Rebecca's Collections

Seasons Greetings!

2011-12-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

Where did the last two months go?! I don't really know, apart from being very busy with work, and getting an issue of Dolls Houses Past and Present magazine out (I wrote an article about dolls houses and interior design / home planning, and a book review). Now it's Christmas, and I'm staying in Sydney with my sister. So I thought I'd do a quick post to wish everyone a very happy Christmas ~ happy Hanukkah ~ happy Winter Solstice ~ happy Summer Holidays ~ happy end of 2011!

These images are from catalogues which I have scanned and uploaded to flickr. This one is from the Comptoir General de la Bimbeloterie catalogue for Christmas 1952 -

And here is one from an Épis d'Or Catalogue - no date, but probably mid 1960s:

This one from the Swiss shop Grand Passage is dated 1966. It has a Magic Roundabout theme:

and some lovely miniatures:

This one, as you can see, is much earlier - it's an Australian catalogue from 1933:

It also has some lovely dolls houses inside, although not the one shown on the back cover!

I hope you all have a pleasant time with friends and family - and receive lots of lovely dolls house gifts! :-)

Jackpot! Walther & Stevenson 1933

2011-10-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

I buy vintage toy catalogues and store catalogues and so on in the hope that there will be dolls houses in them. Sometimes, as you know from previous posts, I'm rather disappointed. Not with this one, though!

This fragile catalogue is from 1933, from a Sydney toy store called Walther & Stevenson. I also have their 1956/57 catalogue - I'm not sure if I've shown that here yet. The back cover is promising:

And the contents don't disappoint at all!

Here on page 128 are pictures of 3 Australian-made dolls houses, of the 7 which were available:

(There are a couple of pages of Hobbies fretwork products in the catalogue, including plans for a dolls house (not pictured) and furniture, so I think that's probably what Dads could use to build their own dolls house.)

Here are some close-ups:

UPDATE: Isobel Hockey contacted me to let me know that the No 2 Doll's House here is aLines/Triang DH2 c1927 - she has one herself. So this house would have been imported from Britain. I wonder if dolls houses Nos 50, 52 and 53 were also either by Lines, or imported? The descriptions don't match what I know of Lines/Triang houses with those numbers, but then I didn't know about this No 2 house. Thanks, Isobel!

I haven't seen houses in any of these designs, but I'd love to find G 91 and G 94. The cottage in particular is such a quintessentially Australian design, I love it!

There are also pages of dolls house furniture, some of which seems to be made up and some in kits to make at home. These are the 'tab and slot' type of construction, I think, called by a trademark Loktyte ('lock tight').

Among the toy tea sets, I was delighted to see a tomato tea-set:

These three pieces of the tomato tea set came with a homemade dolls house from Sydney (which I haven't shown yet since I bought it, but did post about when it was first sold on ebay):

They are made in Japan - you can just see the words stamped into the side of the sugar bowl (at the bottom).

There are also Australian-made wooden model buildings for use with Britain's diecast lead model farm figures:

I think these are pretty rare - I've only seen some listed on ebay once (I did bid, but didn't win them). There are some in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, which also has a bit more information: they were first available in the Walther & Stevenson catalogue in 1931, and were still made during WWII. The designs must have varied slightly over the years, as the Powerhouse toy farm house doesn't quite match these.

Here are some close-ups:

I love the names - the proprietor of the general store is called Will Weywell:

and the pub is run by Ilava Notha:

There are more scans on flickr, where I will eventually put scans of the whole catalogue. I have, of course, started with the dolls houses and model buildings!

A set of homemade model buildings

2011-10-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

This is not the house I referred to in my last post, but I just realised that I had photos on my camera of a house I picked up in Sydney in July! The house is now here, of course, but I haven't furnished it yet, so it is still worth showing these photos.

I bought the house, and the other buildings with it, on Australian ebay. I was particularly attracted to the garage, with its sloping roof, round windows and tapered, rounded screen at the entrance:

I was staying with my sister in July, and we drove to the Ikea Sydney store, where she wanted to buy some things, and I headed off up the winding way to Newport in Sydney's northern beaches area.

The seller's husband had found these toys while doing a house clearance, and the seller offered me other things from the same clearance. There were lots of plastic soldiers and camouflaged buildings and vehicles, which I left, but I did pick out the cars which you can see in the photo above, and a few other things. Then I drove in to Newport shopping centre, to get some more cash for the extra things I was buying - and found a German bakery! Bliss!

The little house seems designed to fit the plastic farm figures:

There are also some farm buildings, stables, perhaps a barn, what could be kennels:

I'm not actually sure what the building below was designed to be. It has lots of small windows on two levels, but no floor dividing the levels inside. From a distance, it could maybe be a school building - but maybe it was meant as a farm building?

The tiny covered wagon (above) is made from a matchbox, with a paper hood and cardboard wheels. It may have been part of the army equipment, or perhaps it went with the plastic cowboys and Indian figures which were also part of the lot.

There is some great fencing:

and I also bought some walls, which would have been used with the toy soldiers I think. In this photo, they are holding down one of the plastic bags which held the plastic figures:

This bag is not very exciting, but the fact that it has the measurements of the tissue paper in inches indicates that it dates from the mid 1970s at the latest. (Australia converted to metric measurements in about 1974. I was in primary school, and I remember learning to convert! I'm still better at thinking of some things in inches and feet, though.)

The other bag which was used to store the farm animals is more interesting, and it is clearly dated.

One side shows Bennelong Point, with Government House, in 1873. The other shows Bennelong Point in 1973 - it's where the Sydney Opera House now stands, and, as the bag also informs us, this was a souvenir from the Sydney Opera House. 1973 was the year the Opera House was opened, by the Queen, so this bag is probably one of the first souvenirs.

Probably these plastic figures were stored away sometime in the late 1970s. The buildings certainly seem to date from the 1960s, so I guess the children they were made for grew up and grew out of them. The buildings are all clearly homemade, and the figures were bought: the petrol pumps for the garage were made in Hong Kong, and the farm animals and people were too.

Among the other items from the house clearance was one in a box (it may have been a harmonica, I can't remember for sure now), with a scrap of paper with the name Milina on it. I looked this name up in the current Sydney telephone directory, and there are several people with the surname Milina listed in the northern beaches area of Sydney. Perhaps these model buildings were made by a Milina of an earlier generation for his (or her) children to play with.

A Weekend's Reading

2011-10-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I picked up my mail. I have a bit of light reading for the weekend:

In the centre is a wonderful new book by Liza Antrim, showing her collection of family dolls houses from the 18th and 19th centuries. There's lots of information about the makers of the furnishings, much of it discovered by Liza herself. You can order the book from Cider House Press (apparently it's actually being published in February 2012, but some advance copies are available).

I also bought 58 issues of the International Dolls House News! They were listed on ebay recently - a great opportunity to add to my collection, though I haven't yet worked out where I'll keep them! There's lots of great information on vintage and newer miniatures in them, and I've been making an index so I can find relevant issues when I'm doing research for articles.

And yes, that is another issue of the Australian Sportsgoods and Toy Retailer, which seems to be just as full of news about fishing, golfing and social events as the first one I bought. This one does feature a dolls house in an advertisement - not an Australian-made dolls house, but one that I've recently acquired, so I'll show the ad and the house in my next post.

(I seem to have got out of the habit of writing blog posts earlier in the year - I had lots of ideas before I went away, and new dolls houses too, but somehow they haven't made it here yet. I hope I'll do more than one post this month, and get back into the habit of posting!)

Gone Fishing .... or Golfing, or ...

2011-09-08T04:03:00.000-07:00

No, not me! I have just been very busy with the Dolls Houses Past and Present magazine, working on articles myself (especially one on Pit-a-Pat dolls house furniture, which probably outgrew the definition of 'article'!), as well as loading other people's articles.

The ones who went golfing were 1950s reps and agents for manufacturers of sports goods, toys and canvas goods. This is the cover of the April 1953 issue of The Australian, New Zealand & Southern Equatorial Sportsgoods & Toy & Canvasgoods Retailer, which I was lucky enough to buy on ebay recently:

There are 8 photos of golfing events, as well as 8 of manufacturers and their agents drinking:

and a couple of them fishing:

as well as lots of snippets of news about fishing trips.

Well, this was 1950s Australia!

There are some ads for toys, as well as many for sports goods and some for tents, etc. I guess the market was much smaller than in Germany, which had the trade magazine Das Spielzeug (The Toy), or the UK, where both Games and Toys and The Toy Trader covered toy manufacturing and sales. After seeing all the wonderful ads from those magazines, copied by collectors and researchers in those countries, I was a bit disappointed to see the Australian magazine.

I did manage to find one dolls house (or two?) - hurray! but no information on the maker. See the dolls house(s) right on the top shelf:

And a closer look:

The shop pictured, Elegant Novelties, was in Melbourne, so we can probably assume that these dolls houses were made in Melbourne.

Notice how the ad mentions a "wonderful range of books", including Jane Eyre, Little Women, Treasure Island, Hollywood Album, Black Beauty and Enid Blyton books for all ages? You can see the books in this photo, on a shelf on the lower right:

Another shop also mentioned books in their ad - they advertised The Coronation Book, English Children's Books, and, again, Enid Blyton's Range of Books. Well, as I've said, it was 1950s Australia. Everyone was too busy playing sport to read.

I don't expect I'll find many more issues offered for sale. The State Libraries of Victoria and New South Wales do have fairly good runs, so I hope I'll be able to visit one day and go through them. I thought buying one might give me an idea of how easy it would be to find information in them - and it does: not easy at all! I'll need quite a bit of time to read all the snippets of news, as well as to scan the ads closely for any dolls house related items.

Bridal Fashions

2011-08-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

My blogging friend CM, of MyRealitty and Leftcoastmini, is going to be the Mother of the Bride this month. She invited me to take some photos of my bridal pairs - you might remember Bridezilla from the second pair, who was determined to win the game of musical chairs at the fancy dress party last year!

Several of my Erna Meyer dolls are getting married:

18th century style

1950s or early 1960s

1970s

Thinking about bridal fashions made me think of the wedding photos I have of my parents, grandparents, and earlier ancestors.

The earliest wedding photo I have is one of my great-great-grandparents. They were both Scottish, although one was born in Jamaica and they lived in India; they married in Munich, in Bavaria (Germany), in 1859.

While this bride opted for the full white silk and lace deal, her daughter, my great-grandmother, had a rather different kind of wedding. My grandmother described it like this:

“My mother was married in her best green costume to her cousin Henry Dunlop one day in 1895, with no-one knowing. She went out for the day, came home as usual; a week later her mother found a note in an empty room saying - “I have gone to America with Henry; Gracie”

Not surprisingly, I don't have any photos of the best green costume!

My grandmother (this great-grandmother's daughter, and my mother's mother) also had a slightly unconventional wedding. Neither the bride's parents, nor the bridegroom's, were present; the bride was given away by her brother. I only discovered some photos of the wedding among a distant cousin's collection inherited from my grandmother's father - my grandmother didn't keep any.

Here they are in 1927, cutting the cake - I believe the dress was pale pink.

My mother had been a bridesmaid at several weddings:

1941

ca 1945

1955

But when she herself got married in 1961, she chose a nice gingham frock for her wedding dress. Like her mother, her brother was present but not her parents, but she refused to be given away, saying she was a person not a present.

That's Mum and Dad on the right, with my godparents on the left.

Here's a photo of my father's parents on their wedding day:

Casino, NSW, Australia, 1935

I've already shown you my maternal grandfather's parents' wedding, in Calcutta in 1903:

Another white lacy wedding dress! This is my Californian great-grandmother, who married an Englishman; her father refused to attend the wedding, so only her mother was present. (Both the groom's parents had already died.)

So, two of these brides went for the white silk, satin and lace - the others were dressed in green, blue, pink and (I think) brown & white. Some were solid colours, one flowery and one check ... Really, based on my family's traditions, I could photograph any of my nicely-dressed dolls as bridal couples!

Love from Darwin

2011-07-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm home again. It's been longer than it seemed while I was away - some time at Mum's place with my sister, some time there alone with Mum's cats, then time in Sydney with my sister - now I'm back in Darwin with my cats. After being very close to Mum all my life, and sharing many interests, it's taken time to come to terms with her death.

I'd forgotten how dry and hazy Darwin gets in the dry season (when rural property owners burn off, leading to smoky skies and ash particles in the air - and inside). I also hadn't realised how much I had bought on ebay while I was away! I have a small car, but absolutely filled it with all the parcels that had arrived since I left in April. The staff at Darwin GPO are wonderful, and had kept it all safely in one place ...

So I've spent a couple of days unpacking (and dealing with all the packaging!). One of my purchases is this wonderful set:

Actually, there are two armchairs, but they are quite big - about 12.5cm or 5" wide, deep and high - so I only put one in the photo with the sofa.

The "walls" are an old filing box and the flooring is an old piece of lino, both of which I found at an amazing secondhand shop in Annandale called Recycling Works:

photo from Google; not mine

I really could do with something to cover the metal that held the spring clip - maybe a lamp, like this one:

but I'd need to make it a stand, or hang it - not today, so only half a scene - but I wanted to show you this lounge suite, with a lovely message on the back of the sofa:

"With love from Darwin 1944"

I bought this from Queensland; it was described as a "salesman sample miniature Genoa lounge," and it might well be a miniature sample, but for the message on the back.

1944 was of course during World War II, and following the Japanese bombing raids on Darwin in 1942, many civilians had been evacuated, and there were army bases in and south of Darwin. I think that these pieces may have been made by a service man or woman based in Darwin, and sent as a gift to a child living, perhaps, in Queensland ... I'd love to know more of their history, but these words alone evoke a time and place and circumstances - these chairs have seen a lot.

After the funeral

2011-06-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

Dear friends and fellow bloggers, thank you so much for your condolences, thoughts, love and support after the loss of my mother. I've been gone from here for over a month now, while I've been staying in Mum's house and slowly adjusting to not having her here anymore.

I thought you might like to see some photos of Mum's funeral. They were taken by Rodney Shrimpton, who is a professional photographer as well as a good friend and Reiki student of Mum's.

We chose an eco-casket for Mum, with the image of a stately tree on it.

The words on the top are from William Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wild flower.

The autumn leaves were from Mum's garden.

My sister and I took turns reading the eulogy we had written together - we're smiling in these photos because there were some funny bits ...

