Heart Cake From Kaybot

Valentine's Day is not something I have ever celebrated - I don't remember it being a big thing when I was young, and I suspect that it's become bigger in Australia in recent years through being promoted commercially to sell more cards, chocolates, roses and so on ...

However, it seemed an appropriate occasion to share another of my new acquisitions.

When I wrote the article about Kaybot Novelties and Kay Miniatures for Dolls Houses Past and Present last year, I commented that it was frustrating that the 1951 and '53 ads for Kaybot's Golly Stores did not show any of their own plaster foods.

Then, late last year, a boxed Kaybot store popped up on UK ebay - and I was lucky enough to win it! This store is called the Circle Bakery, and the box has a photo showing Kaybot cakes and breads, as well as some boxed goods!

I was even more thrilled that the advertising signs at the top of the store are for Huntley and Palmer's biscuits and cakes - as my grandfather's surname was Palmer, he was called Huntley in the family.

Although the store shown in the label on the box is pale yellow, the store in my box is blue. It doesn't have any advertising at the back of the shelves, but has the same stickers along the top:

and the same Ryvita ad on the counter that sits in front of the shelves:

The counter is made quite simply, and the top has become a bit warped:

Here is the bakery filled with all the goods that came with it:

The boxes of sugar are different from those shown on the label, but are from the same range. I think I have boxes of the kinds of sugar shown on the label, but I expect that the actual varieties included did vary, just as the colour of the store did.

You can see that there are some gaps on the shelves of my store. I'm glad that so many pieces have survived with it, including one of my favourite items, the Hovis loaf:

It even still has its paper label! I loved eating Hovis bread when I stayed with my grandparents in England - and especially loved the mini Hovis loaves that we could buy with a bowl of soup when we went shopping at Bentalls, in Kingston-on-Thames! I have some other plaster Hovis loaves, but I didn't know who had made them, so I'm delighted to have this photo showing it among other Kaybot breads.

I also hadn't realised that the fruit tart on the counter, next to the heart cake, was Kaybot, nor the Victoria sandwich cake on the bottom shelf! Some of the items that are missing from my bakery include what looks like another fruit flan, on the top shelf, a cottage loaf, and the cake on the middle shelf with yellow, white and brown checkered icing. Luckily, I have just bought a lot on ebay that includes one of those cakes! What is it called? All I can think of is Battenburg cake, but that has checkered cake, not the icing ... Also, there's no Huntley & Palmer's Dundee Cake tin. I have one, in the kitchen of my Cupboard House - perhaps I will look for another one to add to this bakery.

All this writing about and looking at photos of bread and cakes has made me quite hungry! Unfortunately, I don't have any cake in the house - but I have plenty of bread, so I think I'll go and make some toast!

Linda and more Linda

Last night, I sat down to write a blog post about the latest set of Linda furniture I have acquired - and discovered that I had not blogged about the earlier ones! I thought that I had, but I only showed two chairs in my Blue-Box rooms with the Dolly Darlings.

The first sets I got came in these boxes:

Cute, hey?

I'm glad to have these sets, as they have the brand name, Linda, as well as Made in Hong Kong, on the front, side and back of the box.

Also, the back of the box shows photos of the sets available:

So, the sets I got in these boxes are -

A dining room set in orange, brown and white:

A living room set in red and brown:

And a nursery set, which, strangely, comes with a TV:

I have other sets which I acquired without their boxes, and probably wouldn't know the maker of if I hadn't found the boxed sets.

The chairs that the Dolly Darlings are using come from a yellow and white living room set, which has a table with a cardboard surface imitating tiles:

Anna-Maria has a yellow and brown living room set, which I photographed when I visited her earlier this year:

I have another dining room set, in red and white - the dining table also has a cardboard surface, probably imitating formica:

And I have a single sideboard, which came without a table and chairs. It has a cardboard desktop on it:

I wonder what colour the table and chairs would have been, if it was part of a dining room set?

The only piece I have from the bathroom set is a bath, missing its tap. It's blue, as shown on the back of the box:

I don't have any pieces from the bedroom set, as far as I know - and until recently, I didn't have the kitchen either.

Then I found this:

The kitchen is in the same colour combination as can be seen on the first box, with yellow chairs, yellow and brown stripes on the doors under the sink, a pink towel, and a blue stove top. (I will try to remove the black marker pen from the plastic covering the set.)

The box is quite different.

The back shows an ordinary girl - and a boy (I think) - playing around a large dolls house, rather than the Holly Hobbie style figure on the other boxes.

This box doesn't show the brand name, it just says Made in Hong Kong, and has a letter E in a flag. However, the sides of the box depict the same 6 sets of furniture as on the marked Linda boxes, although they are drawn, not photographed, and they are rather different colours:

The living room set is purple and yellow, and the bathroom is purple and green, blue or white!

The bedroom looks more red than pink, and the dining room looks like my red and white set, but with a sideboard that is coloured all over.

