We Got Cut Off for a Few Days

 We've had no contact with the outside world for a couple of days, as a cable was crushed somewhere and interrupted the telephone, internet and television connections to our house. Combined with cold winter weather and now, strong winds, I wish once again that people could just hibernate like the animals do! The temperature is going to -30C tonight.

I did some work, however, slowly and carefully as my new eye gets used to its lens; I had my first cataract surgery nearly two weeks ago, and am now driving without glasses for the first time in well over half a century....

Two glue pots, a right angle, and two glue brushes awaiting their bristles are ready for the bookbinder's shop. The front facade has been cut, as well as the two side walls, but I have to be patient (sigh!) for the other walls needed. As I do not have a miniature lathe, I cheated and cut apart a wooded goblet for the pot holding the brush, with a base of a small wood circle added. The other glue pot had much of its tapered base cut away, and because it was solid wood it didn't affect the pot shape. That uses up some of my far too large stash.... The right angle is painted cardboard.

Book production has also gone ahead. Some of the spines didn't bend nicely and tore a bit, but that's fine as those will become the books waiting to be re-bound! The nicer books will be the finished product for the shop.

And I recently stumbled over a series of YouTube videos by Cathy Brickner, in which she makes more than a dozen southern prairie wild flowers. Today I found a stash of a material very like Flower Soft at a local second-hand store, and I can use that to make some of the other flowers in her series. The videos are short, which means you have to pause while you work on the flowers, but that gets me up out of my chair and makes me walk over to the computer on a regular basis. (Well, I have to look for the silver lining, don't I?) The white flowers are rain lilies, awaiting their grey-green leaves, while the pink ones are evening primroses. The stems have their leaves, but I won't plant them until I've made a whole garden of near-desert flower varieties, as they are all different heights..

I'm thinking of a small flower-bed that has been allowed to go wild, with perhaps a cactus or two in it now, and a tumble-down fence - which will likely mean back to barbed wire manufacture - and if I can find one, a scale Texas longhorn skull. We'll see! And yes, we do have cactus in Canada; in Alberta you will find prickly pear growing quite happily!

Book Binders Need Books

 And that means I'm back, for a little while, in the book-making business, This kit came to me from the things we helped sort and tidy last fall, and as I had no purpose for it at that time, I filed it away. Fortunately, I filed it in a place where I could easily find it. 

These are all non-opening books, as they will be shelved ready for parceling up or for repair work. The covers of this kit are lovely and subtle , just right for the period I'm working in; moreover, they have lovely worked spines, and that is more or less what will be visible of them when they are placed in the book-binder's workshop. There are 124 covers in the kit, and I'm not sure I'll be needing all of them; however, we'll see! 

For the "pages", I'm using scraps of mat board and foam core; in some cases, one of each, in others the books are thin enough that only a piece of mat board is needed. The rest of the supplies I need, like thin packaging cardboard, are in good supply in most homes. I've found the card from tissue boxes are the best weight, and they bend nicely and don't warp when the glue is applied.

One of the really nice things about this kit is that there are a wide variety of book heights and thickness, which makes them look more "real". 

At Least Five Days' Work....

 The amount of time involved in making minis is directly related to how much time is spent waiting for glue and paint to dry. And the other thing is, how many times something has to be redone!

This is a gilder's cushion, with a tiny drawer underneath to hold the gold leaf bits that are applied to the more expensive books the bookbinder is working on. It measures 42 mm (1 3/16") wide, 21.5 mm (7/8")deep, and 1 cm (3/8") high at the side, has a padded suede leather top, and has brass "nails" (sequin centres or glitter!) along the edge of the cushion. It took 4 tries before the drawer stopped imploding; the fifth time it actually held. That took at least 3 days....

This peculiar item is called a "persknecht" in the Dutch instructions, which I think would translate to press aid in English; it appears to have something to do with the book press. There is another photo of this item below, it is actually 2 layers separated by square wooden pieces, which gives it a certain amount of springiness, or give. I used a #2.5 permanent black marker to draw the late Victorian/Early Edwardian decorative elements on it. I tried to research the press aid, without much luck, and if anyone knows what it is meant to be, please do let me know!

The work table has sturdy legs, and a fine beeswax finish. The block, most likely used for stamping designs into the leather book covers, has a veneer top, and like the table, a beeswax finish. I need to visit a bookbinder's shop to learn about the various tools used, so will do a little research to see if there is one in the area. With a couple of universities, there should be someone still re-building old and out-of-print books, and there are lots of artists in the area, as well.

Two of the walls for the bookbinder's shop have been cut, and I hope the others will soon appear on my work table. I'm thinking about how to decorate the interior; I rather like the idea of a late 19th or early 20th century scheme, lots of dark wood, anaglypta wallpaper, dark stairs with, perhaps, coconut matting, and imposing stair spindles and newel posts. I'll have to check scrapbooking shops to see if there is a good embossed paper to represent the anaglypta. We rented a house in Edmonton, AB for several years in the second half of the 70's, which dated from about 1910 (very, very old for Alberta!), which had olive-green anaglypta paper half-way up the hall and stair walls, my inspiration for this treatment for this little shop. We'll see!

Happy New Year?

 We missed most of it, this year. We were away for 4 whole days at Christmas, visiting with my sister-in-law in Nova Scotia. Driving up was good for the first 6 hours, but then we hit drizzly rain, poor visibility, and then darkness hit. The last leg of the journey (2 hours) was mine, but with cataracts in both eyes and the car lights in the dense drizzle, it was a white-knuckle journey.

On the way, we made a stop in Kentville, NS and visited Freedom Miniatures there. To say I was blown away by what Shelley carries, is an understatement. It is well worth a visit if you are ever in Nova Scotia, as she has just about anything a miniaturist might want. Santa arrived! 