It was a lovely funeral, with a lovely feeling in the room. It felt much fuller than it looked afterwards in the photos, I'm sure because of all the love and prayers and thoughts of people who couldn't be there in person.

After the funeral, a friend of my sister's, who was also a student of Mum's at the university here, stayed on for two nights. We went op shopping together (op shop is short for opportunity shop, though no-one ever calls them that - they are secondhand shops run by charities, what are called charity shops in the UK and thrift shops in the US (I think)). Bathurst has several op shops, as well as several other secondhand shops of varying priciness. I found a few nice bits and pieces which I might be able to use in my dolls houses:

Both I and my sister were exhausted after looking after Mum and then preparing for the funeral, and we both got flu afterwards. So I have been taking things very slowly, spending time resting, cuddling Mum's cats, reading, and so on, as well as doing necessary things like organising Mum's tax for the last 3 years and making a list of her investments for the solicitor. Oh, and I have put together another issue of the Dolls Houses Past and Present online magazine, thanks to all the members who sent articles! It was good to have something to focus on that wasn't too demanding (I was a bit less active as editor/researcher this time). So hopefully I'll be back on here a bit more from now on.

Gone

2011-04-30T00:03:00.000-07:00

Mum died early in the morning on Wednesday 27th April. These photos were taken by my sister Deborah in Mum's backyard, ten days before she died. We were able to care for Mum at home for the last 20 days of her life, with support from palliative care, the district nurses, and friends. Mum was happy to be with her two daughters, her cats (and Deborah's), and to be in her own home. We're very sad that she's gone, but very glad to have had this time together with her as a family. Now we're remembering her life as we prepare the eulogy and a slideshow of photos for her funeral.
Many thanks to those of you who have offered your support on my previous post, and your sympathy following Mum's death through facebook or DHPP. It's a great help.

A Mother's Love

2011-04-05T07:55:00.000-07:00

Dear blogging friends, I just wanted to let you know that I may not be posting much over the next month or so, or commenting much on your blogs. My mother has been diagnosed with cancer of the liver, and I am going to be with her for the last phase of her life. My sister is already with her.
It's been quite a shock, although Mum had lost much appetite and a lot of weight over the last year. She had already had major changes after this photo was taken, nearly 10 years ago, as she had a heart attack and stroke 5 years ago, and has suffered vascular dementia since. She is philosophical, and will be happy to spend the time she has left with her daughters, reading good books, and going for drives. It's autumn in Australia (or at least the part she lives in), so I hope there will be some lovely trees to see.
I'll still be dropping in to your blogs and enjoying your company when I get the chance - and perhaps posting a bit too, I'll just see how it goes.

Bloggers' Day of Silence for Japan

2011-03-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

Please consider joining! For more information, see Utterly-Engaged's Shelter Box USA appeal, and the bloggers who had the idea, Ever Ours and Utterly Engaged.

Miniature Japanese bamboo house listed by Fukuoka based ebay seller seizan21:
"The area where I live in has six hours (3+3) blackout plan in a day.
Therefore contact and shipment may be late. Please understand it."

Casas de Muñecas Antiguas

2011-03-12T04:26:00.000-08:00

Who collects antique and vintage Spanish dolls houses? A query from a Dolls House Past and Present member about antique Spanish dolls house furniture got me thinking about this, and I started searching ebay.es and other websites. Just in one evening I found some lovely houses - and I would love to know more about old Spanish dolls houses and their makers.

This one, called Celi, is said to be made in Dénia in the 1950s.

This one is also said to date from the 50s:

while this one, in English Victorian style, is said to date from the 30s or 40s:

The ebay seller who has listed this boxed porcelain dinner set thinks that it was made in Dénia, although the box is unmarked:

The same seller is listing a boxed set of kitchen utensils, which were apparently made in Alicante in the 1940s:

Can anyone tell us more? Was Alicante, and particularly Dénia, a centre of dolls house manufacturing? Do any of my Spanish readers own antique or vintage dolls houses or dolls house furnishings (say, from the 1950s or before)? Or do you know of other collectors, or museums, who own some? Perhaps there is already a website showing them? I would love to discover more!

A Doll's House with a Moral Tale

2011-03-07T05:02:00.001-08:00

I recently bought this little book. It starts off promisingly,

Jenny had the most beautiful doll's house. But she hardly ever played with it. She liked trains, and model cars, and fire-engines because her brother Christopher played with those. And Jenny wished that she was a boy too.

One saturday morning Christopher's friend Tony came to play with him. They got out all the model cars and made a marvellous garage. Then they were the garage-men, and they told Jenny that she could be a customer. But Jenny didn't want to be a customer. She wanted to be a garage-man too.

So what did Jenny do? Did she build her own garage? No,

So she went up to her bedroom and sulked. She laid down on a thick white rug in the corner and rested her head on her hands. And she found herself staring at her doll's house which was in the same corner. Jenny thought how nice it looked, with its garden looking so bright in the morning sunshine.

Perhaps Jenny decided to become a gardener? Perhaps she had a set of Britain's garden pieces, and could plant flowerbeds and trees and vegetable gardens?

No,

She opened the front door and looked into the hall. What nice little pieces of furniture! But they did need a polish.
"Yes, they really do need cleaning," someone said. "And it's such a charming little house, isn't it? Look at its lovely brick chimneys and the porch over the door."

"There are curtains in every room, even in the kitchen. The stairs have carpet on them, which probably needs brus-hing. And I don't think I've ever seen a nice bedroom."

"Such a pity," they said, "that the owner never comes to take care of the house and all the little things in it."

Jenny turned her head to see who it was speaking. It was Teresa, her own walking-doll. She was standing just beside Jenny, looking at the house. She didn't seem to realise that it was strange for her to be speaking.

Jenny doesn't seem to think it's strange either, and instead of running from the room and the doll which walks and talks by itself, she asks,

"What would you do if you were the owner?"

"Well, I'd clean the windows sometimes and polish the furniture. And use all the things inside. And I'd have cars in the garage at the back."

"That's a very good idea," said Jenny. She ran downstairs to the boys and asked for a couple of their cars.

"What for?" asked Christopher.

"To put in the garage of my doll's house."

"That's a good idea," said Christopher. "Why don't you bring it down and put it near our garage? Then you could be a real customer, with your cars in your own garage."

Remember, Jenny didn't want to be a customer, she wanted to be a garage-man too. So,

They did that, and it turned out to be a very good game.
Jenny found she liked being a customer. When the game was over she took the doll's house back to her bedroom and cleaned it from top to bottom. And very nice it looked.
"I'll never leave it all alone like that again, Teresa," she said. "Truly. I'll keep it bright and clean now, and play with it often. Just as you said."

But Teresa didn't want to answer. She had already said all that she wanted to say.

So girls, don't be individuals and explore your own interests. You'll find that you really like being a girl, which means being a customer and cleaning your house. Don't show any gumption - use Gumption to clean your bath!

This book was published in the year I was born, about 10 years after women worked in garages during World War II, and about 10 years before the second wave of the women's movement began. So poor Jenny didn't have much chance. I was luckier, in that I grew up in a messy house where everybody read. My dolls didn't tell me to clean my dolls house, or my own bedroom, though if they had, they might also have said that "they had never seen a nice bedroom," poor things!

I do like this little house - the exterior with its brick chimneys and bright garden, and interior with its 60s pastel blue, pink and yellow bedroom, and kitchen with orange and turquoise highlights. Where is that four-poster bed with red velvet drapes meant to go, though? Are we meant to use that antique bedwarmer in the comfortable bed with its padded bedhead and twin side-tables, while reading by the light of the hanging oil lamp?

Like Jenny, this little house seems somewhat uncertain of what it's meant to be.

Story by Wendy Wilkin, published by Bancroft & Co. 1963.
The illustrator is not named - perhaps Wendy Wilkin illustrated it too?

Diva's Rose Seidler in the SMH - and at Rose Seidler House!

2011-03-03T05:24:00.000-08:00

I'm sure The Shopping Sherpa will post about this, but checking the Sydney Morning Herald website tonight, I was so excited to see her friend Diva's model of the Rose Seidler House featured! And the model is actually at the Rose Seidler House for its Open Day this Sunday! Anyone in Sydney, try to go if you can - the house is fantastic, the model looks fantastic too, and to see one in the other - wow!

Congratulations!

2011-02-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I compiled the list of names for the giveaway draw. This was the order of your comments here and on facebook:

1 KDShort
2 Minna
3 Beatrice Dassonville
4 Cola E-son
5 HepzibethClare
6 Margot Ensink
7 shale
8 Thmini2
9 Christine Jaeger
10 Frederieke
11 DollMum
12 Amy
13 Iluna
14 Rosa
15 Marian
16 Sans
17 Karin Goldring
18 Susi
19 Nicola

Some of you said you didn't want to go in the draw, or didn't say you did want to, so your names aren't there. (I do hope I got that right!)

I had also said that the giveaway was for my followers. Now I know this is a great way to get new followers! ;-) I'm very happy to welcome those of you who discovered my blog through this giveaway, and I've enjoyed exploring your blogs, too. But I am sorry, MarVer, I did not put your name in the draw, as I couldn't see you among my followers, or my blog in your list ...

So, the list above was the final list, and the random integer generator spat out:

Congratulations, Amy! The Meyer family will be coming to live with your peeps on Lundby Lane! Please let me know your address - I've sent you a message through ebay with my email address (ebay's useful for lots of things!) Or you could just send me a comment with your address which I won't publish.

Wow, I look forward to seeing where they'll live - is there an empty house they can rent, or will they [you!] have to buy a new one?

101 Followers! Giveaway!

2011-01-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

Dear blog followers, readers, lurkers, visitors and especially fellow bloggers, I am delighted to have passed 100 followers! And I'm a little ashamed that this milestone comes when I have not been keeping up with all of your blogs. I shall try to catch up, now I'm home and over the first week back at work ....

To celebrate having so many followers, I have a little giveaway. Longtime readers of my blog know that my favourite dolls house dolls are by Erna Meyer - they live in lots of my houses, and I have so many that quite a few live in a large box (a special one for conserving textiles). Among the box-dwellers are some old store stock dolls which I bought in a live online auction some time ago. Because they're old store stock, there are quite a few duplicates, and I would like one family to have a new home with one of my followers.

If you are one of my followers, and you would like a chance to win this family, please leave a comment saying so below. (If you want to comment but don't want to go in the draw, just let me know - I will enter the total number of people who want them into a random integer generator, so I just need to be able to distinguish between people who'd like to have them and people who just want to leave a nice comment ;-) Thought I'd mention that, as I don't always comment on giveaway posts - but now I've used random.org, I know it works on a number, not the actual comments.)

Please note that ONLY the dolls are included in the giveaway - the red leather Lundby lounge is NOT included, it's just so they didn't all have to stand up. It also gives you an idea of their scale: the adults are about 12.5 cm tall (5 inches, or just a little less if their hair wasn't so fly-away), the boy is 8.5 cm (about 3 1/4 inches) and the girl is 8 cm (3 1/8 inches).

Here is Mrs Meyer's twin sister in my 1960s Lundby house:

So, a big welcome to my new followers, and big hugs and thanks for your support to my fellow bloggers over the past couple of years! Good luck in the draw :-)

MORE INFO: I forgot to say when the draw would close! Please leave a note by the end of Wednesday 2nd February if you would like to enter.

Also, some collectors who are followers here usually read my posts on facebook, and they have left comments there. I will include them in the draw (I did just say 'below') - all entrants will be numbered following the order in which you commented (I have the exact date and time of each comment, so that's easy!), and I'll enter the total number into the random integer generator.

Checks, Red & White

2011-01-22T17:40:00.000-08:00

"Hello Aunt Jenny, what are you doing today?" asks Lois.

"I have to go to the supermarket, dear. The boys are coming with me to go to the fossil and mineral museum."

"Yeah," says Paul, "come and look at the insects in amber with us."

"No thanks," says Lois, "I'm going to the corner shop for lollies."

"Why are you holding that old parasol?" asks Bruce.

"It's not a parasol, it's an umbrella. It's going to rain - look at those grey clouds over there."

"Hah, that old thing won't keep you dry! And anyway, it probably won't rain for ages, we'll be right."

"Maybe you're right, dear," says Aunt Jenny, "but we don't seem to have any umbrellas or raincoats. They don't seem to make them in our size - but I'll have another look in the supermarket. Or maybe a mail-order catalogue would have them."

Jenny, her niece Lois and her nephews Bruce and Paul live in Bathurst, in NSW. It rained quite often while I was visiting them - though not as often as in Darwin, and not nearly enough to cause flooding like in Queensland, Victoria, northern NSW and Tasmania.
I'm afraid Jenny's right, that they are sadly under-supplied with wet weather gear. I will have to see what I can do about it!

Another drive through the mountains

2011-01-06T05:32:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I hired a car and drove my mother home from Sydney, because the plane was booked out. We had a good trip and were able to go to a bookshop in the mountains, so this year we decided to drive again.

However, this year we made the trip on December 30th, rather than in January, and the highway was so busy (and had long stretches of roadworks leaving only one lane each way), that at times we were doing only 10 km an hour, bumper to bumper with all the other cars. Some no doubt were returning from or going on holidays, as we were; others were Sydney-siders spending the day in the mountains.

Apart from the traffic, the trip is really too long for Mum now, as her strength and stamina have decreased a lot in the last year. So I don't think we'll do it again - maybe I'll hire a car to travel up to see her instead, or to get back to Sydney after visiting her, as there's a lot to see in the mountains.

This time, I wanted to visit Leuralla Toy and Railway Museum in Leura. It has beautiful large gardens (which we didn't attempt), and imposing stone steps up to the entrance (which we managed) - and a wonderful collection of Lenci dolls, model trains, tintoys, and many other toys. Here are some things that caught my eye.

All the comforts needed for your railway trip:

Some relaxing places to visit:

Interesting people:

and impressive buildings:

More Lotts Bricks! a different set from the one I have - it looks like these were not intended to be painted.

This tall tower looks like it's made from a wooden construction set, but I'm not sure.

As well, there is a vintage, homemade dolls house. It is also called Leuralla, and was part of the exhibition of Dolls Houses in Australia 1870-1950 ten years ago. It's the main reason I wanted to visit the museum, but it's not possible to see it close up, as it sits in the children's bedroom by the window:

There's so much to see at Leuralla, I'd love to go back one day.

