The Wisteria Challenge

Yesterday I visited the City of London Dolls House Festival.  I’ve never been to a dolls house fair before and had no idea what to expect. Never in my life, have I seen quite so many people, peering quite so hard, at objects that are quite so small, yet perfectly formed! 

The standard of the exhibitor’s creations certainly put my own little efforts to shame.  I tried not to think about the decidedly wonky, glue and sawdust encrusted handiwork, squatting on our dining room table at home, as I skulked sheepishly around the fair, sure that they’d be able to spot the imposter who did not belong in their world.

But rather than tar and feather me with miniature handcrafted plumage, they seemed happy to let me browse. And so I managed to overcome my awe, long enough to make a few modest purchases, including some lovely handmade turquoise glass bottles and an oil lamp from Ray Storey Lighting who even kindly wired the lamp for me.

I have always dreamed of owning a wisteria and last year our neighbours presented us with one, so I’ve been looking for a tiny one, or a way of making one, to add to the mini house. 

I’m pleased to say the search is over. I found one at the Festival, in the form of a wonderful, if somewhat challenging, kit made by Georgina Steeds at The Miniature Garden Centre. 

In kit form ready to be transformed into a thing of beauty and a joy to behold forever.....

It comes with full instructions and four little bags containing all the miniscule parts required to create a very realistic plant.

Sadly for me, it is not supplied with little bags full of the expertise or patience I am going to need, to turn it into a Wisteria anywhere near as fabulous as the one they had on display.  Nor does it come with a spare pair of eyeballs for when mine become so crossed they need replacing.

But I’m up for the challenge.  I just hope I am up to the job.  I don't think I could cope with having my a*** whooped by a plant.

The finished product as made by Georgina Steeds at The Miniature Garden Centre.

Image copyright: The Miniature Garden Centre

I can only live in hope mine will look half as good as this once completed.

Image copyright: The Miniature Garden Centre

Having left Mr PJ waiting for me outside the Festival, afterwards we took a stroll along the Thames Path to the Captain Kidd in Wapping, where I showed him what I had bought.  Including a tiny wooden dolls house by Jacqueline Crosby Miniatures….

He rolled his eyes and asked if that meant I will now need a mini house, for the mini house’s mini house.  He has a point.

The Mini House Project

As children, growing up in the 1970's, my sister and I shared a much loved dolls house.

Mr and Mrs Bender lived there with their children Tommy and Sally. Probably socially inappropriate today, their surname was down to the flexible wire in their legs, which would pop out of the back of their knees, if you bent their legs the wrong way.  We did that rather a lot. It was a novelty. Our own small legs only bent one way. Unless you count the time, when aged 10,  I was doing hobby horse jumps in the back garden and ripped a ligament in my left knee. Then, and only then, I understood what we had put the Bender Family through.

The Benders owned the smallest bar of pink plastic soap I’d ever seen, which kept getting vacuumed up, when we carelessly and frequently lost it in our bedroom carpet pile. It had to be regularly rescued by our long suffering Mother from the Hoover bag, to placate her two sobbing infants, and four small, unwashed, rubber people.

Having no children between us, our beloved dolls house has been handed on over the years to various extended family children and I suspect the Bender Family have relocated to the Big Dolls House in the Sky.

I'm all grown up now, on the surface, but secretly I wish it was still mine.

So when I spotted a dilapidated dolls house in a local antique centre, looking for a new home, I bought it.

It wasn't old or handmade, as ours had been. It was a modern flat-pack kit based on a Victorian house, which someone had attempted to put together and furnish. Rather badly, and in an enthusiastically "gluey" fashion.

I thought I would do it up, for fun. But that wasn't really a challenge, when you can buy anything your heart desires, ready made, for dolls houses nowadays.

One evening, while contemplating how to strip the weird, green, brick patterned paper off the exterior, I had an idea. Why not try to make it, or the interior at least, look like the inside of our life-size Victorian cottage, which my husband, pooch and I have renovated over the past 8 years?

And so it started.

Turning the Mini House into No.1. Heatherside Corner.

This blog follows the successes and failures of the project....

The Mini House arrives at No.1 Heatherside Corner