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!

Who made it? #1

I have finally photographed some of my boxed sets today. I have uploaded photos to flickr, but I thought you might like to have a go at guessing the brand of some of them.

First up is this sweet living room set:

What do you think?

If you're impatient for an answer, you'll find other photos showing the box and the base of the chairs on flickr.

June

June for me was busy with the Dolls Houses Past and Present online magazine. As well as editing and uploading other members' contributions, I wrote two articles myself. One article is about Kaybot Novelties and Kay Miniature, who made yummy plaster food:

 

and other things like fireplaces:

My other article is about the dolls houses made by the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops in London, during and just after World War I. They were set up to provide employment for soldiers and sailors who had lost hands or limbs in the war.

A while ago, I came across the catalogue from 1916/17. It's full of the toys made in the workshops - lots of battle toys, as well as dolls houses, farms, villages and shops:

A butcher's shop

A houseboat dolls house

I had read about one Lord Roberts' dolls house in the International Dolls House News, but I've never seen one anywhere else. Their toys would have their logo on them:

If you know of any, I'd love to hear about them!


Some Blogger ps and qs:

If anyone knows if it's still possible to place two photos in a row in this new blogger set-up, please let me know how! It used to be possible not to select either left, right or centre for the alignment of photos, and you could just add them across the page like text - and resize them by dragging the corner, not just by choosing a preset Small, Medium, Large or X-Large. I think we have been left with fewer options now.

I know that Google Reader is about to finish. My understanding is that the Blogger Dashboard and Google Friend Connect will continue, for the time being at least, so we can still follow each other as we have done, and see the most recent blog posts in the dashboard and on the side of our blogs. So I haven't set up an alternative like Bloglovin. However, I have saved a list of all the blogs I follow, so if I'm wrong and my dashboard reading list disappears, I can find you all and follow you again!

Some dolls for Odessa's house

Cleopatra, Rudolph Valentino as 'The Sheik', and an Indian Maharajah are having drinks on the terrace.

Admiring the view from the balcony .... 

while a maid stands outside the main door below ....

These ladies and gentlemen would need to bend their heads to pass through the doors, especially with their elaborate turbans. I hope they can stand up inside! However, I thought the bright colours of their costumes would go well with the decoration of Odessa's house.
Cleopatra and her companions are Rexard dolls; the others are souvenir dolls from Turkey (the couple) and Egypt (the woman in the green dress).

I will see how they like the inside of the house - perhaps they are just staying here briefly while they shoot some scenes from a film ... or perhaps they will make a longer stay here.

Diana's House

Just before Easter, I received two dolls houses which I had bought from an Australian collector who lives in northern New South Wales. She is downsizing her real house, and therefore also downsizing her collection. Here is one of the houses.

It was made in the 1940s for a lady named Diana Mitchell. Anne, the collector I bought it from, told me that the dolls house was made by Diana's grandfather from New Zealand timber. They lived "out the back" of Kyogle, a small town in northern NSW, on the Richmond River. It's a big dairy-farming and timber-getting area, not far from the larger town of Casino, where my father grew up. My father's parents' families had both been involved in dairy-farming around Casino and Grafton, so I'm very happy to have a dolls house that comes from this area. (I do wonder why Diana's grandfather used New Zealand timber, when red cedar and hoop pine are logged locally ....)

The front of the house comes off - it's held in place by the two little clips at the top, the pieces of wood on the inside of the front, and a hook at one side. The curtains are all original - they were made by Diana's grandmother.

Inside, there are four rooms. The kitchen (in the photo above), the living room and the bedroom have original furniture made by Diana's grandfather, with the upholstery, bedding and mats also made by Diana's grandmother. (Anne has added pieces, as I shall too, but I'll show just the original furnishings here first.)

Anne has done some restoration work on this house - when she got it, there was a split in the wood right down the back, through the living room downstairs and the bedroom upstairs. She filled the crack, and repainted the rooms in the same colours but slightly lighter shades (she said that they had been terribly bright).
(I've just realised I left the Dol-toi table in the living room! Obviously, it wasn't made by Diana's grandfather!)