As we drove on over the mountains, we passed Trains, Planes and Automobiles. I had been to their shop in Annandale when I stayed with my sister last year, and I'd hoped to get to the Mount Victoria shop on this trip. We left Leura much later than I'd expected, because of the heavy traffic, so I thought that the shop would be closed. However, their Open sign was still out, so I pulled over and went in. Here's what I found:

A tiny caravan, with stars and moons on the roof! It's marked only with the number 2, on the inside of both the roof and the cabin, so I don't know who made it. It's quite light metal - aluminium, or an alloy of some kind? - and is missing the yoke for the horse. I love the colours and the design - and as the roof lifts off, I could furnish it, for a very tiny person - it's only 2 inches long!

01 01 2011 - Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T03:48:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! Ein frohes neues Jahr! Bonne Année! Godt Nyttår! Feliz Año Nuevo! Buon Anno! Gott Nytt År! Onnellista uutta vuotta! Gelukkig nieuwjaar! καλή πρωτοχρονιά! Feliz Ano Novo!

I wish you all a happy, healthy, peaceful and fulfilling new year. Our blog world has grown a lot over the last year, it seems to me, and I'm sure we'll have more new bloggers this year. It's a bit like living in a dolls house museum and art gallery that changes daily! And where many of the artists and visitors and curators become friends, and share support and inspiration. Thank you for sharing last year, and here's to another year of great things!

My new year wishes come with a page from my Australian Nana's step-mother's 1886 scrap album. My Nana did not like her step-mother, but she had kept this album and gave it to us when we were children. We loved looking through it and making pencil rubbings of the embossed pictures - and the back and front covers:

The page I've scanned has two New Year cards by S. Hildesheimer & Co (an English greeting card company), both with very traditional European images of forget-me-nots and a passion flower.

My tiny azure flowerets
Come wishing thee good cheer,
And ask for thy remembrance,
When dawns the glad NEW YEAR.

The New Year bring thee
Health and Happiness

There is also an Australian scene, showing The Lower Light, Sydney (from a Cave on Coast). This card was published by Gibbs, Shallard & Co (a Sydney company, and probably the first local printer of Australian Christmas & New Year cards). I'm sure I should know the name of the native plant depicted on it - but I can't remember it.

(I included an Australian card from this album in my 2009 Christmas post, too - it shows Watson's Bay & Gap, NSW with more native flowers.)

There are six cards in the album which have blank spaces within the design for writing in. I think they were probably sold for friends to exchange remembrances by. The two on this page show a school room (with a poor little dunce wearing donkey's ears!), and a clock tower. One is inscribed "When this you see, remember me, and bear it in your mind, Let the world be as it may, Think of me as you find." (And make of that what you may!) The other says more simply, "With best Love to Bella" (my Nana's step-mother's name was Isabella).

Happy New Year!

(I'm staying with my mother with dial-up internet only, so please forgive me if I'm a bit slow at leaving comments on your blog posts, or responding to yours.)

Happy Christmas!

2010-12-24T21:49:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas, dear fellow bloggers, followers and readers! I hope that all of you have a safe and peaceful Christmas, whether you are spending it with family, with friends, or alone.

In previous posts, I have mentioned the scrap albums which were either made for me, or passed down in the family. The images in this post come from a scrap book which my English grandmother made for me - probably when I was about 5 years old. I don't remember exactly when she sent it, but it contains a lot of Christmas images, so it may have been a Christmas present.

She also included lots of images of northern hemisphere winters, no doubt so that her Australian granddaughter could become familiar with them.

One thing I love about this scrap book is that I could run my finger over the pictures and feel them. The robin at the front of the stove here was cut out of a card and pasted on to the larger picture - and on a lot of pages my grandmother had built up a picture this way, making a very tactile scrap book, as well as one that is visually stimulating.

Love and hugs to you, dear fellow bloggers - see you after Christmas!

Mrs Santa delivers

2010-12-23T20:32:00.000-08:00

Santa is so busy delivering presents all around the world - of course, Mrs Santa also goes out on delivery runs.

I hope Santa and Mrs Santa bring wonderful gifts for you this Christmas!

A fancy dress party

2010-12-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the end of a school year, the children are having a fancy dress party. Everyone has come dressed up, including the adults!

In one room, there is a game of pass-the-parcel. An older boy, dressed as a sailor, provides the music on his accordion. He stands in the doorway between classrooms, so that the children in the other room can hear the music too.

In the other room, there's a game of musical chairs.

What is a lamb doing, playing musical chairs?

Oh! It's Mary, and everywhere that Mary goes, the lamb goes too.

Back in the other room, the first and second layers of paper have come off the parcel, and around it goes ...

Oh dear! Clown's big feet have tripped up on the lamb's lead! Who will be able to get up first and join in again?

Mary is more concerned about her lamb, so clown is still in the game.
That little bride looks very determined, doesn't she?

It's fun ripping paper off the parcel, and everyone is getting a turn ...

Only five children are left playing musical chairs .... Woops, one little girl sat down on the floor, instead of a seat! Four left now ....

The parcel is getting smaller, but still there are more layers ... Who will find the last layer?

Only two chairs left ..... around they go, and then Mr Tim takes away one chair. Now only one is left - who will sit down first when the music stops, the bride or Little Red Riding Hood?

We've reached the final layer of paper in the parcel, and the chimney sweep unwraps it - it's a mouth organ! He is very happy.

And the game of musical chairs has ended too, with Red Riding Hood getting to the chair first!

Phew! Time for the children who played Musical Chairs to play something quieter - they go into the other room, for a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Mrs Thomas (dressed as a queen) gives each child a tail, and then a mother dressed as a maid ties on the blindfold ... and takes it off again, so they can see how they did ..

Oh dear! That tail is at the right height, but it's not really on the donkey, is it?

Sally the painter gets her tail closer ...

Clown makes the children laugh - his tail is right in the middle of the donkey's belly!

So Sally is the winner - her prize is a tiny, bouncy rubber ball.

In the other room, the children have been playing Blind Man's Bluff:

Then it's time for judging the best fancy dress costumes.

The couples join up, and the children who brought accessories for their costumes pick them up again. Mary, of course, has had her lamb with her all evening!

There are prizes for the couple with the best costumes, the best occupational costume, the best folk costume, the best fairy tale character, the best nursery rhyme character, the best historical costume, the boy with the best costume, the girl with the best costume, the scariest costume, the sweetest costume, and the funniest costume.

Who do you think should win each prize?

Are there any categories I've forgotten?

The Rosetta Stone Award

2010-12-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

The Rosetta Stone Award was created by a committee of My Realitty's dolls in March this year. One doll from each house attended the board meeting, and, after other business, announced the inaugural Rosetta Stone Award, which is given to a dollhouse blogger who has contributed greatly to the information of dollhouse history. The inhabitants of the dolls houses explained that "though these houses started as toys and may have led a perilous life, once they are in the harbor of the collector they have a story to tell. This award is to acknowledge the sleuthing it takes to discover that story."

This award is issued to only one person, must be kept for 6 months then passed on to another worthy recipient.

I was very honoured to be the first recipient of the award. I think the dolls are probably less impressed with my timeliness in passing it on. Although my dolls decided who to award it to next in plenty of time, I have been very tardy in making the announcement. My apologies.

Valerie Smith has been nominated by the inhabitants of my dolls houses as their representative, and is very happy to present the Rosetta Stone Award to:

Diepuppenstubensammlerin!

Valerie would like to thank diepuppenstubensammlerin for her assistance in identifying the designer of her kitchen table and chairs (Bodo Hennig), as well as the original designer from which her kitchen cabinets were copied (probably Modella; this is a more affordable copy by Blue Box). Many vintage photos of Valerie's family, the descendants of Erna Meyer, have also been located thanks to diepuppenstubensammlerin - and other families, such as the Cacos and Hückels, have also benefited from this service. Valerie Smith also recommends a visit to diepuppenstubensammlerin's online photo albums - Valerie says she loves looking through them!

Snow in Summer - My New Baby

2010-12-16T05:57:00.001-08:00

I recently bought a new house on UK ebay, with the help of Dolls Houses Past and Present member Linda. It's an old English style brick house, which (based on the lighting and furnishings) dates to the 1930s.

The house is small - 1/24th scale, or 1/2" scale, measuring 8 1/2" (21.5 cm) deep, 13" (33 cm) high (to the chimney tops), and 22" (56 cm) long (including the bathroom and shed).

Every roof surface and window sill has a dusting of snow (cotton wool), so it must have been part of a winter scene at one time.

It needs a bit of work - this is how it looks at the moment.

I'm not really sure which side is meant to be the front - one side has a knocker on the door, while the other side has a door with a porch and a letter flap. I think the side with the knocker is probably the back, as the shed also opens on this side. I love the shed door - it opens top and bottom, and has a wooden latch to close the bottom half. This side of the house opens on hinges - or will, when it is reattached to the hinges.

The front door also needs to be re-hung:

There are also some windows that need replacing:

The back of the roof lifts up on hinges to access the two bedrooms:

There is one set of Dinky bedroom furniture - bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers and stool - in excellent condition.

The roof is kept shut with a little hook on each side, which goes into a hook just below the eaves:

Downstairs is a stone-flagged kitchen on the right:

The stairs go at the front of this room, something like this I think, although the gap at the top doesn't seem quite right. There are steps missing - two are with the house, but I will need to make some replacements as well.

On the other side, downstairs, is the drawing room and hallway, here without the dividing wall:

and here with the dividing wall in place:

The far door opens into the bathroom, which is also furnished with a Dinky set:

The shed contains the electrical wiring and switches:

As you can see, both the shed roof and the bathroom roof lift off. The undersides are constructed to sit on top of the walls:

The dolls house is handmade, and probably a one-off. A lot of work has gone into creating all the detailing - the roof "slates" are made from paper stuck on to postcards, painted grey and cut into individual tiles, which have then been stuck down on to the wood:

The bricks and the flagstones in the kitchen are painted, and pencil outlines are visible between the bricks:

The panels in the doors are marked by pokerwork (or pyrography) and chasing, and I think the functional letter-flap and the door knocker are handmade too.

This photo also shows another thing I need to deal with: woodworm holes, which I could not see on the auction listing!

As well as the two sets of Dinky cast metal furniture, this house also came with 3 rugs and 4 lampshades:

The rugs have also suffered from pests, as you can see clearly from the backs:

There is also a hand-drawn picture of a dog, stuck to what I think is part of a matchbox:

The poor dog has also suffered the depredations of pests, poor thing! I'm wondering if one reason that there are only two sets of furniture is that the rest was wooden, and was eaten. The metal alloy that Dinky furniture was made from also deteriorated, though, so if there were other Dinky sets they may have broken and been discarded. Anyway, I'm delighted to have two sets in very good condition.

So there's a fair bit of cleaning and repair work to do before any dolls can move in! I won't get much done before Christmas, but hopefully I can work out how to treat the woodworm, just in case there are any live ones still.

Lott's Bricks

2010-12-07T02:14:00.000-08:00

I bought this set on ebay recently - it's a set of bricks made of artificial stone, called Buildec, by Lott's Bricks of Watford, in Hertfordshire. They are quite heavy, and feel very smooth and cool.

They come in a box which also contains four bottles of paint.

I think there should have been two layers of bricks in the box. These are the models you can make with box 1:

I have enough bricks to make the cottage, with a few left over for a path and a fence:

I had just enough to make the aeroplane hangar:

and the seaside shelter:

but only by turning some of the patterned bricks so that the plain side faced out.

Originally, the bricks would have been plain, without colour, and then the children who played with them would have painted them, following the directions in the instruction booklet:

The box lid states that no previous knowledge or skill is necessary, and the booklet even gives instructions for mixing the colours (blue, red, yellow and white) to create green, orange, a black substitute, brown, mauve and grey.

It looks like you could order extra bricks, which would be very useful if you wanted to make more than one building at a time, or if any broke!

The little figures by the cottage are 3.5cm tall or less, making this set 1/48th scale, or O scale in model railway terms.

I don't know anything about these china figures, except that they were "an attic find" in Kent, but they have no maker's mark on them. (Sorry, these photos have too much flash - I'll try to get better ones.)

Lott's Bricks were made in Watford (in Hertfordshire, England), from about 1917 to 1967. I found a wonderful website which shows many sets of Lott's Bricks, and says that these Buildec bricks were introduced in 1936. I'd first thought they might be older, but the 30s explains the models of an aeroplane hangar, an omnibus waiting room and a garage!

More disappointment, but plenty of dolls houses

2010-11-30T02:37:00.001-08:00

In among the dolls house plans for sale, and dolls houses donated to fetes or kindergartens, which I've found written about in old newspapers, I discovered this little paragraph:

Myer is one of the major department stores in Australia, and in November 1982, their Sydney City store had a display of dolls houses designed by students at the Institute of Technology for a major international competition.

I was intrigued - what was the competition? and who were the students? More importantly, what did the dolls houses look like, and where are they now? Selling for $500 in 1982, you would hope they had been treasured.

Well, I was able to find the answer to the first question fairly easily, helped by Architoys blog entry in March on the Architectural Design Profile from 1983 entitled Dolls' Houses. Architoys described the stages of the contest, which was announced in 1981 and judged in Spring 1982. There were 260 entries from 27 countries, including 11 from Australia.

So this was most likely the international competition for which the dolls houses on display at Myer were designed. Copies of Architectural Design: Dolls' Houses are still around, and I bought one on ebay and waited eagerly for it to arrive.

Here's where the disappointment comes: from the 260 Stage 1 entries, 50 designs were chosen to go on to Stage 2. For Stage 2, 20 internationally renowned architects were also invited to design a dolls house. The book names only the 50 architects who progressed from Stage 1 to Stage 2, as well as the invited ones, of course.

And, I discovered, none of the 11 designs from Australia progressed to Stage 2. So none of the Australian architects are named, and none of the designs are shown. I haven't yet been able to find any photos of the 1982 Myer display, either.

But, as I said in the title of this post, there are certainly plenty of dolls houses in the book. Or at least play houses, or model houses, or model cities. (The winner was a 7 foot high tower, which children could get inside.) Here are some that I like.

Some constructional dolls houses:

On the left above, by Hans van Well of the Netherlands, a suitcase which contains the elements of the house (columns and wall-blocks), and which forms the base of the constructed house. (In the middle is an elevator; not sure how it works.)

On the right above, by Armand Heuse and Yves Mounier of France: "the observation of children's drawings did show the importance of the roof and chimney, the staircase and the contour of the facade." The wall panels, decorated with different shapes and colours, are interchangeable.

