First Post of 2022 - Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

 Dear Reader,

Happy Old Year!

 By the time you get this message, the year will be half over. (I started to say that it will be the month of June, but it's now July, and, at this rate, summer autumn might be over, so maybe you should just disregard that first sentence or interpret it to mean that "an unknown but extremely large amount of time has passed.") I can't tell you how many times I have tried to start a post, but it didn't work out. So, I'll try to cover what I've been up and try not to ramble too much, although I do really enjoy a good rabbit trail.

Speaking of rabbits, I bought a dollhouse.

Now, before you get all judgmental, hear me out. There are many dollhouse collectors and miniaturists in the world, most of them adults and professionals. I didn't realize just how deep of a rabbit hole this was... until I fell in.

I had considered making one. Like, I had been thinking about it for a while, and I had started my dollhouse board on Pinterest a couple of years ago. Decades ago, I had the basic cottage kit until we moved and my husband's cousin put his foot through it. It wasn't really his fault, so I don't blame him, although, admittedly, I was miffed at first. He didn't do it on purpose. He was reaching up into the closet for a box, and took a step back to brace himself as the weight of the box on the shelf shifted. Just so happens, the little cottage was right under his back foot. So, that was the end of my miniaturist career.

But, this time, although I had already been admiring dollhouses on Pinterest, it all really started when I ordered a garbage can for my birthday.... 

😹 Okay, allow me to explain. 

I've been looking at those Pioneer Woman trash cans for a while, but they were over $50, and I just couldn't. I mean, talk about throwing money away! (Shameless pun.) Well, after I joined Walmart+, I hopped onto the website one day looking for something, and I noticed they were advertising some exclusive discounts just for Walmart+ members. You can check periodically, but I haven't noticed such a sale since! I guess it was just an extreme blessing. So, there with the few electronics and gadgets were the PW trash cans, bundled with a mini-size one for the office or bathroom. They were about $25-30. My dad had given me some birthday money, and I felt that I could easily justify it since it was birthday money and half the price. So I jumped at it.

Okay, sorry, I said I would try not to ramble. This is me trying.

Anyway, so... I got the trashcan in the mail, and I still have the box it came in. That is a fantastic box. I just can't throw it away. It looks like just a cardboard box, but it's super stiff. And I keep thinking, "That there is a high quality item. That's dollhouse material right there." Upon closer inspection, the box has an extra layer of corrugation, so it is really thicker than a normal cardboard box.

So, I was thinking about it, and I got to poking around on Pinterest to see what I liked and how I would want it done. I kept being attracted to the miniatures with little animals. Most of these were handmade and felted, but they were so cute. I loved the idea of a fairy tale type of dollhouse. I also saw a lot of Calico Critters. 

I had seen Calico Critters in Walmart when I was Christmas shopping for my grands. I just fell in love with them. A few years ago, I had been to a flea market where they had one of those stalls that contained mostly new stuff still in the box. I saw the "Cozy Cottage" dollhouse and grabbed it for $10. (At the time, I justified the purchase that it was for the kids, but I no longer pretend. I'm officially into toys.) That same dollhouse runs around $30 now. I had never messed with it beyond taking it out of the box and putting everything where it belongs. (Oh, and there was that time I spilled Coke on the end table, and the house was under the end table.) Anyway, they are made of durable stuff, and it's been sitting in one of the cubbies in the bookcase since not long after that. Fast forward to 2022. I saw that Amazon had the larger dollhouse on sale, and I got that. 

Since then, I've been buying furniture and stuff for the house. I've learned there are so many different styles of houses they made, and there are about 35 years worth of Calico Critter items to explore. That's a LOT, although you won't find most of the items in stores. Some of the items in the series go for several hundred dollars. 

The CC items have amazing quality. They originally started in Japan (Sylvanian Families), so there's this somewhat kawaii sort of Hello Kitty appeal to them. There are knockoffs, but you can tell the difference. When I showed my mom the furniture, she said, "That is just as cute as can be!" I know what you're thinking. She's my mom, so naturally she would say that. No, I inherited my sentimental streak from my mom. :) I told her I got it honestly. And she laughed because she knows she doesn't have much of one. Mom says she's a "realist." (Seriously, it may sneak up on me sometimes, those sentimental feelings. Like someone will surprise me once every couple of decades, and I'll burst into tears. I remember it happened around 1989, 2001, and 2016, so I've got a few years before I'm due for another sentimental eruption again. I think we bottle everything up so much and lock everything down because we are so sensitive, and it comes out in sudden fits on occasion.) My sister said, "Those are cuute," when I showed her my Silk Cat family, and my niece said I was making her want one. :) So, they are all very supportive of my new insanity. The doors and drawers open on the furniture (although one vintage drawer refuses to open, and I don't want to destroy it). I have an old school TV that lights up. It's just crazy cute.