You can see the filled crack in the back wall of the rooms.

Anne told me that she had also painted the doors and the fireplace in timber colours, as they were all painted the same colour as the walls they were in/on. She sent me a photo of the dolls house before she fixed the crack and repainted it:

You can clearly see the crack running up the back, as well as the blue fireplace, blue door on the living room side and pink door on the bedroom side.

The house clearly had a bathroom, as the small room upstairs has the same white and green checked floor paper as the kitchen, and the same material (with small raised green spots) has been used for the curtains:

The bathroom curtains are on the left side of this photo; the other two windows are in the bedroom. The same fabric used for the bedroom curtains is used for the living room curtains downstairs, too.

However, the bathroom furniture is not original - none came with the house when Anne bought it. Anne provided it with the set you can see in the photo of the house before she worked on it, and the set she included when she sold it to me. (The first set had a low cistern; Anne had then found a set with a high cistern of the type real houses of the time would have had - if they didn't still have an outside dunny!)

Anne also included some Erna Meyer grandparents with the house - I'll show them when I post about it again. I have already been looking through my stash for things like pictures to hang, and thinking that this grandmother would be very likely to use the fly covers I bought at the fair, to protect the scones and other goodies she whips up when visitors call - so now I want to find some scones for the house!

Shutters or louvres?

Here's the other house which Anna-Maria was holding for me:

I have another of these houses, which has been overpainted and came without any furniture. So when I saw this one, I jumped at it:

The back slides off and inside - it's fully furnished! (And the house was in excellent condition until I walked into the door frame, carrying it - Anna-Maria picked up the pieces and put them in a tiny ziplock bag for me, so I can glue them back on.)

I also have a few pieces of this furniture, which I'd bought separately quite a while ago. Christine has an identical house with lots of furniture too.

So it seems clear that it was produced for sale - but where? and by whom?

It probably originates from Sydney - it's come up for sale there, in coastal areas north of Sydney, and as far north as Brisbane, as far south as Canberra - as far as I know ....

I haven't seen it in any catalogues from the Sydney toy store Walther & Stevenson - but as I've only seen four catalogues, two from the 30s and two from the 50s, that doesn't mean a great deal.

And thinking of dates, when do you think this house and furniture dates from?

Here's the furniture in more detail:

A piece is missing from the table - perhaps I'll be able to replace it, that might help keep it even ...

Also a foot missing on the green wardrobe - I've propped it up with a pebble ...

As you can see, the wardrobes come in two sizes - one has a drawer at the bottom, the other doesn't.

The round table is in pretty good condition, just a little warped:

The matching chairs are missing both cross-pieces from the back (and someone has painted the very top black??), and the rungs from the bottom:

Thankfully, Christine's chairs have the top piece, so I'll be able to copy it (they are also missing the other pieces, though - can't have been very firmly attached!)

I think this is a stove -

the round bits on top look like hot plates, perhaps?

The black paint looks a bit messy - I might investigate and see if there's something else under it ...

This is the bottom of the possible stove - none of it opens ...

And finally, the other set of living room chairs:

The separate set which I bought some time ago is green and purple - I'll see if I can dig it out!

I'd like to make some bedding and perhaps cushions for this house. I'm not sure what will suit it - florals? geometric patterns? I wish I knew when it was made!

The base doesn't look as old as some of my other houses:

I'm guessing that "#65" means it's been sold at auction sometime, but the other numbers - both the printed/stamped 24743 and the handwritten numbers - seem to go under original parts of the house, the front steps and the outer edging of the base. I'll check and see what the base of my other house like this looks like ...

Back to the question I posed in the title of this post - I have been thinking of this as the Shutter House. But shutters are not at all common on houses in Australia, even on older houses. Perhaps they're intended to be louvre windows, even though they open as a whole like shutters? Louvres are very common in hot and tropical areas like the Northern Territory and Queensland, and in old houses in Sydney too, louvres were often used on the sunroom. What do you think, louvre windows or shutters?