Christmas Presents

A few days after Christmas, I spent some of a generous gift on miniatures kits.  First -- arrived January 7! -- the Moorish stool from Arjen Spinhoven, a Dutch miniaturist who specializes in rather esoteric but extraordinarily beautiful pieces, which come in laser-cut kits.  (I am fairly swooning over the linen-fold settle and the box bed!)  You can see how meticulous he is just from the package --

Even the corners of the tape are mitered! both sides!  That is a tidy-minded man.

The set of two "retro" armchairs from Jane Harrop -- arrived January 9.  I am so pleased with the mid-century-modern dining table and chairs that I've been dreaming about these armchairs ever since ...

And last but not least -- arriving today! -- two clock kits from Cynthia Howe, the banjo clock and, for some subconscious reason I still don’t quite understand, the E.N. Welch wall clock instead of the cuckoo clock that was my original desire when I visited the website.

The Moorish stool comes with no assembly instructions, Arjen Spinhoven assuming that since it's quite straightforward, you don't need any instructions -- and it is indeed very simple to see how it goes together.  The tricky part is how to actually hold the pieces steady in the process.  This required quite a bit of pondering, and then some rather Rube-Goldbergian confabulations.  A flower frog which to the best of my knowledge I pretty much never used and is now being very handy as a drying rack for small newly-painted pieces, has, as it is also quite heavy, been pressed into service here as a weight to keep the block of wood underneath from jumping out of the clamp.  There are photos of the stool in process of assembly on Spinhoven's Etsy site, and it's pretty clear that he just lays the smaller, internal octagon on the work surface and butts the legs up against each edge, but that seemed worryingly unstable to me (maybe because I am a mom -- "Kids! stop horsing around! you're going to knock over my -- oh, blast!"), and so I decided to lower that internal octagon a bit, which would give the table more strength.  The easiest way to do this was to temporarily stick something to one side of the octagon, to raise it up while I was gluing the legs on -- I used a nut from the junk drawer and a bit of Blu-Tack.  I also realized during the process that somehow (was I doing it wrong? I don't know!) that if I glued the legs on clockwise then the little teeth stuck out just far enough that I couldn't press the current side against a vertical surface without it being crooked, but if I went counterclockwise it was fine!  I didn't remember until afterwards that he does say that if you paint it first, the pieces may need a bit of sanding to fit, because they are already so snug -- I needed to sand the inside of the teeth on the last leg, as it was so close.  It's not obvious from the outside, but it that leg does look a bit closer to its neighbors than some of the others, if you look carefully!

You can also paint the stool -- which Spinhoven says on the website "is easier than you'd expect"! -- but frankly, although I usually don't like the laser burns on wood, here they help give it this perfect aged look, faded in places from the sun, let's say, and mine is completely as-is from the package.  (The burns also give it a lovely, clove-y smell somehow.)

Comments

[Toffeeapple]

That is a darling little table.