Category : Miniatures

A Work in Progress

Full Disclosure: part of this blog appeared on Lois Winston’s Killer Crafts and Crafty Killers blog earlier this month. Nothing wring with repurposing, right?

original release from Berkley Prime Crime, 2/2008

Who hasn’t thought of time travel? Reliving glory days, redoing a life-changing decision, or simply hanging around with your favorite historical figure. I might make a date with Abraham Lincoln, find out if he really did wear size 14 shoe.

Recently, I was offered the chance to go back in time – to 2008. Not as dramatic a trip as one requiring a whole new wardrobe, maybe even a bustle and a parasol. Its claim to fame: My first Miniature Mystery, cover shown here, was released in 2008. Murder in Miniature introduced miniaturist Gerry Porter and her precocious 10-year-old granddaughter Maddie. The book also includes a section of Tips for Miniatures, with ideas such as using rounded buttons as the feet on an upholstered chair; or the fluted metal top of a soda bottle as a mini pie plate.

I’m now cleared (long story) to reissue that book and 4 others in the series. The new cover will include a photo of my latest dollhouse project, shown here as a work in progress, with interior and exterior views. Once completely cleaned up and furnished, the house will be donated to a local school for its holiday raffle. Giving crafts projects away serves a dual purpose: raising money for a worthy cause, and making room for another project. Not to mention an excuse to shop for more supplies.

A little more about furnishing the house shown, which arrived as a fixer-upper from a writer friend. I rummaged through my many drawers, shelves, and messy boxes of stuff, as usual before I buy or make anything new. I found one of those pieces of fabric that come with an easy chair, the intended use being to protect the arm or the head rest of the chair from wear. Since I’m not that fussy about my life-size furniture, but I do always keep scraps, this meant-to-be carpet was a perfect fit for the living room (lower right). The paint brushes are there for scale, lest you think this is where I live.

I’ve also scattered other items: a folding chair and a coaster-cum-scatter rug in the bedroom (middle right); cans of food, barely distinguishable on the kitchen floor (lower left); and a mini slinky and kid’s chair in the attic.

This method of positioning pieces—here a stool, there a stool—is similar to the way I write a novel. Test out a word, a phrase, a plot twist and live with it for a while before committing.

Which is to say, I like crafts with moveable pieces and room for correctible errors!

Sister Miniaturist

Some Mini Fun

The Christmas dollhouse, traditionally decked out with a tree, lights, Santa in the window.

You’ve probably seen photos of this dollhouse — a gift from LR.— here and there throughout this season. The house is finished on the outside as you see, but the inside is not finished, just bare wood with spots of paint and other marks. Eventually, I’ll paint or paper the walls, lay flooring, and set up the rooms with cute furniture.

But first I wanted to have some fun with the house. I ran the idea of a crack house by some friends. I wouldn’t have to do anything but toss some mattresses and backpacks around, maybe set up a “lab” in one of the rooms. I got so much negative feedback, I scrapped the idea. But I still wanted to have a little fun before going suburban. The least I could do was dress some dolls in SWAT clothes and raid the house. No harm in that, right?

A mini SWAT TEAM, ready to invade the crack house.

If there are any shrinks reading this, please refrain from analyzing me. 🙂

Theory of Dollhouses

PLAYHOUSE

Here’s my latest “dollhouse,” almost ready for departure to a local school raffle, an annual project for me.

Technically, this house is a PLAYHOUSE, not an official DOLLHOUSE, the difference being that one couldn’t really live in a house with a partial roof and rooms not fully enclosed by walls. Not that you could live in a dollhouse, but it looks like you could!

1/12 scale DOLLHOUSE (1 INCH TO 1 FOOT)

The rooms in a playhouse are easily accessible to young hands, to toddlers who might want to move things around. A dollhouse is more of a showpiece, meant to draw you in so that you feel you have entered a different world. You can imagine yourself sitting at the miniature table, taking a nap on the bed.