It's no big secret that the reselling business has exploded in recent years. There are collectors everywhere, and some of these items go for big prices if you can't find them in stores. There are many channels about miniatures, dollhouses, and even nothing but Calico Critters/Sylvanian Families collections. The more I discover about the world of miniatures, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I've learned so much that I'm overwhelmed.

I've accumulated about 9 rooms so far, and more are on the way. I had ordered one set "new" on eBay, as it was no longer in stores. The set was a reasonable $34 on eBay, whereas other sellers were selling for at least twice as much. The box never arrived. FedEx claimed to deliver, but I did not hear a truck, a beep, a knock, or anything, and the box never showed up. EBay refunded my money immediately, which was weird. I was disappointed, but I bought another item that I had wanted on Amazon to replace the lost building. However, the other day, I was on Walmart.com again, maybe checking out the new PW items, and I saw they were having a sale. Then, there was the same house I had ordered from eBay. Only $29.99. Even with 9 rooms, I was coming up short, so I decided to go ahead and get the house.

 

 

 

I mean, look at these. Is this not the cutest thing ever? Don't those donuts (doughnuts if you just can't deal) look great? She's got her little Kitchen-Aid mixer going. I was turned off by the chunky wooden dollhouse furniture in some other brands, but these are incredible. The kitchen items are the first pieces I received before the dollhouse was delivered. They're just sitting on my desk. The hutch is hard plastic. The porcelain is from another brand that sells miniatures on Amazon. The Hopscotch family Chocolate Rabbit character in the red dress is from my cottage, and I learned she is the younger non-baby sister named Bell. I believe Stella, who is in the Town series, is the older sister, apparently old enough to run a business. The toy store is an older Sylvanian Familes item from eBay (nowhere near as reasonably priced as the house mentioned above). The store is not as wide as the other buildings, so it will not be a compatible "room" for the house, whereas some of the new CC town buildings can be repurposed and may stack. These two characters, Snow White and Peter Pan, are two of the fairy tale costume "babies" sold in random mystery bags. They also have babies in Halloween and other costumes, as well.

You can take different pieces and connect them, but not all of them will sit on top of each other. Some have to be on the bottom, and there are some that won't allow you to put anything on top because of the roof shape that is permanently attached. On Amazon and other places, you can see where some of the dollhouses are sold in bundles because you can connect them to make a mansion. I'm already up to about 13 cat and rabbit characters, with a mouse, chipmunk, and elephant thrown in.

So, I did pick up a few "vintage" items in addition to the new ones. The scale is approximately 1:12, which is the same size as you see in Hobby Lobby. However, the scale isn't exact since you normally don't see human-size rabbits and squirrels wandering around. I have noticed that the CC beds are different sizes, with some being considered "children's furniture" and some for adults. So, if you are buying something like a bed, you'll need to make sure it will fit the intended character. Characters can be a bit tricky, too, because you have the "Mom" size characters, "older sister" sizes which are the size of the town girls, girl sizes, which is smaller, and at least two types of babies, one of which is not posable. I haven't ordered any of the non-posable ones nor the ones that come in baby beds and wrapped in cloth where I can't see if they have feet or not. :)

All that being said, I have still not given up on the idea of making one. Nor have I thrown away the box. Every time I start to toss it out, I think, "Man, that's a great box." I'm also not ruling out the idea of building one from a kit or a bookcase, which is always a great idea. I'm sure I have plenty of characters, and I have some other ideas, as well.

I was thinking about all the movies I have watched that feature a dollhouse. If you haven't seen the second season of Locke & Key on Netflix, there is a special dollhouse in it. It requires a special key, and whatever you do to the dollhouse happens in Key House. 

Then there was the one in Bly Manor on Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor. After watching both The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor twice, I've decided I actually like Bly Manor even better. I am always a bit skeptical that a second season or a well-liked series will have the same impact. I loved it. Flora was my favorite character, and the dollhouse was cool. On the outside, it was intended to be a replica of Bly Manor, but, inside it was only one room deep. 