More constructional houses:

On the left above, a design from Great Britain by Brown, Greenwood and Taylor, "in the style in which Frank Lloyd Wright would design a dolls' house." This model had been played with at the Young Family Centre in Islington (London), at the time it was submitted.

On the right above, a design from West Germany by the aptly named Sieber, Timmermann and Baumgarten, in which one side is a greenhouse with plants which grow and die.

Some houses made from blocks, by Akroyd & Whatley of Great Britain (left) and Takefumi Aida of Japan (right):

Aida's house has a Japanese style-room, a dining room and a drawing room, with a fireplace in the middle of the house.

There are also more traditional dolls houses, in the sense that the structure of the house is fixed, though some parts move.

The one on the left above is by M.J. Long and Colin St John Wilson of Great Britain, and it came 3rd in the competition. On each side, drawers open out, forming rooms, gardens, terraces and so on. I think that some of the rooms/drawers can be left furnished when they're closed, but obviously terrace furnishings would need to be put away.

On the right above is a house by Roy Kingston of Great Britain. Inside the house, the two floors of rooms revolve independently, like stage sets.

These next two houses are very different in style, though both open out from a cube:

Left: Peter Farrall of GB; right: Charles Moore of the USA.

There is one designer whose dolls houses I've come across before, Jane Blyth of GB. "The house is AD 1982 and the incumbants ADman, ADwoman, ADbaby and ADdog." She adds, "I acknowledge that many children are incurable realists and for them a dolls house with Brobdingnagian cracks in the floor will be a most unsatisfactory toy"!

Faith Eaton had the Weavers' House by Jane Blyth in her collection; it's pictured in The Ultimate Dolls' House Book. There's also one in the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green, the Happy Birthday dolls house (sadly no image on the website).

And finally, a dolls house by someone I would like to see more dolls houses by, Charlotte Baden-Powell of GB.

This is a house by the sea, to provide additional scope for playing.

Inside, "there are curtains to be pulled, lights and fires to turn on, cars and a boat to manoeuvre, and a bell to ring at the front door."

This house won the children's vote.

There are some nice houses here, as well as some weird ones, and lots of inspiration for making dolls houses - most also show the architectural drawings (and a few didn't get past the drawing stage). The models which reached this stage and were constructed were auctioned by Sotheby's for the Save the Children Fund. So, like the Australian dolls houses which didn't reach Stage 2 of the competition, all were sold. I'm still curious about what the Australian houses looked like!

Disappointment

2010-11-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

Where has the last month gone? Partly work has been challenging, partly I've been busy with the Dolls Houses Past and Present magazine, partly it's the start of the wet season here, so it's hot and steamy ...
But, before November expires, here is a post or two.

I recently bought this copy of the Australian Home Journal, dated October 1967, as I've started looking for doll's house references in magazines as well as in newspapers.

Here's what the ebay listing said:

Hmm, conversion of a dolls house? I'm not one for doing major renovations on old dolls houses, but still ...

Here's what the contents list showed:

Conversion of a "Doll's House".

As in,

So, no need to worry about old dolls houses being vandalised! Though why anyone would want to remove that lovely iron lace and a shady verandah (unless they couldn't afford to have the rust treated), I can't understand ...

It was not by any means a complete waste, though.

"Does a dull dining area destroy your appetite? Bring in the color:"

Also available in a vast range of vivid colors is Il Cubile, by Mim, "selling like hot pizzas all over Italy," and as "at home" in your bathroom, bedroom and living-room as it is around the swimming-pool:

Personally, I'd rather sit here, in the "H-shape for Harmony" house:

More comfortable, and less colourful!

A little bit of Illinois in every state in Australia

2010-10-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

As you know, I love old home-made dolls houses, and I have quite a few in my collection. I would have more, if I had room and if ebay sellers could freight them all to me .... but as neither is the case, I enjoy looking at them on ebay, and saving some of the photos.
Then, as I've been looking through old Australian newspapers online, I saw ads for dolls house plans - and realised that some of the plans for sale were the same models that are now coming up for sale on ebay.
Here's one that I've seen a few models of:

and here it is advertised in the Sun Herald in 1978:

The ad says that the house is 27 1/2 inches high and 29 inches wide, and the back is cut away for play. The pattern included acetate windows with printed dividers, and decals for the house and window boxes. The house "will be cherished by any little girl fortunate enough to receive it, [and] is sturdy enough to last for several generations."

This seems to be borne out by the houses which have survived - the one above has wonderful 1970s wallpaper, and, except for one of those acetate windows, looks pretty sturdy 30 years on.

I was pleased to know the source of the design, and the date of this house, and then ebay threw up another piece of information:

The plans themselves are currently available for sale, and, as you can see, they give the designer's name: A. Neely Hall.

Another house, which came up on ebay in Sydney recently, was also made from plans for sale - the ad I found was in the Sydney Morning Herald of 1982:

Turns out this house was also designed by A. Neely Hall - this I discovered by browsing the galleries of old dolls houses on KT Miniatures. Marilyn Pittman of Ohio found the same model dolls house at a flea market, and later, she says,

While browsing eBay, a "Craft Patterns Doll House Packet" came up for auction, and it was my house! After buying the pattern, my decision was made for me. The pattern had an address, so I contacted the museum in Elmhurst, Illinois, and the rest is history.

The house now resides at their Historical Museum in the section of their famous architect, Albert Neely Hall, 1883-1959. His first pattern for this house was printed in 1958 and there were several subsequent printings of the pattern of the house, breezeway, and garage, as well as patterns for furniture. The brick paper, paper to cover the shutters, and plastic windows were included in the pattern packet.

So houses made to this plan could date anywhere between 1958 and 1982, or even later. Probably the best way to date them is by the materials used to decorate them - the offcuts of flooring, wallpaper, fabric and so on.

Elmhurst, Illinois' website gives more information about Albert Neely Hall. He wrote many books and articles in newspapers and magazines, and with his brother, illustrator Norman P. Hall, he founded Craft Patterns, which published the designs he created. The business was continued in Elmhurst by other family members until 1986.

(Another Elmhurst resident was Walter Burley Griffin, who designed the Australian capital city, Canberra. Elmhurst Historical Museum recently had a fantastic-sounding exhibition,

Dwellings: A Study in Residential Architecture
Using Elmhurst as a case study, this original exhibit takes visitors on an exploration of the diverse architectural styles of the western suburbs. From bungalows and prairie style residences to turn-of-the-century Victorians, Sears mail order homes and more, Dwellings depicts the architectural details of neighborhoods in the Elmhurst area and explains how the city evolved as a classic example of Midwestern suburbanization. The exhibit includes special features on the work of Walter Burley Griffin, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright; a video on "The Lost Homes of Elmhurst"; and a hands-on kids' activity desk with architectural building blocks.

Pity it's finished, but still, Elmhurst sounds like an interesting place to visit!)

Here's an early design by A. Neely Hall, published in a 1937 issue of Science and Mechanics Magazine, for sale on ebay right now:

So, he was certainly a prolific designer of dolls houses, and it seems likely that he (or his company) also produced the plans for these other houses which could be ordered from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald.

From 1973, this open-backed house on castors, pattern no. 411:

(Perhaps the maker of this model, listed on ebay in Adelaide four years ago, had taken to heart the message of the feature (and photo, right) above the ad: "Eye appeal need not rely on furniture .... today's excitement lies in backgrounds provided for that furniture".)

In 1979, plans for this three storey, front-opening house were advertised; I've seen several models of this one too:

A lot of the plans I've come across were for two- and three-storey houses. There were also two bungalows, neither of which I have photos of, unfortunately.

This fantastic model was advertised in 1966. A house of this design was sold on ebay in Perth a couple of years ago - I don't seem to have saved the photos, but I do remember that it had the same vinyl flooring as my re-decorated Lines DH/C.

(Notice how it's the same little girl, in the same outfit, and holding the same cot, as in the Cape Cod plans?)

UPDATE: Thank you, callsmall, for noticing this house on US ebay, and letting me know about it:

This house is signed on the bottom, and dated 1965. The maker chose a quite different colour scheme from the maker of the model sold in Perth - that had a red roof.

And this one I don't think I've seen yet, a ranch house from 1978, the same year that the Swiss chalet plans were available.

So parents who wanted to make a dolls house for their daughters (or possibly even sons?) had some choice of styles. The plans right at the top of this post are a teaser - they're in an ad for a 1975 issue of Woman's Day magazine, so not available from the newspaper. Hope I can track down a copy of the magazine - at least for a better image of the plans!

And just to finish, who would have thought it was International Women's Year the year before this ad appeared?

In Keystoneville

2010-10-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

In Keystoneville, in Keystone Square, there are four houses.

The Jacksons step out of the house at the same time as Mr Weisman.

"Good morning," they say. "How are you today?"

On the other side of the square, Miss Marks and Mr Rimmer have also appeared.

"Good morning," says Miss Marks. "You're as regular as clockwork, Mr Rimmer!"

"Good morning, Miss Marks. You're an early bird today!"

Off they all go, to the centre of Keystoneville.

Mr Rimmer works at the Keystone Garage.

Mr Weisman needs to buy a new chamois leather for his car.

Mr Jackson is the pharmacist, and Mrs Jackson works at the bakery.

I wonder what Miss Marks is buying at the hardware store?

All is quiet at the fire station, and the cinema doesn't open until the evening.

Oh dear, it looks like someone else is at work too!

Better call the Keystone cops!

These model buildings are probably made by Keystone - Keystone made toy garages and dolls houses similar to these. The two-storey houses here are about 2" high, and the garage is 1 1/4" high. They are made of solid blocks of wood, with the cardboard and paper litho wrapped around them. The little figures are by Preiser in 1:160 scale (N scale, in model railway terms).

UPDATE: Jennifer McKendry shows the box which these came in, labelled Keystone Wood Block Village. So yes, definitely Keystone! (Scroll down her 1940s page past the real houses and past Rich to get to Keystone.) And Callsmall has a complete boxed set, with labelled slots for each building, plus trees, walls and squares of grass to sit the houses on!

Keystone of Boston: the history of the firm which made Keystone dollhouses

2010-10-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, my fellow blogger Florine and I collaborated on writing about Keystone dolls houses for the Dolls Houses Past and Present online magazine. Florine has an extensive collection of Keystone dolls houses, and she presented a chronology of the designs and features, showing catalogue pages and photos of her dolls houses. I researched the firm itself.

The older editions of the DHPP magazine are only available to members, so I like to republish my articles here too. And I've recently acquired a set of miniature model buildings which are probably Keystone - the garage is labelled 'Keystone Garage', and the houses look like full-size Keystone dolls houses. So it seems a good time to republish my history of the Keystone company, and I'll show the model houses in my next post. Not everyone will be interested in detailed research, I know, so feel free to skim through and look at the catalogue pages and ads, and wait for the mini buildings!

Jacrim
According to Zillner and Cooper’s Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and Their Furnishings, the Keystone Manufacturing Company was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in the 1920s by Chester Rimmer and Arthur Jackson. First called Jacrim, it produced junior grade movie projectors. However, the List of Toy Companies at antiquetoys.com and Seaworthy Boats, Jacrim Manufacturing both show that Jacrim actually produced boats – Chester Rimmer (b. 1899) and Arthur Jackson were both MIT graduates, in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.

The Boston City Directory for 1925 lists Jacrim Manufacturing at 3 Cross St, Malden. David W. Rimmer was president, John W Rimmer was secretary, and Chester A Rimmer was treasurer. According to Seaworthy Boats, Chester Rimmer’s older brothers were coopers and cabinet makers by trade. Arthur Jackson was not an office-holder in the company, and apparently left Jacrim to join the American Enka Company, which produced rayon, in 1929.

The 1926 Boston City Directory entry for Jacrim Manufacturing is very informative, showing that it was incorporated in July 1922 with $10,000 capital. Jacrim has now moved from Malden to 615 Albany Street, Boston. Chester Rimmer is still the treasurer, but his brothers no longer hold positions within the company (whatever David Rimmer’s trade was, he became a freight traffic manager). Instead, the president is Isadore Marks and the secretary is Benjamin Marks.

Marks Bros

Who were Isadore and Benjamin Marks? I looked them up in the same 1926 Boston directory, and found that Isadore Marks was president of Marks Bros Company (address rear 288 A Street, Boston) and also president of Jacrim Manufacturing. Benjamin Marks was treasurer of the Marks Bros Company, and secretary of Jacrim Manufacturing Company. The entry for Marks Bros Company states that it was incorporated in 1915 with $80,000 capital, and the other office holder, the secretary, is Rebecca Marks. They are toy manufacturers.

Furthermore, there are several entries for Keystone as well in this 1926 Boston City Directory. The Keystone Manufacturing Company shares an address with Marks Bros, rear 288 A Street Boston. It was incorporated in 1919 with $93,000. The president is one Edward M Swartz, the secretary is none other than Isadore Marks, and the treasurer is a Mrs Jennie M Weisman.

So the picture looks rather more complicated than has been previously described.

Clearly, the Marks brothers are key figures. The 1920 US census shows the family living at 21 Esmond Street, Dorchester, Boston. They were born in Russia (or Balbeershek (modern Białobrzegi), Poland, according to Joseph Marks’ naturalisation record) and immigrated in 1895. As well as Isadore, born ca 1887, and Benjamin, born ca 1896, there was an older brother Joseph Marks, born ca 1882. All were toy manufacturers. Rebecca Marks, born ca 1890, was the housekeeper; a Rose Marks, born ca 1894, ladies’ haberdasher, also appears. They had not always been toy manufacturers – the 1910 census shows Joseph Marks as a house painter, Isadore Marks as a gasfitter, and Rebecca Marks as a stitcher of neckwear.

As the 1926 Directory stated that Marks Bros was incorporated in 1915, I looked at earlier city directories. In the 1917 Boston City directory, the listing of Toy businesses does not include Marks Bros – instead, it lists Joseph Marks Co, rear 2176 Washington St, Roxbury; Marks & Knoring Co, 40 Winchester St; and Moss and Marks Co., 101 Albany St, 4^th floor. The alphabetical listings confirm that Joseph Marks Co, toy manufacturers, comprised Joseph, Benjamin and Isadore Marks. Isadore was also president of Moss & Marks Co Inc. Benjamin was the sales manager at 2176 Washington St (Joseph Marks Co.).