We picked up a number of components required for the book bindery so it appears that the project will become a reality. We just have to recover from Covid first....

On Tuesday, we headed home via the ferry across the Bay of Fundy, which halves the trip in terms of time for us. I had had a bit of a sore throat the last couple of mornings, but didn't think too much of it as the house we were staying in was dry enough my sister-in-law keeps misters going in the living room and main bedroom. But, the Carpenter-in-Chief had the entire drive from the ferry terminal to our house, as I was totally out of it. Two days in bed with headaches, fever, congestion, aching bones and so on, and then I realized I had lost my sense of taste and smell -- a test proved I had Covid. Which means we are both under voluntary house arrest until our tests come up virus-free, which cannot happen soon enough for me. The C-in-C also caught it, although a milder case, but we are still not rested enough to do very much beyond reading and sleeping. However, my sense of taste and smell has returned, thank goodness! A life without stinky cheeses and dark coffee would have been a bleak thing, indeed!

Now that we have the doors and windows, we can cut the carcase components; we are using commercial ones rather than attempting to make our own from scratch. That means cutting out the front and back, as well as the false wall, and using the commercial windows and door to mark the appropriate openings for them. The large shop window has a fancy header, which will have to be replaced as the shop is in a humble fisherman's cottage, and dentil moulding just would not have been on the builders' horizon. We'll see how that goes.

I do hope 2023 will be a good, productive, happy year for all of us!

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Our corner of the world is very much black and white today, and it really is quite lovely. No miniatures, but beautiful scenery.

 

We have had 15 cm (6") of snow over the past 36 hours, and as you can see from the white sky, more snow is on the way.

The only real colour in this photo is a small patch of light brown birch bark, which has peeled away, near the top left of centre.

The Carpenter-in-Chief, heading back uphill getting rid of the snowpile the snowplow left behind. We will shortly try to drive in this heavy, wet and sticky snow.

But it is very beautiful.....

Still Here and Still Doing Minis

Real Life keeps getting in the way of my pretty much favourite pastime,  but I haven't stopped making stuff despite that. It's just that I keep having to put the minis on hold in favour of things that need to be done. It has also been difficult to get together for Mini Wednesdays due to Real Life, like snow storms and illness, getting in the way of fun.

Although it doesn't look all that spectacular, this is the beginning of a small, two-room up and down cottage that is a late 19th century book bindery. The cottage's carcase is being provided by Santa, aka the Carpenter-in-Chief, and is a regional, wooden structure known in The Netherlands as a Zaans Huisje. or a little house from the Zaan River area, north of Amsterdam. You can look up an outdoor museum, De Zaanse Schans, where examples of these little utilitarian cottages as well as a number of windmills have been placed along the banks of the Zaan as a sort of recreated village. I first visited this museum in 1970, on my way home to Canada from the Middle East, when it was quite new and there weren't all that many buildings and mills in place yet. Most recently, I visited about 5-6 years ago with my older daughter, who wanted to see the country I grew up in. The museum had expanded dramatically in the intervening decades, and we both loved our day there.

The table is the work table, and the top of it needs an appropriate edging put on it. I'd like to try half-round for that, and think I have the correct thickness in my stash. If not, I may try sanding wooden skewers to make my own. The other pile of stained wood is the actual work bench, which fits across the back of the cottage. It has a couple of interior dividers, and a single shelf. 

The plans for the cottage are in Dutch, so I have to do some translating for my spouse. It will be finished in boards, horizontal as well as vertical, and painted in the same green colour as the trim on the wooden shoe workshop (waiting for the lights, there!), with white paint on the various architectural details. 

But, right now, I'm working away on nearly finished Christmas gifts, as they have to be in the mail next week to guarantee delivery (well, that's what the Post Office claims, anyways!). One of the reasons for the lack on entries here has been the fact that I was asked to work two  days a week at my volunteer job for "a couple of weeks", which turned into a month and a half of very physical, hard work. I admit now I'm too old for that sort of work. Last week was my first one back at one day a week. That I can still handle....

My sincere thanks to "Huibrecht", of the blog Huis ter Swinnendael, who was kind enough to send me the plans for the tools and furnishings that will create the book bindery!

Sort of Saw That One Coming....

Earlier this week, I was informed that I have cataracts in both eyes, and that it would be 3 to 4 months before surgery would be scheduled. I knew it was coming, but I had been told more than a year ago that I might have a cataract. It took 13 months to get an appointment with the eye specialist; the medical staff in our little province is worn out from Covid-related cases, and staff is retiring in massive numbers, without enough replacements wanting to come to our lovely but admittedly quiet little backwater.

I think we have only about 800,000 people in our province; Toronto alone has more than three million! Many are elderly, as our young people tend to migrate to the "bigger cities" for their careers. All three of my children live further away from me, in our own country, than the distance to here from Europe....

The downside of the wait is that my glasses are not very useful any more, and there seems little point in getting a new prescription when, in 3-4 months, I will need a completely new one  again. My sight is getting blurry, which is not so great for the detail work of miniatures....

I am doing small things for short periods, in the hope of stretching out the eye use - and as I am a person who needs something in her hands, it is a learning curve! I also read a great deal, and that is becoming a little more difficult all the time; I may have to check out large print for a while. Winter is also on the way, and I really don't like being cold, which means that I usually spend much of my winter indoors, doing things with my hands and eyes! I do, however, love to sit by my window looking out at the snowy world from the comfort of my living room, as the sun usually shines in vivid blue skies here during our coldest months.

Perhaps it is time to tackle some of the polymer clay projects waiting for my attention, or some larger miniature pieces, like furniture. We'll see!