Cliff Clavin fact: The exterior shots for Bly Manor were at Thornewood Castle in Washington, which was also used for the filming of Stephen King's Rose Red. I have also read that CGI was used in the creation of some of the shots, but it's really well done in that I didn't notice.

In the dollhouse, you could see where the ghosts were because Flora made dolls to represent them, and a ghost boy moved them around. But I'm pretty much a sucker for a gloomy old haunted house movie.

Weird fact: I had already written a scene for my book involving a place called Blythe Manor before the second season of The Haunting of Hill House (The Haunting of Bly Manor) was released. I had no idea. I'm over rewriting stuff because of similarities, so the name stays. This is like the 3rd or 4th thing that has been an idea of mine before I found out about a movie or show.

Vulture.com did a whole article on dollhouses in Movies and TV, and there are plenty more that weren't covered. They're certainly prevalent in horror movies. Like dolls, there's something a bit creepy about most dollhouses. Bly Manor and Locke & Key, which wasn't technically a horror movie series, were my favorites, though. 

Even as a kid, I had nightmares about my dolls coming to life, and there was one incident when a dollhouse fell over in the middle of the night. We discovered that it had been sitting on a spool of thread, although I don't know how the spool got there. It's not like we had random spools of thread in our bedroom when I was 9, so it seems that someone else tampered with it. I'll just keep telling myself that.

Warning: Here thar be spoilers!

I nearly forgot to mention that I recently watched The Miniaturist, which was a 2017 PBS Masterpiece movie in two parts about a young bride in Holland who was given a dollhouse as a wedding gift from her new husband. The dollhouse was grand and fascinating. Unfortunately, I found the "behind the scenes" type videos about the dollhouses used by adults during that time period to be actually more interesting than the story. I over books and movies with thin plots to frame political agendas (Deleted rabbit trail about this. You're welcome.).

Another weird thing: I knew nothing about the novel this was based on, but I do have a bit in the book I'm writing about objects that "know things," very much like the objects that know things in this movie. It's not the same, but, apparently, there is that "trope," for lack of a better word. These days, it's really hard to avoid tropes, and I'm not sure how many times something has to be done, whether known or unknown, before it is a certified, card-carrying trope club member.

In the past month, my office has suffered an overflow of boxes as different dollhouse pieces arrived. There's the dilemma of whether or not to save the boxes new objects came in since they are "collector's items" or just let it go. I will have to let them go since there's no way I can keep all these. I have no closets! So, in a nutshell (a bigger than average nut), that's my dollhouse obsession aka hobby. Other than that... well, now that I've thought about it, what have I been doing?

I got into the habit of doing art at night after work until I realized that it was hyping me up too much so that I couldn't sleep. I can't do this on "school nights." :) In case you didn't know, art can be rejuvenating because it lets the logical left side of the brain rest while you are doing art. A lot of what I did was just practice and trying out the new colored pencils. This is my first time using them. Although you may not can see it in this photo, I messed up on the tree because I forgot to leave holes between the leaves for the sky, and going over the yellow with blue (or maybe it was the other way around) was hard. Who wants a green sky? I'm definitely better at bark than leaves. I also had not colored in the boats in the harbor when I took this picture.

I found a great deal on the pencils, and they turned out to be the real deal (I also had a set that turned out to NOT be the real deal, and I was able to get a refund, no questions asked.). I had tried other pencils, but nothing as good. I stayed away from colored pencils because the good ones were expensive, and the others weren't worth it. I knew from college that Prismacolor was the standard for professional art. I was really impressed with how buttery and vibrant they are. I know that "buttery" it a term I've heard other artists use, and it's not an exaggeration. The core is softer than normal pencils, and, at time, it felt more like I was painting.

I also tinkered a bit with pastels. In case you didn't know, soft pastels are the purest medium, traditionally containing pure pigment and enough of a binder to hold them together. If there are other ingredients mixed in, they're not actually pastels. I think there are people who paint with mud, so if you want to pay outrageous amounts for your mud, that's up to you.

The oil pastel images below are some practice experiments copying work by other artists, using inexpensive oil pastels--NOT my favorite medium at all. They look kind of like crayons, and there are little peels of color all over the surface as you work, which I find to be the most annoying thing about them. It also smears on your hands and everything else. Between soft (chalk) pastel and oil pastel, I find the dust easier to work around. And I don't really like the crayon appearance of the art. However, you can create a somewhat painterly effect without the mess of dragging out wet paint, water, palettes, etc. So, that's a plus.