The Marks’ partners in these firms were Abraham J. Knoring, born in Russia, a dealer in bottles, who was also secretary and treasurer of Mark V Knoring Co, at the same address, 40 Winchester; and Isidore Moss, born in Austria, a clothing manufacturer. I can imagine that Moss & Marks Co may have made children’s play outfits; Celluloid Dolls (by Pelletier Robinson) says that, according to Coleman’s Encyclopedia of Dolls, Marks and Knoring made dolls with celluloid faces.

By 1919, the names Joseph Marks Co, Marks & Knoring and Moss and Marks had given way to Marks Bros Co, and the address given was 40 Winchester St (where Marks & Knoring had been in 1917). There is no entry for Joseph Marks. For a short period in the early 1920s, Isadore and Benjamin Marks also made dolls under the name Andrew Manufacturing Company (address 463 Dorchester av, Boston).

So, it seems that the Marks family, after arriving in the United States from Russia, worked as house painters, gas fitters, haberdashers and neckwear stitchers until they had enough capital to set up their own business as toy manufacturers. They also seem to have had an eye out for partnerships which would enable them to expand their range (whatever that was, initially).

Toys found under the Marks Bros name include many Mickey Mouse toys made under licence from Walt Disney (bagatelle, Pin the Tail on Mickey Mouse, a Mickey Mouse toy piano with die-cut cardboard dancing figures, a Mickey Mouse target game, Mickey Mouse hoop-la, dexterity games, toy soldier set, etc), as well as dolls with celluloid socket and shoulder-plate heads, toy cardboard telescopes, toy baseball and horse racing games, party horns and miniature rocking toys.

The partnerships with Moss and Knoring were followed by one with Edward Swartz of the Keystone Manufacturing Company.

Edward Swartz, Keystone

Edward M Swartz was born in Posvel, Russia (modern Pasvalys, Lithuania) in 1886. The 1920 US census shows him as a manufacturer of toy moving pictures, who employed others in the business. Mrs Jennie M Weisman, treasurer of the Keystone Manufacturing Company, was his mother-in-law, and was born in Kiev. One of his brothers-in-law manufactured paper cups.

There are 9 companies called Keystone in the 1920 Boston directory – Keystone Coin Controlling Lock Co, Keystone Envelope Co, Keystone Fibre Co, Keystone Lubricating Grease Co, Keystone Printing Co, Keystone Sales Co, Keystone Wire Matting Co, Keystone Woolen Mills – and Keystone Manufacturing Co, makers of children’s furniture. I doubt that all these companies were related; perhaps there is some feature of Boston that makes Keystone a likely name.

Keystone Manufacturing Co, children’s furniture, is interesting, though, as it is exactly the name used by Edward M. Swartz for his toy moving camera company, which was not yet listed in the directory. The following year, 1921, the directory shows that the children’s furniture manufacturer had changed its name to Keystone Furniture Manufacturing Co (Abraham Cohen, 90 (later 86) Merrimac St Boston), and the Keystone Manufacturing Co (Edward Swartz, president, 53 Wareham Street, Boston) manufactures toys.

As the 1920 directory shows Isadore Marks associated only with Marks Bros Co, it seems likely that Edward Swartz set up Keystone Manufacturing in 1919 without any involvement of the Marks family. However, by 1922 Isadore Marks is listed as the secretary of Keystone Mfg Co, which was then at 53 Wareham St, Boston, and by 1925, Keystone Mfg Co and Marks Bros Co were sharing the same address, 288 A Street. As noted above, by 1926 Isadore and Benjamin Marks were already officeholders in the Jacrim Manufacturing Co. Jacrim still had separate premises at 615 Albany St in 1926 and 1928, but by 1930 Jacrim too was sharing the premises at 288 A Street.

Amalgamation

Sometime after that, all three (or more?) were amalgamated under the name Keystone, with Edward Swartz and Chester Rimmer retaining management positions in their respective specialties. It’s possible that the name Keystone was chosen over Marks to avoid confusion with Louis Marx and Co, the well-known manufacturers of metal dolls houses and plastic furniture, or the even better known comedians, the Marx Brothers Chico, Harpo and Groucho.

Ad from 1938 Playthings. The Marks Bros had a showroom at 200 5^th Avenue in 1935, and the 1938 Keystone Manufacturing catalogue also gives a showroom address here.

In the 1938-39 Keystone catalogue which Florine owns, as well as the 2 pages of dolls houses, there are:

· 10 junior movie projectors, a page of adult projectors and 8 and 16 mm movie cameras,

· several pages of heavy steel “ride ‘em” toys for boys and girls (models of full-sized Packard vehicles produced with permission of the Packard Motor Co.),

· children’s kneehole desks and matching chairs, musical cradles,

· soldier forts,

· beautiful 30s style speedboats, plus sailboats, a fireboat, and surprisingly (as it was before WW2) an exploding battle fleet and shooting submarine….

With our knowledge of the individual companies which had merged, we can see here Edward M Swartz’ toy movie cameras and ride ‘em toys; Chester Rimmer’s toy boats; and possibly Abraham Cohen’s children’s furniture. Keystone continued to acquire the ranges of other companies: just before World War II Keystone purchased the tools and dies from Kingsbury Toys, which was going out of the toy business.

Popular Mechanics Jun 1938

We don’t know whether dolls houses were made by one of the original firms before their merger (although no dolls houses marked Jacrim or Marks Bros are known). It would be a natural progression from manufacturing children's furniture – or possibly from boats and wagons – or from Marks’ Bros laminated cardboard, paper lithographed toys. Perhaps, when the three companies had amalgamated, they realised that dolls houses were missing from their otherwise extensive range of toys, or that they needed to cater to girls too.

World War II

Keystone continued production during WWII; the 1942-43 catalog, which Florine owns, added lots of war toys (mainly boats; Chester Rimmer’s contribution perhaps), a small “bowling alley” on legs, 2 pages of dollhouses, still had several pages of junior projectors and the adult cameras and projectors, but added a page of 8 and 16 mm movie films, child related and travelogues. (In fact, it seems that Rebecca Marks had continued stitching ties, as a 1942 issue of The Billboard advertises “a line of summer neckwear in the latest designs” made by the Keystone Manufacturing Company. “A spokesman for the firm pointed out that it has been in existence for over 20 years and has always given satisfactory service.”)

As we’ve seen, prior to WWII the history of Keystone was one of several small companies being set up and then taken over by the Marks Brothers, initially keeping their original name and separate premises, but then all becoming part of the Keystone Manufacturing Company.

Keystone garages in Popular Science 1947 and 1950 LIFE 27 Nov p77

1950s: Splits

The 1950s brought changes. Isidore Marks died in 1951 (and Benjamin in 1956). By 1953, Keystone had split into four separate entities once again. The Keystone Camera Co (manufacturers of motion picture apparatus), and the Keystone Manufacturing Co (manufacturers of metal toys) were both under the direction of Edward M Swartz, the founder.

Chester Rimmer, founder of Jacrim Seaworthy wooden boats, was president and treasurer of the Keystone Wood Toys Inc, with Chas V Kesselman as vice-president. Chester Rimmer’s home address is given as Norwell, Massachusetts, from 1953 on, and he died there in 1984.

Another company, Keystone Import & Sales Co (toys) was under the direction of one David Dobro.

Takeovers

It seems that these four companies did not continue to operate independently for very long. According to the February 1958 issue of Playthings, Keystone Wood Toys had just been purchased by the South Bend Toy Manufacturing Company of South Bend, Indiana. South Bend Toys had existed since the 1870s, making wooden toys such as croquet sets, rocking horses, wooden and wicker doll carriages, etc. Florine’s most recent Keystone house, which is still in its box, is marked Keystone Division, South Bend Toys; it is one of the models shown in the 1955 Keystone Wood Toys catalog issued from Hallett St, Boston. The Playthings article states that “all of the Keystone tools, dies, jigs, equipment, etc., are now in South Bend and the entire South Bend toy organization is busy getting set up to get into production on this merchandise.”

However, in the same month, the Playskool Manufacturing Company of Chicago acquired a fifty percent interest in South Bend Toys. No changes were planned at that point in the management or sales organisation of South Bend Toys, but Playskool later became a subsidiary of Milton Bradley, which then became a subsidiary of Hasbro. In its earliest catalogues, Playskool had offered a collapsible wooden dolls house with four rooms and a sun parlour, and in the 1950s or 60s, produced play sets, including Let’s Play House . Perhaps South Bend Toys, or Playskool, produced the Keystone-type dolls houses shown in the FAO Schwarz catalogs as late as 1967, but the catalogs do not identify the suppliers.

According to a 1981 Nutshell News article by Dee Snyder, the Keystone Camera Company was bought by Berkey Photo, Inc. in 1966 and moved to Clifton, N.J. This article also states that “the wooden toy division was sold to the creative person who had designed and supervised the building of the houses and other toys.” This would seem to suggest that Chester Rimmer (who became president of Keystone Wood Toys in 1953, and who had definitely designed the wooden boats) was also the designer of the dolls houses, but this is not certain.

Getting your ducks lined up in a row

2010-10-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

Pan recently did a delightful post about a Barrett's Novelty box she acquired, with a porthole mirror. She also has other items in this set, and wondered if anyone had other items. Her earlier post about her Barretts Pop-Up Electric Toaster inspired me to photograph my boxed sets of Barretts Novelties when I visited my mother in July, so here they finally are!

Mine came via America, where they were sold at Shackman's in New York:

Inside are the original Barretts boxes:

The boxes are illustrated and labelled on all sides:

Don't you love the logo? A beefeater standing at arms inside the B! The company which made them is A. Barrett & Sons - here they use the rather grand name of The Barretts of Sonderburg Street (their premises until 1970).

A. Barrett had been making metal dolls house accessories since 1920, in partnership with F.G. Taylor, as Taylor & Barrett. After World War II, both men set up independent companies with their sons, and A. Barrett & Sons produced dolls house pieces from the early 1950s until 1983, with metal pieces gradually replaced by plastic. If you want to know more about Barrett and/or Taylor, Marion Osborne's book Bartons "Model Homes" has a history of the firms, and lists and photos of the items they produced. The Novelty Box series was sold from about 1959 to 1970, but a lot of the items were available previously (in metal) and later (in plastic).

The contents of these three boxes are in my late Victorian Cupboard House, so it's puzzle find the Barretts:

(There's another Barretts' Novelty set in this photo - can you pick it?
Hint: see the list on the box below! I don't have the box for this one.)

(No, this toast was not made in the pop-up toaster!
Someone must have eaten those slices, and made some more on the range.)

Recently I bought another boxed Barretts' Novelty Set. This box doesn't have a label or a picture showing what it is:

Can you tell?

Yes, it's the ducks!

Here they are in the living room of the Italian Villa style house.

Marion Osborne says that Nos 9 and 10 were added to the list on the box when Barretts re-ordered the boxes for the novelty series, and had to take into consideration future lines. The scales apparently never got past the prototype stage; she believes the Sunbeam Mixer was part of the Kitchen Accessories set, but didn't know what else was. Does anyone have a kitchen set?

I've just won another lot of boxed Barretts Novelty sets, so I'll show them when they arrive. Until then, here's a cat whose kittens have grown up and left home:

Introducing Miss Birdie Fethalite

2010-09-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Miss Birdie Fethalite is an Australian doll, who was born in the 1940s in Sydney. She has an extensive wardrobe, consisting of two summer frocks:

two winter coats:

a siren suit:

and a party dress:

From the front, Birdie looks nicely rounded. Her back view, however, shows that she is flat, and even slightly hollowed out:

From the back, you can see how her clothes clip on around her waist. Sadly, she has had an accident some time in which she lost most of her right arm.

Birdie is not as fortunate in regards to housing as she is with her wardrobe. I'm sure she would love to live in the Marquis kitchen and other rooms in that set. As I didn't win it, however, I have posed her here in front of Marquis kitchen furnishings set up in front of the photo of the inside of the box on my computer screen. It looks just the right size for her, and the walls even match one of her dresses - but as she can't live in front of the computer all the time, I will have to find another home for her!

Perhaps she could live with the Cacos, and they could all share the curling tongs:

This little doll is marked with the Fethalite brand name and symbol:

The number 204/1 appears to be the product number. All the pieces of clothing are also marked: the frocks are 204/2, the long dress is 204/3, the coats are 204/5, and the siren suit is 204/6. She must have had another outfit too, as 204/4 is missing from this set.

Fethalite plastic products were made by Pierwood Plastics (Piercy & Ashwood) in Chatswood, Sydney. qilich has a Fethalite catalogue from 1949, which shows miniature kitchen and bathroom sets, and a couple of dolls, but not this one. Her hairstyle and the siren suit definitely date her to the 1940s, so she was probably made before 1949. I wonder if she was always alone, or whether a family of dolls was produced?

Update: Ysé6 and Roberta have told me on flickr that the same doll was also made by the Selcol company in England. A Selcol doll is listed on ebay at the moment - here she is with her outfits and her right arm:

The clothes are almost the same as Miss Fethalite's, although the decoration on the long dress is different. The piece missing from my set is probably the little gym tunic, here in yellow next to the yellow frock.

Thanks, Ysé6 and Roberta - though I'm sorry to realise that all Australian-made plastic dolls house miniatures were made using moulds from US or British companies! Seems we did OK on production (at least while tariffs were in place), but didn't produce original designs.

Update 2: Sally also has a Selcol doll set: see her blog stitchywoowoo. It's clear from Sally's pictures that the frock is a pinafore dress - Miss Birdie's frock doesn't have straps, so that's another difference between the English and Australian clothes.

And Marcie Tubbs has very kindly emailed to say that in her book Dollhouse and Miniature Dolls 1840-1990 (which I have!), she pictures both a 'Peggy' doll made in the US by Ideal in the mid 1950s, and a Lido doll dress set, also made in the US. She also received a photo from a reader of a boxed set of 'Peggy's Magic Snap-On Wardrobe', made by Bell Industries (in the UK, I assume).
The dolls and clothing sets made by Selcol, Fethalite, Ideal, Lido and Bell, in the UK, US and Australia, are almost identical. As Marcie says, this doll really travelled! I wonder where she started?
The mid 1950s Ideal catalogue which Marcie has describes her wardrobe as consisting of 2 bathing suits, pajamas, 2 over-coats, hat, 2 school dresses and party dress. The Lido set identifies the bathing suit as a play jumper.
Sally describes the 'school dress' as a pinafore dress (the Australian one isn't, as it doesn't have straps). I was seeing the clothes through the lens of 1940s British novels, so the bathing suit / play jumper looks like a gym slip to me, and the pajamas look like a siren suit. If Peggy was originally made in the UK, the siren suit would make sense (and as I suggested, it goes with her 1940s hairstyle). If she was first made in the US, then they probably were pyjamas originally.