The play house pictured came ready-to-assemble, and accompanied by dolls. Ugh, dolls. Here’s why dolls are ugh-ly – they ruin the fantasy. You can tell by looking at these dolls that they’re not real. They can’t comfortably sit in the tub (middle right of the playhouse); their stiff hands can’t pick up the can of soda on the table (lower right of the playhouse). They don’t bend for the rocker or the couch. Never mind that they are simply painted wood.

So here’s what I do with the dolls – I steal their clothing, which does happen to be “real” – real fabric. Yes, I strip them and fling their clothing around the houses, as real people might do. You can see a sample in the bunk-bed bedroom of the playhouse, where a pink jacket from a girl doll has been thrown on the floor. Now the house looks lived in, but more important it looks like you live there.

Addicted to DIY

Make a soda fountain chair from a champagne cage. Instructions obvious?

This blog is about three months late — I should have written it for April 1. Because the follow up to “Managing a DIY Addiction” is: You can’t! April fool!

I can blame my DIY addiction on many things, starting with the lack of toys available when I was a kid. The proliferation of toys now is exponential; they’re found in just about every retail outlet from bookstores to produce stores and even at the dry cleaners. (We wouldn’t want the sweet little tots to be bored while the nanny picks up Mom’s business suits.)

Not that our family could have afforded toys anyway, but I consider myself lucky in both regards – few toys available and little money to buy what there was. I, and my friends, were left to our own imaginations.

My father built me a crude dollhouse and that’s all I needed. I’ve written elsewhere (ad nauseum, you might be thinking) about furnishing that house and probably hundreds more scenes, roomboxes, and houses in the intervening years. Thank goodness for the countless charity auctions that are willing to take the finished products off my hands, or I’d have to have a separate dwelling for my crafts.

DIYing my dollhouse carried over to other areas. Not, I’m sad to say, into major work like painting a life-size house or fixing the plumbing, but to many other crafts. From my earliest days, I would look at something in a store—a greeting card, say, or a skirt, a bookmark, a scarf, a calendar, a paperweight, an ornament—and think, I can make that.

Of course, sometimes the attempts were colossal failures, but enough projects succeeded that I kept on going. From friends and relatives, I learned sewing, knitting, crocheting, drawing . . . whatever it took to make that thing that was in the stores.

One time I took a cartooning class so I could make a comic strip for our Christmas card. The instructor was about 17, and worked on Toy Story! Fun, but that was my last try at that.

Dick (note the pocket protector): How do you like our tree this year? Camille (remember this was 20 years ago): It's our best ever! (And you see the "tree" is really a tv image.)

Crafting as therapy. There's nothing like it. It's impossible to stay stressed and unfocused while trying to glue tiny pieces together.

More miniature scenes are on display in the gallery on my website.

Too Cute to Live

Sewing scene; marker for scale

Here’s a new scene in one of my miniatures corners, inspired by a friend who gave me carpet that she made from cotton thread, and another who gave me sewing equipment. I’m trying to decide whether to turn it into a (mini, of course) crime scene. It’s a thing with me.

One time I found a lovely Vermont country house in half-inch-scale in a local miniatures store. It was so cute—freshly painted, beautifully finished wood floors, a charming porch—I almost didn’t buy it. Too pretty. What could I do with it except place equally adorable tiny furniture in the rooms?

“How come it’s on sale?” I asked the clerk.

“There’s a defect,” she admitted, pointing to a window on the first floor. Sure enough, one pane in a multi-pane window, made of plastic, was split open.

My spirits lifted. “Great,” I said. “That’s where they broke in.”

The clerk gave me a sideways look, but I was happy. I had my crime scene.

In my mind I was already placing small pieces of glass (plastic) on the floor under the window, tipping over the darling living room chairs, smashing the dainty lamp, breaking one leg of the miniature coffee table.

It’s not just miniatures. There’s something about crafts and murder that have a natural connection. Whether it’s knitting needles or utility knives, scissors or toxic paints and resins, our crafts tables are a storehouse of offensive and defensive weapons.

Although most miniaturists I know have elegantly furnished Victorian or Tudor dollhouses or Cape Cod cottages, they sometimes stray from The Cute with risqué scenes. In fact, every miniature show I’ve been to has a few brothels, strategically mounted higher than kids’ eye level. But other than the fascinating CSI thread a few years ago, there aren’t enough miniature crime scenes to enjoy.