Still, because of the mess from both oil and soft pastel, I would NOT use either material while sitting on a bed. You need to prep an area and maybe lay down some newspaper. In art class, we used soft pastels with our paper vertical, and we had paper beneath it to catch the dust. It was also better for keeping the dust from flying everywhere. I do sometimes watercolor while sitting on the bed and watching TV. Nothing too expressive or paint slinging. :)

The first is a "study" of work by Mark Hearld. His original incorporated collage with painting, so there was more texture in his. I was trying to be loose and more expressive here, and I was working a lot faster than normal. There was a lot of scraping when the color got too thick to put any more down because I was using paper that didn't have a lot of tooth.

 

 

For the second piece, I used a Margaret Owen painting as a reference. I definitely need to work on my patterns.

I've created pastel paintings in the past (no pun intended) using traditional materials, but I didn't go through the trouble of pulling out the high-quality pastel paper. I was just playing around in my sketchbook and had no intention of hanging anything on a wall. I thought the paper I was using had enough "tooth" to hold a certain amount of color since it was very rough when I was using colored pencils, but you can only go so far with pastels. I was also trying out some less expensive soft pastels (non-oil kind), although I did supplement a little bit with Rembrandt pastels. My traditional work was created using Prismacolor (hard) Nupastels, and supplemented a bit with Rembrandt and Sennelier. The Rembrandt are soft, but the Sennelier is so incredibly soft that you can use them up in no time, so I save those for highlights. Since I wasn't using very toothy paper, it would not hold very many layers of color, but I didn't think the pastels themselves were bad. I was more impressed with the Ohuhu ones than the Master's Touch ones I got from Hobby Lobby. The Ohuhu seemed softer, although some colors are easier to work with than others. I have noticed that in Prismacolor Nupastels, as well. Some colors feel a bit weird and scratchy, particularly on the outside of the color. Maybe they have a coating, or maybe it's just the particular materials that that color is made from. I found that true with particular blues, very dark cool greens, and some reddish shades. The cheaper pastels had a nice range of colors. One thing I did find that was lacking were light shades of blue, pretty much across the board. I have some very pale blues in my Prismacolors that I use ALL the time, and I kept looking for those shades, which were absent.

Another great thing about professional items like Prismacolor and Sennelier (and maybe Rembrandt) is that you can buy a separate color if you use it up. I picked up some extra white the last time I visited an art store.

In this photo, the top and 3rd trays are Master's Touch from Hobby Lobby. The second tray is Rembrandt, and the bottom are Ohuhu from Amazon.  I really didn't use the top tray but maybe once or twice, if at all. I didn't try to get the whole picture I was working on since it is incomplete. It takes longer for me to finish a soft pastel painting, usually several sessions of a few hours each. This was after one session, and I got much further along than I had expected.

I forgot, while I was working on this, that I also had bought some more Conte a Paris pastel pencils. These are great for little details. Think of them like fine-tip markers compared to those with a broad tip. Like, signing your name gets a whole lot easier. Normally, I wrote my name on my watercolors with a pencil, but these make it possible to get a sharp point and write. I had about 20 leftover from around the time I was in college or shortly thereafter. Most of them were more muted, and I'm assuming that I bought them open stock. I honestly can't remember actually purchasing them. They either came from the school book store or the local art store turned frame shop.

I'm reading The Companion by young adult author Katie Alender. She writes a lot of ghost stories, including the Bad Girls Don't Die trilogy, Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer, and The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall. It's a bit of a slow burner. As I realized it wasn't her normal ghost story (so far), I was thinking there has to be a bit of a struggle when you are writing something a little different. I mean, sometimes, as a reader, you expect every book to be different, original, and exciting, exactly like the other book. It's a bit weird, and I imagine it's hard for an author to decide if it's too risky to write something different. I really did enjoy her other books, so I decided to keep reading, despite the slow burn.

I finally finished reading Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip, who is my favorite fantasy author. It was another slow burner where I kept waiting for something "fantastical" to happen, and it finally did, but it felt a long time coming. In looking up the details on the story, I saw a reference to a Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, which I didn't know. After reading the description of Tam Lin, I can see the parallels, and it seems clear that that was her point.

So, that's some of what I've been up to. We also had family visit from out of state, so it has been an exciting week. I've been trying to pretty much avoid watching the news and keep myself distracted from the "real world" most of the time. My sister laughs at me when I tell her I know my neighbor probably gets tired of hearing me talk about those dang Calico Critters. But she gets it. When real life seems insane, we need a distraction. And things are definitely insane right now.