So, more questions: where was she first made? when? and how did she come to be made or sold by 5 companies in 3 continents? We may be able to answer some of them if we're lucky enough to find dated catalogues showing the Selcol and Bell dolls one day.

Thanks, Marcie and Sally, for sharing your dolls!

Dolls Houses for the War Effort

2010-09-13T23:30:00.000-07:00

I've been having fun looking at mentions of dolls houses in old Australian newspapers. I've noticed that quite a few dolls houses were raffled during WWII, to raise money to support the troops and prisoners of war. In Tasmania alone, the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury reported on over 12 dolls houses donated for raffles. Some were made especially for the raffle, some were old childhood or family dolls houses. The Mercury was also particularly good at showing photos of the dolls houses, and I thought you might be interested to see them.

This dolls house was made by the employees of Nettlefold's Bodyworks, Hobart, in their spare time. Mr Bernard Walker (an architect who was involved in the development of the Cadbury Estate in the 1920s) designed the dolls house, and Miss L. M. (Maud) Poynter (a potter and painter) and Miss E. (Spring) Reid made the furniture and fittings. It was described as a very modern dolls house, "modelled on the lines of a modern home, and fitted throughout with snappy miniature furniture."

The lounge, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and dining-room are all completely furnished down to the tiniest detail. Real carpets are laid down and the rooms are fitted with electric light. A special feature is a roof garden, complete with swing seat and a large sun umbrella. Special pottery equipment and dolls were made by Miss Poynter. The house is painted in cream and has a brown roof.

The house was donated to the Red Cross Prisoner-of-War Fund in January 1942, and drawn in March. The Mercury published the amount raised in 8 weekly instalments, totalling over £120. Here's the winner, Margaret Neave of Battery Point, Hobart, with the house, showing just how big it is:

(Nettlefold's had another dolls house on display two years later, in 1944, when they posted the following public notice in The Mercury:

Would the boy who took Toy Motor-Car from the Doll's House at Nettlefold's Showroom return same to save further trouble.)

Two months later, in May 1942, another dolls house, fully furnished and with running hot and cold water, was donated in aid of the Air Training Corps equipment fund. This raffle also realised £100; the winner was Miss Diana Rex, c/o Mr. G. Rex, Morrison St., Hobart. Sadly, there are no photos of this house with its running water. Although the maker is not named, F. X. de Bavay was responsible for placing the announcement of the winner in The Mercury; he is named as the maker of another dolls house in 1945, so perhaps he made this one too.

Then in October 1942, members of the Apex Club of Hobart designed and built the "Dolls' Dream House", which they donated to the Red Cross "Young Bill" prisoners of war appeal.

This house measured 4' 6" by 2' by 2' 6". It had a sun roof and a garage, and the furnishings included tiny carpets, bedsteads, blankets, pillows and pictures. Most of the furnishings were made and donated by Peter Eldershaw, then a patient at Wingfield House for crippled children (he later became principal archivist, State Archives of Tasmania). A Mrs Basil Crisp donated a Parisian teaset to the house in the second week of the raffle.

The dolls house was exhibited in Hobart, Launceston, Burnie and Devonport, and regularly reported on in The Mercury. The manufacturers of the materials used to make the dolls house took advantage of the massive publicity to advertise their products. Here, we are informed that "The Feltex floor covering for the "Dream House" was donated by Felt and Textiles of Australia Ltd."

Another version of this ad informs us that

"MASONITE, "the wonder Board with a Thousand Uses," was used in the construction of the Dolls' Dream House.
This Advertisement is inserted by the manufacturers, THE COLONIAL SUGAR REFINING CO. LTD. (Building Materials Division), to assist in the war effort."

(Who would have thought masonite was made by the CSR sugar company?)

and a third tells us that

"The painting of the Dolls' Dream House was carried out entirely in "Dulux."
This advertisement is inserted by the makers, British Australian Lead Manufacturers Pty. Ltd., to assist the war effort."

All three companies had further information at the bottom of the advertisement about how they were contributing to the war effort:

A dinghy was raffled at the same time as this dolls house - between them, they raised £516. The winner of the dolls house, drawn at an Apex Ball on December 19th 1942, was Elsa Young of 35 Tennyson Street, East Malvern, Victoria. Did she take her dolls house home to Victoria, I wonder?

In May 1944, two Hobart children made a dolls house for the Red Cross. They called it Austerity House, because it was made from "boxes and "bits and pieces" at the cost of 1/."

The children were Brian Kemp, aged 8, and Ann Kemp, aged 10; their father, LAC Wilfred Kemp, was in the Royal Australian Air Force. Brian had already made models of a man-o'-war and a hospital ship, which he had donated to the Prisoners of War shop. Ann was "an accomplished knitter, making her own jumpers and cardigans, and now knitting her first pair of gloves." She made "vases and pot plants [for the dolls house] from coloured bottle tops, and match boxes and cotton reels were used in the construction of the furniture."

This dolls house was won by Betty Groombridge, of Lower Longley.

Catherine Macleod of Richmond was one of the people who donated her childhood dolls house in aid of the war effort - it was "most attractively refurnished by Mrs J. Eldershaw and her son, Peter" (who furnished the Apex dolls house, above) before being raffled for the Red Cross in May 1944.

Another old dolls house had been donated to the Battery Point Red Cross at the end of 1943. This wasn't just a childhood dolls house - it was nearly 100 years old!

Ouch! They are leaning on an antique, 3-winged Georgian dolls house to write the raffle tickets!!

The Mercury gave the history of this dolls house (I've added to it with a bit of online research). It was sent from England to Mr William Knight in Van Diemen's Land, for his baby daughter, Emily Lang Knight, who was born in 1850. She grew up and married Henry Thomas Maning in 1876, and gave the dolls house to her daughter, Frances Maning, born 1878, to play with. Frances Maning became Mrs Cecil Baldwin, and donated the house to the Red Cross in 1943. The Mercury reported that

It ... is in an excellent state of preservation. Only a comparatively small amount of renovation was necessary, and this was undertaken by Miss Poynter, who is well known in the world of art, and is a keen worker for the Red Cross.
Most of the furniture is the original, and a feature is a fascinating little writing desk complete with candlesticks. The remainder is more than 50 years old, and is in perfect order.

(Miss Poynter had also furnished the Nettlefolds' dolls house raffled in early 1942.)

What an amazing piece of Tasmanian history. It would be one of the oldest dolls houses in Australia, if it still exists. Strangely, this raffle was to be drawn after only one week - I wonder how much it made, compared with the raffles that went on for weeks with huge publicity. The winner was J.S. Ramsay of Launceston. I'm going to try tracing this house!

"Housing problem solved - for this little lady at any rate! She was purchasing a ticket in the doll's house raffle in connection with the Allies' Day Appeal yesterday."

The Allies' Day Appeal was held in July 1944, and this dolls house was raffled on the Free French Stall. The reports don't give any information about who made or donated the dolls house, and it's hard to see the details in this photo. It seems to be a fairly traditional two-storey house with a simple pitched roof. Lorna Ahearne of Mt. Nelson won this house (so perhaps this little girl's housing problems weren't solved!)

Finally, in February 1945, F.X. de Bavay, master brewer and general manager of the Cascade Brewery, made a dolls house which he called the Victory Doll's House. He donated this house to the Tasmanian Society for the Care of Crippled Children and thc Tasmanian Sanatorium, so it wasn't strictly speaking in aid of the war effort - but the name certainly referred to the war! The winner of the Victory Doll's House was Miss Sallie Hall, of 10 Tasma Street, Launceston.

Does anybody recognise the Nettlefolds' house, the Dolls' Dream house, or the Georgian house? They are all fairly distinctive - if they have survived, they would be quite easy to recognise, I think. I'd love to know where they are!

The oldest dolls house for a dolls house? (Updated)

2010-09-13T05:12:00.000-07:00

I've just ordered Halina Pasierbska's book Doll's House Furniture. Google books has a preview, including this photo, of the nursery in Ann Sharp's baby house:

Ann Sharp's house dates from 1695, and is the oldest surviving English baby house. Could this be the oldest surviving dolls house for a dolls house?

Update: Christine and Beatrice asked on facebook about the size of this tiny dolls' house. Flora Gill Jacobs, in A History of Dolls' Houses, gives the height of the whole house: 5' 10" (so 70", or about 1.78m). The house has four storeys, including an attic - I think that this room would be about 18 1/3" high (or 46.8 cm). (The attic and basement have less height than the two main floors, so this room is probably a bit more than a quarter of the total height.) As you can see, this dolls house is almost half the height of the room, which would make it about 9" high. I've been trying to work out the scale. I think the rooms being represented here (in Ann Sharp's house and the dolls' house dolls' house) are a bit over 12 1/2 feet high. So I think the scale of the little house is about 1/44th. (Corrections welcomed!)

Flora Gill Jacobs quotes a Mrs Willoughby Hodgson, who in 1917 wrote an article about Ann Sharp's baby house for The Connoisseur . The dolls' house is, Mrs Hodgson says, made of and furnished with cardboard (though Halina Pasierbska says it's paper, and thinks Ann Sharp probably made it herself).

The tiny prints which adorn its walls are believed to represent Bishopthorpe [residence of the Archbishop of York], with the church in the grounds, and the furniture includes a grandfather clock, flap tables, footstools, a slung looking-glass, dressing tables, kitchen stove and dresser, and many other articles.

The Iberian Connection

2010-08-29T04:58:00.000-07:00

Some bloggers are very good about welcoming each new follower individually. Although I don't do that, I'm very grateful to all my followers, readers and those who find me through google and comment on the post that interests them. I'm delighted to see that I now have 88 followers - thank you all very much!

I particularly want to draw your attention to two recent followers' blogs: El cuartin de juguete and architoys. Both have posted about things that will look very familiar!

Remember the Villa Hogarin and Hogarin family on Florine's blog?

Photo by Florine

Here is Papa Hogarin on El cuarte de juguete's blog:

Photo by El Cuartin de juguete

Callsmall has found some wonderful fold-up dolls houses, and posted about one by Winthrop Toys in April:

Photo by Callsmall

From El Cuartin's blog, I learned that the same house was made in Spain by Daypa:

Photo by El Cuartin de juguete

Have a look at the other dolls houses and toys on this blog, too!

While El Cuartin posts in Spanish, Architoys is a Portuguese architect. When I checked out his blog recently, I discovered some fascinating posts about construction toys. Remember the Super City set which I bought, and the Skyscraper version which Oese bought? Here is one of the scenes Oese has created with her set:

Photo by Oese

Architoys discovered that Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland created an installation called "Super City" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2005:

Photo from Architoys blog

Apparently, the Super City set was released by Ideal in 1967, and withdrawn a year later! (Hmm, didn't Ideal release the Petite Princess line just a couple of years before, and withdraw that too?)

Architoys gives a link to a NY Times slideshow of Douglas Coupland's house, where you can see some of his collection of construction and architectural toys - and the house itself, which looks as if it was built from a Super City set!

When Architoys visited the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg this year, he also went to the German National Museum, and photographed some fantastic dolls house furniture, including this display of cardboard furniture made by Hapa in 1945:

Photo by architoys

The desk set is the same as my PI Angus Shand has in his office:

- I had not seen the bedroom set before.

There are lots of other interesting posts on architoy's blog, so do have a look. And no, I don't understand Portuguese, but I have learnt how useful google translate can be for a language you don't know!

I love how I can keep learning more information, and getting new perspectives on my dolls house collection, through the world of blogs and other networks on the web :-))

Rocket Science and the 1940s

2010-08-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

This week, I contacted two people who bought 1950s Australian toy catalogues on ebay. Both sent very helpful replies. One collects Australian tintoys, and the other, qilich, collects Australian and New Zealand made space toys.

qilich shared some research on Australian toy manufacturers, and reminded me of an essential source for research: the digitised Australian newspapers (1803-1954, but not yet complete) available on the website of the National Library of Australia. I have previously searched this, for family history and for dolls houses, but had forgotten about it when writing my last two posts.

qilich had found advertisements for the Marquis kitchen set in newspapers dating from 1948 and 1949, so they're earlier than I'd thought. The 1949 ad, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday 30 November, is wonderful, as it shows the whole set illustrated:

As you can see, it cost 22/6, which sounds quite expensive to me - although the year before, David Jones, an upmarket department store, had advertised it for 27/6!

qilich also found a 1948 ad for the Tiny Town Kitchen Set I showed in my previous post. It was on sale for 1/9; the original price was 3/7. Being on sale in March 1948 suggests that it was not new - I'd think it would have been released in 1947 at the latest.

The same sale included Miniature Furniture, 6/- now 3/-, and Morley Toy Furniture (8/6, now 6/-), as well as Little Housewife Sets (5/2, now 3/-). It might be possible to find out more about the Morley Toy Furniture, but (saving an illustrated ad), I doubt we'll ever know exactly what the Miniature Furniture was!

So, having been reminded of this wonderful Australian research source, I did a search for Wee Folks, the company that made the Dining Room Table and Four Chairs in my previous post. Turns out they were based in Melbourne - the company advertised in the Melbourne newspaper The Argus. The first ad I found was in 1944, for Skittles, The Old Favourite Game, 8/6 each. Other ads were for factory space, plastic moulding, staff (secretarial and packing), and residential properties to buy and rent. The company was also the subject of legal action in 1949, so the records of that case might give more information about the people involved. I haven't yet found any more information about their toys, but qilich also sent me a 1947 article from Australian Plastics about plastic toys, which shows the Wee Folks table and chairs:

The Wee Folks dining room table and four chairs are in the centre of this display from Australian Plastics September 1947.

So, there are ads for the 3 Australian-made boxed sets I've posted about which date from 1947, 1948 and 1949. All of them were available in the late 1940s, earlier than I had estimated in my earlier posts. Thank you, qilich, for providing evidence to date them - and for reminding me of a great resource for research!

More Australian-made dolls house furniture

2010-08-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here are the two boxed sets that I did win. They belonged to the same lady who had owned the boxed Marquis set as a child.

One is another set of plastic furniture, a lovely deco style dining table and chairs:

The top of the box says Wee Folks Miniature Furniture Set No 1 - Dining Room Table & Four Chairs, while the side adds A Wee Folks Production, Wee Folks Australia Productions.