Which box do you think is earlier? I'm not sure whether photographs of the sets available would have replaced drawings, or whether the Not Recommended for Children under 3 Years Old indicates more regulation of toys, and hence a later date. As for the design of the boxes, I don't know. Perhaps they weren't from different years, but rather produced for different markets? What do you think?

As for the design inspiration for much of the furniture, compare this ad for Modella roomboxes at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg in 1968:

You can see photos of the room sets in diepuppenstubensammlerin's article about Modella roomboxes  and on her blog here.

Nābytek by Chemoplast of Brno, Czechoslovakia

Well, this one was much harder to guess, as probably most of you, like me, will never have heard of this maker!

I've just looked up Nābytek on Google Translate, and it means Furniture in Czech. So that doesn't seem to be the brand name!

At one end of the box is more information, including the price, and also the name Chemoplast in Brno. (The line above that means 'higher authorities'.)

The other end of the box also says Chemoplast Brno, and has a logo in which the letters cp appear. The downstroke of the p seems to be a glass tube from a science laboratory.

So Chemoplast is the maker. They do seem to have copied the designs of Jean of West Germany's dolls house furniture - I'll have to see if I have any Jean pieces to compare with these.

The three words under Nābytek 'furniture' are bedroom, living room and dining room. The one shown in red is the one in the box.

They each have a different price, as you can see.

 

The living room is the most expensive, probably because it includes the grand piano with its opening lid.  The bedroom was only one koruna (crown) more than the dining room.

As the boxes state that the furniture was made in Czechoslovakia, they must predate 1993, when the country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Czech Wikipedia tells me that Chemoplast was established in Brno in 1952. Plastic toys were one of their main products. They went into liquidation after 1989 (although they started again a few years later, I think). I don't know when exactly these sets were made - perhaps in the 1970s, or perhaps the 1980s. I wonder if they had a licence from Jean, or just copied the pieces?

Who made it? #2

Here are some more of my boxed sets.

I have three - a dining room:

A bedroom:

And a music room or parlour:

They don't come with room settings, as the Fairylite and Spot-On sets did. I'll show the boxes in my next post - meanwhile, can you guess who made them?

Spot-On Antimacassars

In the last post, I showed the TV chair and bookcase from this Triang Spot-On boxed set. I bought this set because I love the cardboard room setting provided, especially the way that the chairs appear to have antimacassars!

The three wing chairs are held in place under semi-circular cut-outs from the cardboard of the back wall. The walls are pink, but the semi-circular pieces over the chairs are white with a pink and blue floral design. They are clearly intended to represent the embroidered doilies placed on the backs of chairs to protect them from hair oil! Isn't that a wonderful detail?

The other features printed on the walls are pretty groovy too - the mirror looks art deco with those streaks of glass going diagonally across it, and the lampshade looks like it's about to fall off!

There's a door into another room ....

though the walls on this side of the room are otherwise bare.

I showed the front of the box in the last post - here it is again:

Triang very usefully give the scale of these furnishings, 1/16", on the box.

Although the front of the box has a sticker saying "Lounge Ref. No. B", and it's definitely a lounge room in the box, the ends are printed with "Bedsitter Ref. No. L". I wonder if they produced more boxes for bedsitters than they needed?

I love the silhouettes of Spot-On pieces shown here.

Woops! Someone forgot to shut the back of the delivery van!

("Where did you get that nice furniture, Mrs Jones?" "Oh, it just fell off the back of a truck!!")

Fairylite!

Here is the box that Dolly's Living Room came in. On one end, it tells us to 'Just clip ends of flex to torch battery', and on the other end is the brand name:

 "Another Fairylite Regd Novelty"

As you can see, all the box states is that it is 'Empire Made' (that is - or rather was - the British Empire). The base of the seats gives a bit more information:

It's not very clear, but it says 'Made in Hong Kong'. So Callsmall and Redrickshaw's guesses of Blue-Box were very close! Actually, I don't know which Hong Kong company made these for Fairylite - and I don't know whether Blue-Box made any sets to be sold under another company's brand name, rather than their own. But these were definitely made in Hong Kong.

MyRealitty's guess of Spot-On was also spot-on, as the chairs, stool and bookcase are copies of Triang pieces. (The fireplace is a plastic copy of a plaster Dol-toi fireplace, and I think the lamp is a copy of a Lundby design.)

Fairylite in blue on the left, Tri-ang Spot-On in red on the right.

Fairylite bookcase on the left, Tri-ang Spot-On bookcase on the right.

The differences in the bookcases are clear - a very different colour, and no sliding doors on the Fairylite version. (I do have a better Spot-On bookcase, with books, but this came straight out of a boxed set.)

 The chairs are much more similar in appearance. The difference becomes apparent holding them - the Spot-On chair is much heavier, as its base and legs are metal, whereas the Fairylite chair is all plastic.

Here's the boxed Spot-On set the chair and bookcase came from:

 

More of it next time!