One of my heroines in this regard is Frances Glessner Lee, the Chicago heiress who built meticulous miniature crime scenes (even knitting tiny stockings for the background) and used them to teach criminal investigation procedure to cops. It’s worth a look at her “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.”

My most elaborate dollhouse is a mortuary, fashioned after the building where my Periodic Table Series protagonist lives. Gloria tiptoes past mourners on her way to her kitchen and trips over a trocar when she goes down to do her laundry next to the embalming room in the basement. It wasn’t easy to fashion an embalming table out of foil, but I had to DIY, since no miniatures stores seemed to have any in stock.

A Tip for the Miniaturists Among Us

Just to prove I’m not always turning cute into deadly, here’s a bloodless tip to accent your dollhouse or roombox kitchen or living room: lay bell pepper seeds, enough to cover a quarter, on a paper towel and let them dry. Then place the seeds in an old contact lens/bowl, or a similar “found object,” and you have chips ready for munching (by a very small person).

It’s a project fit for family viewing. No crime scene tape needed.

A Special Architecture

A few weeks ago, I got a query from a blogger for the Eichler Network. (Yes, Eichler owners are networked.) He’d heard that the protagonist in my Miniature Mysteries, Gerry Porter, lived in an Eichler, and would I be willing to do an interview on how, why, etc. Eichler? Of course I would.

Briefly: When I planned the series based on a miniaturist who builds dollhouses, I thought she should have an architect for a husband, and she should live in a special kind of house. My good friend, author Margaret Hamilton, had just moved into an Eichler home a couple of miles from me. Perfect!

If you’ve never seen an Eichler, you’re in for a treat. The floor plan is built around this model, with variations, but the main feature is an atrium with plants of your choice and a skylight that can be rolled back to the open sky.

The phone interview with blogger David Weinstein resulted in this fun blog, complete with photos, where all questions are answered.

Maddie Porter: A Day in the Life

Preteen Maddie Porter, of the Miniature Mysteries by Margaret Grace, often steals the show in the 9 novels of the series. Here’s the inside scoop on a typical day, in her own words.

The newest adventure of Maddie Porter

A Day in my Life with Grandma Gerry Porter

I’m Maddie Porter. I’m 11 and 3/4, and my grandma is Gerry Porter.

People are asking Grandma to talk about a day in her life. But she’s very shy when it comes to talking about herself. She taught high school for years and years, but she claims that’s different. She knows a lot about English—that means all kinds of reading and writing, like, even old stuff, Shakespeare, and all—and she loves to pass it on, she says. But if it’s about her personal life, she keeps it quiet.

So it’s up to me to do it for her. Talk about her day, I mean.

When I was a kid, I didn’t spend as much time with Grandma and Grandpa because I lived far away in Los Angeles. But now I live in Palo Alto, California, which is very close to Lincoln Point and I have my own bedroom in Grandma’s house. Grandpa was sick for a long time and then he died but I still remember a little bit about him. He was an architect and that’s what I might want to be. Either that, or I’ll get a job building dollhouses because that’s my favorite thing to do with Grandma. She has lots of friends and they come over and work on projects that they give away. Like to kids in shelters. I guess that means that they can’t afford real homes. The kids, I mean.

I’m very lucky that I have 2 homes, almost. My best friend in Lincoln Point is Taylor. Taylor’s grandpa, Henry, and my grandma are going to get married soon.

Or else, I might be a cop, like my first-cousin-once-removed Skip, but I can tell nobody wants me to do that, because . . .

Uh-oh, I think I’m doing that unfocused thing my teachers are always ragging on me about. I’m supposed to be talking about a day in Grandma’s life. But I only know about the days I’m with her, so what can I do?

Maybe I’ll just tell you about last Saturday, even though it was the worst day of my life. I did something really stupid and Grandma got mad at me. And she never gets mad, even when my ‘rents are really mad at me, so you know it must have been bad.