Some of you might recognise this set:

(Table: 1 1/2" high, 4" long)

It is almost identical to a set made by the British company Bex - according to Margaret Towner, the trade name of the British Xylonite Company, Ltd, of London. I have the chairs and sideboard from the Bex 'Toy Town Furniture' set - here are a Wee Folks and Bex chair side by side, and the bases of each:

The Wee Folks chairs are unmarked, while the Bex chairs show Made in England - A Bex Moulding. The Wee Folks table does have markings:

As well as Wee Folks Aust., it shows a diamond with the letters A.E.C. within it.

I haven't been able to find out anything about Wee Folks Australia so far. Apart from the Australian Electoral Commission, the Atomic Energy Commission, etc, A.E.C. was the name of a UK based heavy vehicle manufacturer, in existence from 1912-1979: AEC stood for Associated Equipment Company. This A.E.C. did have a presence in Australia - here is an entry from a 1930s Sands directory of Sydney:

But were they the makers of this dolls house furniture? If they made all the components of the buses and trucks they manufactured, that would probably have included some plastics, so perhaps they were - though the British A.E.C. used a symbol with a triangle, not a diamond.

There's one more clue on the box -

- the name FARRELL in tiny print - but does this indicate who made or printed the box, or have something to do with the furniture?

The other box contains two sets of kitchen pots.

It's called the Tiny Town Kitchen Set No 1, and contains two sets of four saucepans and a frying pan. This box is more informative, as it names the manufacturer as Goodwood (Aust.) Productions.

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has a collection of scale model cars made by Goodwood (Australia) Productions. According to the museum's database, Goodwood Productions Pty Ltd (based in Melbourne, in Victoria) made a range of zinc diecast scale model toy cars between February 1952 and June 1961. The range featured models of Australian-made cars, trucks and specialist vehicles, and were very popular with children as they "represented familiar outlines", but eventually, the British-made Dinky and Corgi model cars out-competed them.

(Frying pan: 1 1/4" diameter, 2 1/2" long)

These dolls house pots were probably made in the same time period, the 1950s to very early 1960s - and as they belonged to the same little girl, the Wee Folks dining table and Marquis kitchen most likely date to the same era. Thank goodness this little girl kept the boxes - the pots are completely unmarked, and only the table in the dining room set is marked, so without the boxes, we would not have known that these were made in Australia, let alone who made them. Both boxes very tantalisingly say "Set No 1" - what other sets did they make, I wonder?

Could Goodwood possibly be the manufacturer of the Australian-made metal furniture which I've shown before? This has been thought to have been made in Sydney, but there's no catalogue or packaging evidence yet, as far as I know. The model cars are painted in similar colours - red, green, blue and cream enamel - although these were probably common colours at the time. Some of the cars are described as having marks (words and numbers) pressed into the underside of the model (though most have raised marks). The metal furniture has numbers impressed into the backs or undersides of the pieces. Perhaps it would be possible to compare the metal, the style of the numbers, and the shades of the paintwork, of the furniture and cars.

The Marquis of Cabinets

2010-08-18T02:38:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned the Australian company Marquis before - I have a Marquis blue and white kitchen set in my Italian Villa style house:

Amazingly, a boxed set of this furniture has just sold on Australian ebay. I'm not the new owner, as I was outbid - I did win two other boxed sets of Australian-made dolls house furniture, which I'll show when they arrive. However, the seller very kindly said that I could save her photos of the set. Amazingly too, the seller said that these sets had come from the original owner, who played with them very carefully when she was young, and was now letting her grandchildren play with them!

According to the lid, the Marquis Little Homemaker Modern Plastic Kitchens in Miniature are Educational, Washable and Durable.

The side of the box shows the company name and address:

Commonwealth Moulding Pty. Ltd. Arncliffe Sydney Australia

I wish all boxes were as informative!

Inside, the table and chairs, sink, stove, fridge, and three cupboards - one with straight sides and two with open, rounded-end shelves - are all in their original slots in the cardboard:

And look at the sides of the box - there are pictures! The inside of the box and the inside of the lid are both printed with images of the walls of a modern kitchen, showing two windows, a door, a clock, 11 cupboards attached to the wall (plenty of storage in this kitchen!), and tiling below that.

So the room which is pictured on top of the lid can be made out of the box!

I know that Marquis also made bathroom furniture for dolls houses - I have some green pieces, and have also seen a pale blue set. Now I'm wondering if they also came in a box which could be used as a room - and what other sets Marquis made.

I have heard or read that the Marquis dolls house furniture was made using the same moulds as the American-made Plasco furniture. Does anyone know if Plasco also sold their furniture in boxes which could function as rooms in a dolls house?

UPDATE: Thank you, Louise! Louise of Grandmas Attic - Toys and Treasures has posted scans of boxed Plasco sets from Dian Zillner's book American Dollhouses and Furniture from the 20th Century. Plasco boxes did indeed form a corner of a room - Zillner's book pictures a living room, bathroom and bedroom. Also shown are boxes with a cellophane window in the lid, which don't seem to have had the images printed inside. Perhaps these replaced the ones with cardboard lids? perhaps when Plasco started making dolls houses as well? I wonder if Marquis followed Plasco in changing the packaging - I've never heard of a Marquis house, though.
Louise also has a wonderful pink and grey Plasco bathroom (in cellophane window box) for sale.

Remember this?

2010-08-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

Remember this modernist, 3 storey house which was offered twice on ebay UK, the year before last and last year? Oese also made a miniature version of it . (If anyone can remind me which blog or dolls house website we discussed the second sale on last year, please do! I know it's there somewhere ....)

Another house in this design was listed on ebay recently:

this time with a label:

"An O.D. Product
Made in Scotland"
around a drawing of a thistle.

(See redrickshaw on flickr for better photos of this house.)

Coincidentally, at about the same time, Rick posted a query on Dolls Houses Past and Present about another house with the same label - this one a more traditional two storey house with lattice windows, pitched tile roof, and entry porch on the right.

So I did a bit of sleuthing in the old British telephone directories*, and found an O.D. Construction, Woodworkers, at 2 Wellington st. Paisley (ph PAIsley 4533) from 1956 to 1958. (Paisley is in south-west Scotland, very close to Glasgow.)

In 1958 there is also a listing for O. D. Products, Toy Manufacturers, at 20 Blythswood st C2 (ie, Glasgow Central) (ph CENtral 5584). From 1959 to 1970, the only listing is for O. D. Products in Glasgow - O. D. Construction in Paisley doesn't continue after 1958, and O.D. Products is not listed in Glasgow after 1970.

So I suspect that they started in Paisley as general woodworkers, found their toys were very successful, set up in Glasgow as toy makers in 1958, and ceased the general woodworking business after that. The dolls houses with the O. D. Product label probably date to between 1958 and 1970.

Are there more designs out there? What other toys did they make, I wonder? And who was the genius who designed this 3 storey dolls house?

(They're online at Ancestry, which is subscription only, so I can't link to it.)

Around the corner ...

2010-08-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

from my sister's new granny flat in the Sydney suburb of Annandale are lots of interesting places. Down the lane and right is Revolver, a cafe in a former corner store (photos from my sister's landlord's blog Me fail? I fly!):

Up the lane, right, and up the hill, are the Witches' Houses (including The Abbey, Oybin, Greba, Hockindon, Kenilworth and others):

And then, up the lane, right, and down the hill, is Trains Planes and Automobiles' Sydney store. Very luckily, I was in Sydney on the two days a week that it's open, so I was able to go in and browse. This is a lovely little shop, full of old wooden glass-fronted cases which display the said trains, cars and planes.

In one of the cases I found this lovely wooden station:

- a model representing Manchester station, which has a label identifying the maker as 'Scale HUGAR Model Buildings, HUGAR MODELS LTD. Epsom, Surrey.'

I hadn't heard of Hugar before, but found some information on the web: Hugar models were made by Hugh Gardner (apparently in his garden shed); Hugar was also known for his

Britain

’s farm and military items. The authors of the website which mentioned the Hugar farms planned a booklet on Hugar Models, and had found links between Hugar and other model railway makers including Basset Lowke.

(I have some Basset Lowke scale model posters - I intended to use some as pictures in the kids' bedroom of the Triang 52, but my attempt to frame them wasn't successful. I'll try again.)

I love the art deco style of this Hugar station. I also love how all the signs advertising tobacco have the possessive apostrophe s after Wills - they all read Wills's, with a small, superscript 's. I'm not sure yet how I will use it, as it's in the model railway scale OO (1:76). The platform is 2 feet long, and the entrance way onto the station is 2 1/8" high. Perhaps I will give it to some dolls house children to play with as a toy, or not worry too much about the scale and use it as a station with small dolls - or somehow put it in the distance so it looks the right scale!

In which I become an internationally exhibited photographer ...

2010-07-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

in the miniature world of dolls house bloggers!

Rory Hill, a successful accountant in Houston, Texas, recently moved out of his mother's house at the age of 37. His new bachelor pad, a mid-century modern Schönherr bungalow, is the subject of a recent spread in the Houston publication My Vintage Dollhouses.

Looking for just the right art work to compliment his "new" furniture, Rory visited a couple of his favorite galleries, Nau-Haus and John Cleary. Finally, in a small gallery in his new neighborhood [Rice Village , north of Rice university], he discovered several prints he thought would be perfect for his new space. The prints were listed by Australian photographer Rebecca Green, but no titles were given. ...For now he decided to refer to them as Table Tops and Stacked Tables.

I was thrilled to see that not only have I made my first international sales*, but they have been featured in this wonderful publication!

The prints that Rory Hill chose were originally published here as part of my study exploring differences of scale. I'm delighted that Rory gets such enjoyment out of them! And I like his names - I would probably have called them something like Tables Scales I and Table Scales II. Thank you, Rory - you have given me great encouragement, and I wish you all the best in your new home.

*The author of the spread on Rory's Schönherr bungalow informed me that "Rory said he is sure the check is in the mail....;)". I didn't ask which postal service he used!

Bliss in Winter

2010-07-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

During the last couple of weeks, I was visiting my mother in Bathurst, NSW. It's winter in non-tropical Australia, and the temperatures in Bathurst went as low as -4°C overnight, to 11° or 12° during the day. Not as cold as many places in winter - but compared with Darwin (22° overnight - 33° during the day, and not much variation over the year) - bliss! I do like rugging up in winter woollies, and snuggling under warm blankets and doonas at night - and we went to my favourite cafe, with an open fire, and drank hot chocolate and tea - and I picked violets and jonquils for my bedroom. Definitely bliss!

I didn't take photos of that kind of bliss, but I did photograph another kind: the Bliss furniture which my grandmother collected.

My Realitty has been posting this month about her Bliss house, and she has many of these same pieces of furniture too.

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of Bliss Toys and Dollhouses (Dover Publications, 1979) at a secondhand bookshop in Sydney. This tells me that the R. Bliss Manufacturing Company of Pawtucket, Rhode Island (US) was founded in about 1832 by one Rufus Bliss. He started out making wooden screws and clamps for piano and cabinet makers. Bliss' nephew Albert Bullock joined the company, and then Alva Bullock and Edwin Clark formed a partnership, but the company kept the Bliss name, even after Rufus Bliss' retirement in 1863 and several changes of ownership. 'Bliss Piano' and 'Bliss Doll House' do have a different ring to them than 'Bullock & Clark Piano', etc!

It seems that their first known dolls house was advertised in 1889, long after Rufus Bliss had died. So he certainly didn't design the dolls houses and furniture that bear his name.

This set of wooden furniture with paper litho designs of children and the letters of the alphabet probably dates to 1901, according to Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and their Furnishings. Each piece has a different picture of children engaging in various activities. The sofa - A B C D E and P and Y on the arms - has two children playing with a doll on the back. On the seat, a boy is lying on the ground. He doesn't look very happy - has he been making sandcastles and fallen over?

The alphabet continues on the chairs - I have G/L, H/M and J/O. My Realitty also has I/N. I think we are both missing F/K.

On G/L, we seem to have a depiction of a youthful sailor farewelling his sweetheart, who is then shown weeping. H/M has the interesting combination of a little girl looking at a tea table, and a policeman directing traffic. J/O has a young tailor measuring his equally young client, and a girl in an apron carrying a basket.

The table which goes with these chairs does not show any letters, just some children cooking:

so which pieces completed the alphabet? I can see in Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and their Furnishings that the piano stool, which I'm missing, had T U V, but I don't know where Q R S and X and Z appeared. On other sets, the piano showed QRST (and the stool UVW), but as you can see, the piano in this set has no letters either:

Very appropriately, the children on the piano are playing musical instruments - perhaps in a military band, as the top of the piano shows 5 little soldiers and their tents.

There were several sizes of furniture available, but even within a set, you can see that the scale varies - the chairs are larger in scale than the sofa, table and piano. I have the piano, the sofa and the table, which are in 1" to 1' (1/12th) scale in the nursery of my Lines No 17. The chairs are too big though - they are 5" tall, and more like 1 1/2" to the foot (1/8th scale).

(This photo shows an earlier arrangement, before I added the Bliss table and replaced the black tin piano (hardly visible on the left) with the Bliss piano. At the moment, all the furniture is wrapped up, so I couldn't take another photo (and last time I photographed the other rooms in this house, all the photos I took of this room were out of focus!)

Wallpaper, old and new-old

2010-07-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

After finishing the inside of the DH/D, I turned my attention to my Battlement House. This house is the abode of an antiquarian's daughter (and possibly the antiquarian, when he is home from his explorations).

To start with, I placed the furniture I've been collecting for it, in the room which will be the antiquarian's study, along with the carpet, pieces of printed out wallpaper, and some antiquities from the antiquarian's collections.

(The wallpaper is a 1918 design by C. F. A. Voysey, which I've reproduced from an illustration in an old Past Times pocket diary.)

Then, I decided that I would remove the electric light switches. They're very large, and date from about the 1920s, so if I ever use the lights in this house, I'll get it rewired.

Underneath the switch by the fireplace is a fragment of earlier wallpaper. It looks like green and grey diamonds on a buff background.

So, now - do I try to remove the paint from the walls and see if there are more fragments? I'm not sure how I would get the paint off - I suspect scraping would just bring up the top, printed layer of the paper with the paint, and leave, if anything, just fibres from the buff coloured paper itself. I think this paper is the same date as the lights - it matches the colour of the lampshade in this room - so it's probably not the original wallpaper. It's still old, and I'll try to protect it somehow so that if someone removes the wallpaper I put in, this fragile bit of paper doesn't come off with it.

