frame.  Worked like a charm, and stayed taut the whole time).

And here it is ready to be mounted on the screen.

I wanted to be able to hide the ends of the gauze and glue the piece in place, without risking glue seeping into my petit point.  I cut a square of laminated paper (from a postcard, actually) and used that as a backing, gluing the edges of the gauze around it.

And here's the petit point chart for your own use -- this would make a nice cushion as it is, or a larger firescreen if done on 32 count canvas. 

Ming Dynasty Petit Point for a Pole Screen

Petit point in progress for a pole screen

Over the last couple of days I've been working on a little project for the Blue and White Room -- a pole screen.  I've got a McQueenie Miniatures kit I picked up from eBay, and I've designed a piece to fit -- it's 51 stitches square on 40 count silk gauze, and I based it on a Ming dynasty dais cloth, so it's the right period :)

It's actually coming along really quickly, even though I have to count like the dickens when I stitch it (this is the second time I've started it -- the first time I made a basic mistake in counting and tried to rearrange things around my mistake and then I chose a colour for the central motif that was far too close to the background.  It was really ghastly!) 

And here's the McQueenie kit -- I love their kits, even though the mahogany they use is not period for projects before about 1730. I'll do my usual -- stain it oak to tone down the red and see how that goes :)  They're all well constructed and go together easily.

It's a really pretty screen design.

You can buy McQueenie kits either directly from their website or from Minimum World.

(There's a wonderful article on the history of fire guards or pole screens in The Antiquarian.)

Marbeling tutorial

After looking at the photos and hearing your comments, I decided to do a faux marble finish on the Blue and White room's fireplace mantelpiece.

And I took pictures :)

1.  Reference photo  When you're doing any kind of faux finish (and that includes many things we do in the miniature world, from making mini food out of polymer clay to faking bricks on the inside of a fireplace), it's best to have a reference photo, or several.

Here's mine, which you may have seen in an early post -- it's from Chatsworth House:

I like the idea of a grey marble mantel to cut some of the "prettiness" of the gold wall colour.

2.  Base colour   Most marbles begin with a pale base colour, either white or cream.  This one certainly could have, but I decided to start with a deep base colour, namely the tester pot of Amherst Gray last seen as the stone coloured test wall behind the blue and white plates.  It's just about perfect!  I painted both the hearth and mantle with two coats.  (NB:  This is a plaster mantel.  At a couple of small points (including one of the caryatid's noses) I moved too quickly with my water-based paints and sort of "melted" tiny bits of the plaster!  Probably best to let things dry thoroughly between coats, instead of going at it like a mad thing all in one gasp, the way I did :)

3. Two colours of glaze.  In order to create this look, the paints you put on top of the base coat need three properties:  they need to be somewhat transparent,  they need to be "smooshable" i.e. moveable, and they need to have a longish open time, i.e. they can't dry too quickly.  This is especially important because I'm using ordinary artist's acrylic paints -- they dry quickly and hard. 

There are many products for acrylic paints which make a great base for a glaze -- I used a matte medium.  Any acrylic medium that extends the drying time will work beautifully.

Working very quickly, paint on diagonal wiggly lines of the two colours (I used raw umber and the wall colour, a pale gold).  I painted the raw umber first, and you can see in the photo below it's drying already -- not good!  (You can also see that all this detail is going to be a pain in the arse to marbellize :))

This one is better, on the top of the mantle :) Smooshier, wetter.

Now take a small piece of cotton cloth or a bit of sponge, and smoosh the two colours gently together.  You'll still see some of the base coat, and you should still be able to make out the two coloured glazes.  Refer to your reference photo.

3.  Veining.   Once you've got the glazes to your liking, it's time to add veining, one of the most characteristic features of marble.  Most marbles have white veins, some marbles are veined in black. My example has white veining, but also areas of a burnt sienna sort of warm red colour.   I perhaps should have put that in as a glaze, but I'll do it with a small brush at this point, instead :)  Use a very, very fine brush.

In general, veining follows the lines of the coloured glazes, with little side trips :)

4.  Final details and varnish.  Go back over your piece, referring to the photo.  Look at it from a distance and close up.  Does it please you?  You can always use your base paint to tone things down or to "erase" areas that aren't pleasing and start again :)

Generally the rule of thumb for miniatures is "don't make large things glossy", because too-glossy woodwork or furniture disturbs the illusion of scale.  If anything, we generally use Dull-Kote or other means to try to keep surface finishes from being too reflective.  Marble is an exception -- it's not marble unless it has a suggestion of surface polish.  I used a satin varnish for the fireplace.

And here it is, in the room, this morning! 

Now I'm eyeing all those other white fireplaces in the house .... Look out!  It's a Marble Attack!

First wall in the Blue and White Room

I find it really helpful to photograph things in process -- for some reason I can be more dispassionate looking at a photo rather than at the scene itself.  (The macro setting is amazing, isn't it -- I keep finding all sorts of infelicities when I examine things close up :)) Looking at this first wall, I think I want framing over the mantle, too.  Looks a little bare.  Should I "marble" the fireplace or leave it be, I wonder? 

The colour, Stuart Gold, looks paler than I thought it would -- it's certainly a little too pale for the period.  But I think it's pretty, so here's another place where historical accuracy will take a back seat to "but I like it!" :)

I've got a McQueenie's fireplace screen kit, so I'm busy designing a Chinese-themed blue/white/gold petit point pattern for it!

And I still need to go down to the workshop and cut those walls!