I’ll try to explain why it happened. I was at soccer practice with Taylor and when Henry took us back to Grandma’s house she was all upset. The place where their wedding was going to be, I forget her name, called and said someone died in their pool! Then it turned out the dead person was Grandma’s friend Mr. Templeton’s wife! He’s part of Grandma’s group that comes and builds dollhouses with us.

The second best thing I like to do, well maybe it’s the first, is help my cousin Skip solve cases like this. I know a lot about computers and I might be a computer specialist when I get to college. It’s hard to decide.

So, everyone’s trying to figure out why Mrs. Templeton, the dead lady, was even at the place where Grandma and Henry were going to get married, plus who pushed her into the pool? It’s like a hotel but they call it Bee and Bee, I think. I don’t know why.

Why Grandma was mad at me: I had an idea for how to find out something about one of the suspects. I was only trying to help, but it turned out to be not a good idea because I could have gotten hurt and some other people might have gotten hurt, too.

I don’t have time to explain it all, but I just wanted to tell you about that one day in Grandma’s life when I thought she didn’t love me anymore. Everything’s okay now, though. The end.

[Note from Gerry: Maddie wants me to correct her essay before she submits it, but I’m leaving it as is. I’m not even going to read it. I hope she didn’t reveal too many family secrets!]

[Note from Margaret Grace: For the full story of Maddie’s misbehavior, read Matrimony in Miniature, released September 9, 2016!]

Bloody Stories

A recent blog site topic invited us to compare American and British writers. Here is my response, reproduced.

Wouldn’t it be considered unpatriotic if I said I prefer British mysteries, as if I wished we had lost the Revolutionary War? From a native Bostonian yet, where it all began?

As I thought about the nationalities of writers I love, it turns out I have favorites from many countries. Karin Fossim from Norway. Pierre Lemaitre from France (How can I resist a male cop named Camille?) The recently deceased Umberto Eco from Italy. An American or two, like Thomas H. Cook and John Verdon. I thought I had a few British favorites, too, but it turns out Peter Robinson is Canadian and Peter May is a Scot. I’m one of the few readers unimpressed by the work of Denise Mina or Val Mcdermid, but Brit Mo Hayder makes up for them.

A couple of years ago, I became a British writer. Well, to be exact, a UK magazine asked me to write a short story. I was (and am) thrilled. The story, Majesty in Miniature, was published in parts over 3 months in The Dolls House Magazine.

I set the story at Windsor, the home of Queen Mary’s famous dolls house, sending my protagonists Gerry Porter and her granddaughter, Maddie, on a tour of the majestic house.

Although I’ve never seen the house in person, I knew all about it from books and videos. I knew about its running water (the cisterns housed in the basement), electric lighting, and working lifts, its miniature crown jewels and special tea services.

I was sure I could capture the essence of the dolls house; what I worried about was the language of the British characters, especially the British docent. I agonized over using “bloody”—too mild? too wild?—and finally checked in with my friend Simon Wood, who agreed to vet the story.

There was only one language problem that neither Simon nor I could have predicted.

“Docent?” a UK contact from the magazine asked me. “We’re not sure what that is.”

What? I’d been concerned about the docent’s dialogue, not the definition of the word. And isn’t the UK the home of the OED?

I figured the person was too young for an old word, or she was a foreign intern serving across the pond.

In the end, we settled on changing “docent” to “guide” and the story made it through the rest of the process.

MATRIMONY IN MINIATURE

The 9th miniature mystery is set for release next week. For once I can tell you the ending without being a spoiler — the title says it all: MATRIMONY IN MINIATURE.

Of course, things go wrong; otherwise, it wouldn’t be under “Crime Fiction” in bookstores and libraries.

Here’s how amazon describes it:

When murder happens in the small town of Lincoln Point CA, there aren’t many degrees of separation between the victim and retired teacher Gerry Porter. How can she stay away from the investigation when the crime scene is the venue for her marriage to Henry Baker? But this time, nephew Detective Skip Gowen tries to discourage Gerry’s and granddaughter Maddie’s efforts to solve “The Case.” He couldn’t live with himself if the murderer learns of their efforts and comes after them.