Dolls House Eggs, Sunny Side Up!

2010-06-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

I received my copy of The Doll Family (as blogged about by CallSmall and Diepuppenstubensammlerin) recently. It's great - I love its comments on the doll world!

Father Doll likes his eggs "sunny-side up." Mother makes them just right, never breaking the yolks. Of course, that's easy to do with doll-house eggs!

I collected up the eggs from my dolls houses. My dolls are not very well supplied with eggs! They have more cake and tea than eggs, poor things!

There are 1/16th scale eggs from the Swans' Deluxe Caroline's Home, and very large fried bacon, egg and tomatoes on toast (1 5/8" long) from the Californian bungalow style house.

The boiled eggs in eggcups and the eggs in a bowl (hugely different in scale - the eggs in the eggcups are almost an inch tall, compared to just over quarter of an inch for the eggs in the bowl!) are from the Triang 52. I haven't yet put the two fried eggs (1 1/2" long) in a house - I wonder which the lucky dolls will be? And I'd better add eggs to the dolls house shopping list!

San Francisco, Turn of the Century

2010-06-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

I called my blog Rebecca's Collections because I thought I might show some of my other collections here too. I have shown one of my scrap albums, and My Realitty's post s this month about her 1890 s San Francisco Italianate style hou s e have inspired me to show some of my great-grandmother Florence Mason Palmer 's first album. This album was started by her mother and continued by Florence, who went on creating scrap books and keeping newspaper cuttings during her later life. It's no wonder I'm a collector, really!

Somehow, I seem not to have photographed the cover of the scrap album, so that is something to do on my next visit to my mother. It's a couple of inches thick, and the pages are thick, good quality paper, as you may be able to see from the scans.

My great-grandmother, Florence Elizabeth Mason, was born at the Grand Hotel, San Francisco, in November 1877. Here she is in the mid-1880s:

And here are her parents, John Elliott Mason and Nellie Chapman Mason:

J. E. Mason was a civil engineer. He was born in New York, and arrived in California in the early 1870s. He and his father, and W. S. Chapman, Nellie's father, were involved in real estate and installing water supplies and irrigation in the new colonies.

With her father and mother, Florence sailed to Europe in 1889 and again in 1891.

She visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.

Florence attended Alameda High School, from which she graduated in 1894. In the same year, she visited the California Exposition,

and was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley (you can see a photo of UC Berkeley at the turn of the century on My Realitty's blog).

Her album documents her social life more than her academic work:

Here she is with the other members of her sorority:

I don't have with me her graduation photo, but I did take photos of some of the items in her scrap book showing the graduation celebrations. I don't know if this photo of Florence was taken at that time, but it looks to me as if she's wearing a ball dress here.

After graduation, Florence and her parents sailed around the world, visiting Japan, China, the Phillipines, India, and Europe again.

During part of this voyage, Florence met and fell in love with her future husband, an English civil engineer who was then working in India, in Calcutta:

They kept their love affair and engagement secret for several years. J.E. Mason did not approve of his only daughter marrying an Englishman, so after travelling to Paris to buy her wedding gown and trousseau, Florence married Frederick Palmer in Calcutta with only her mother present.

However, with the birth of their first child, a son named after J. E. Mason, father and daughter were reconciled, and the Palmers visited the Masons in San Francisco during 1905.

Compare their clothes with those worn by mother and daughter in My Realitty's scene one afternoon in San Francisco in 1906:

For some reason, J. E. Mason travelled to Mexico over Christmas 1905. He died there on December 26, 1905. Florence and her baby were staying with her mother when this tragedy occurred.

Florence was again, or still, staying with her mother when the great earthquake struck San Francisco in April 1906. Their house on Washington Street, built only four years earlier in 1902, was not damaged by the quake or the fire which followed. A couple of years ago, I was surfing the internet and came across a diary of the earthquake - written by someone else - which mentioned the Mason house. Of course, right now I can neither find my printout, nor the website again! If I do, I'll add details.

Florence's mother, Nellie Chapman Mason, died in San Francisco in September 1916.

None of the newspaper clippings I've included here is completely accurate, with J. E. Mason's death notice stating that Florence's husband was an army surgeon (he was a civil engineer), and Nellie Chapman Mason's funeral notice giving her father's name as her husband's. Still, I wish all my ancestors had left such rich records of their lives!

At Home in the Lines DH/D, 1926

2010-06-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I still haven't finished scraping the overpainting off the outside of this house, touching up the paint and putting on the roofing paper. But George and Margaret Sinclair decided that the appearance of the outside didn't matter as much as having a home to live in; they were getting rather tired of living in a shoebox.

There are curtains at both downstairs and upstairs windows -

some glass would make the house less draughty and more secure; the glazier seems rather hard to tie down to a date ...

Speaking of downstairs and upstairs is not quite accurate - as you can see, there are no stairs - or at least, no visible ones, inside. This is one of the mysteries of dolls houses which dolls seem to cope with well.

Margaret has boiled the kettle for tea, and chosen a book from the bookcase,

and puts her feet up after her tiring day working as cashier at a teashop.

George spends a lot of time upstairs, where he has a comfy chair by the fire.

He lost a foot in the war, and, poor man, seems to have neither a false one fitted, nor crutches.

As he was also gassed, and suffers from nerves, he is unable to work.

He feels bad that Margaret has to work, but grateful that they have been able to find this small, cosy two-roomed cottage. It is luxury after their last lodgings.

As you may remember, the inside of this house had also been completely overpainted. I have reproduced three patterns of wallpaper from Lines houses of the period by scanning pieces of wall that I bought from someone who had taken apart a house which had so much woodworm that it couldn't be saved. My reproductions are not as good as Dolls House Restoration's, but they'll do. I intend to buy some of his parquet flooring and window shutters, but in the meantime, I have used wooden flooring from Jennifer's Printables upstairs, and a copy of a vintage wallpaper sample downstairs (the original is in my Triang 52).

The kitchen range is original, and came with the house. The upstairs fireplace is also original, but I acquired it separately. The furnishings are vintage pieces from ebay - except the upstairs lights, which were Oese's (I can't find it in the photos, but it came with these vintage pieces in the house Oese bought).

I forgot to say: the pattern repeats for these three designs are in my post Slow Progress, if anybody would like to use them in their own houses. The one I used upstairs is darker at the top of the repeat, so a sheet of the pattern shows distinct lines, unless you can photoshop them out!

Kitchen Table Scales

2010-05-26T09:02:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since my last post - partly I was busy working on my part of an article about Keystone for Dolls Houses Past and Present, and partly I have been a bit down - having some ideas for posts, but not the energy to put them together. This weekend I decided that I would start decorating the inside of my Lines DH/D, even though I haven't finished scraping the outside. So I'll take photos of that in the next day or so, and meanwhile, here's one of my ideas!

Several of you have posted photos of your dolls house furniture in different scales. When I was putting together my dolls house study and the Super City mini-building, it occurred to me that it would be fun to stand pieces in different scales on top of each other.

These kitchen tables can also nest:

and by placing them next to each other and looking from above, you can see that the long end of the smaller table equals the short end of the bigger table!

The largest table is 1/10th scale, and is vintage German (from Oese). The next one is 1/12th scale, and is also vintage German - it came in my VERO Rügen, and I think it's Crailsheimer. The pale green soft plastic table is 1/16th - 1/18th - it says 'Made in England', and I think it's Kleeware. The next table is marked Kleeware - it's 1/24th scale, and hard plastic. Then there's a tiny 1/48th scale cream coloured plastic table, which I think is by the Ohio Art Company (or a copy of their furniture) - and the tiniest is 1/144 scale, from the Sylvanian Toys dolls house for their dolls house.

UPDATE: Oese wondered on flickr if the scale of the pink table might be 1/10th, and the wooden table larger still. It's a very sensible question - it's clear that the tables are different sizes, but as I didn't measure them or include a ruler in the photos, the actual size, and hence the scales, was not obvious. So, I've now measured them, and here are their actual dimensions and the dimensions they would be in 1:1 scale. (Only in metric so far - I have measured them in inches too, but multiplying inches is a bit more complicated, so one thing at a time!)

The wooden table is 15.4 cm long x 10.2 cm wide x 8.5 cm high.
In 1:10 scale, this makes it 1.54 m x 1.02 m x 85cm.

The pink table is 11 cm long x 8.3 cm wide x 6.7 cm high.
In 1:10 scale, that would be 1.1 m x 83 cm x 67 cm,
and in 1:12 scale, it would be 1.32 m x 99.6 cm x 80.4 cm.

The pale green table is 8.85 cm long x 5.8 cm wide x 4.7 cm high.
In 1:16 scale, that would be 1.41m x 92.8cm x 75.2 cm,
and in 1:18 scale, it would be 1.59m x 1.04m x 84.6 cm.

The white table is 5 cm long x 3.1 cm wide x 2.8 cm high.
In 1:24 scale, that would be 1.2m x 74.4 cm x 67.2 cm,
and in 1:30 scale, it would be 1.5m x 93 cm x 84 cm.

(I don't actually know if 1:30 scale exists for dolls house furniture, but I wanted to see what it would be in a smaller scale than 1:24.)

I don't actually have a real-life rectangular kitchen table, just a small round dining table and the built-in kitchen work benches. So I can't measure a 1:1 scale table! What do you think? I think I'd be happy with the wooden table in 1/10th scale and the pink one in 1/12th - but the pink one certainly could be 1/10th. Perhaps the wooden one could be 1/8th (1.23 m long x 81.6 cm wide x 68 cm high), but again, I'm not sure if there are many 1/8th scale dolls.

I'm not very strict about scale in my own dolls houses, and especially with vintage furniture from many different makers and old dolls houses, I tend to do what I do with clothes - try it and see if it fits, within a scale up or down. But that means knowing roughly what will be a good fit - so knowing about scales does have some use!

Some Art Deco dolls house furniture

2010-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

As I have a few houses which date from the 20s and 30s, and are modern in style, I have acquired some pieces of vintage art deco furniture for them. I recently photographed some sets for a friend's article for DHPP, and I thought I'd show them here too.

The first two sets are American. The Wisconsin Toy Company showed this 'Moderne Bed Room Set' in their 1930s catalogue. It's 1/12th scale. (There is a chair with the set too, but I forgot to photograph it!)

This set is in the main bedroom of my Californian bungalow-style house (where you can see the chair from the set):

According to Zillner and Cooper's Antique and Collectible Dollhouses and Their Furnishings, the Wisconsin Toy Company was based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 1921 and 1936. They made furniture in other styles as well - I also have their nursery set, which is in the nursery of the same house.

Another art deco style bedroom set I have is made by the Jaymar Specialty Company, started by Louis Marx's father Jacob and sister Rose in the 1920s. This set was sold in about 1933 as the Happy Hour Doll House furniture; it's 1/18th scale.

As you can see, here the shape of the furniture is fairly simple - it's the printed design which gives it an art deco touch. Zillner and Cooper's book also shows kitchen, bathroom, living room and dining room Happy Hour furniture. Each set is a different colour - I'd especially like to have the red living room pieces, which also have a black art deco design on them.
UPDATE: Louise at Grandmas Attic has posted a picture of her houseful of Jaymar Happy Hour furniture! Wonderful - thank you, Louise!

This set is going in the kids' bedroom of my Triang 52, dating to 1939. This room needs more work, but looks like this at the moment:

This room also has some of my Jacqueline furniture, which I'll photograph for another post.

Also in the Triang 52 are some pieces I don't know the origin of. This chair and sofa are all metal, but the upper red surface feels like flocking or felt - I don't know how it's been done.

I also have a delightful little mirror and hanging clothes brush, with a raised art deco design in the metal:

Here they are in the house:

One day I'll make some curtains for this house!

Miniature Spirits

2010-04-25T08:38:00.000-07:00

I recently collected up most of the alcohol in my dolls houses for a group shot, to contribute to an album in the Dolls Houses Past and Present photo gallery.

You've seen most of the pieces here in the houses and room boxes they belong to: the Bodensee, the VERO Rügen, the Lundby Gothenburg, PI Angus Shand's office, and the Californian Bungalow style house.

The Jack Daniels boxed set is new - I bought it for Tim, as he and Johnno had to play cards without anything to drink.

But it's not easy to see all the details in each room, so I think the idea of collecting similar pieces up and photographing them together, as Florine did with radios and TVs and diepuppenstubensammlerin did with computers, is great. I'll try to do more gradually.

Super City Skyport Building Set - buy it now!

2010-04-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

I got curious about whether the Super City set of my last post had been available in the US. So I had a look on US ebay - and guess what? The Super City Skyport Building Set is for sale right now - 2 sets, mint in box, buy it now - and seven have already sold. Sounds like old store stock. It's described as Marx Toys 6548 - interesting, when mine says Ideal Toy Corporation. Was there a link between Ideal and Marx, I wonder?
I'd love to hear if any of you buy a set!

Super City Construction Set

2010-04-18T07:53:00.000-07:00

I recently found this Super City set on Australian ebay.

I hadn't heard of it before, and I don't remember seeing it in supermarkets - it was sold at Coles Stores and New World Supermarkets. Coles is an Australian supermarket chain, and used the 'New World' tag from 1962 to 1990. I would guess that this might date from the 1970s, but there's no date on it. It does say 'Made in Australia':

and also that it's a registered trade mark of the Ideal Toy Corporation:

so perhaps there's a US version as well.

It's a modular construction set, not a dolls house - it's designed to build a city with shops, utilities, businesses and houses. You can tell it's Australian from the spelling of the signs:

What caught my eye was the coloured plastic sheets that form the walls of the buildings, so that you can construct multi-coloured buildings - a similar concept to the Marx Imagination house or the Bozart Kaleidoscope house.

I've had a go putting together one of the buildings:

and also making a small house that I could almost use as a dolls house in the Kaleidoscope house. The square plastic frames, into which the coloured inserts go, are 5.5 cm wide, so this structure is about 13 cm x 7.5 cm, or roughly 5" x 3":

I think the tiny plastic dolls house furniture I've used in the top pictures came with the 1949 Ohio Art Corporation metal dolls house, although it may have been available through other companies too. I bought it from an Australian woman who played with it as a child.

I haven't tried the modern home with its second floor overhang:

or the research centre or medical centre:

and I'd need the Skyscraper Kit to make the skyscrapers shown on the lid of the box, and also in the Building Guide and Plans - no doubt so that kids would ask their parents to buy it for them!