I've put together and finished the two clock kits from Cynthia Howe. First, because it was my reason for visiting her website in the first place, was this lovely banjo clock. The kit comes with a ready-made face+dome and a couple of printed faces, but since all of the ones I've seen made up have used the dome face, I decided to be a little different and use the other one.
This is finished with Rust-Oleum wood stain in dark walnut and two or three coats of Ceramcoat gloss varnish with the details picked out in Martha Stewart Metallic Gold craft paint. I also flooded the face and the two inserts with artist's gloss medium, which gives them a sort of faux glass look, and I hope will protect the images from fading as well.
This clock is "missing" the usual finial at the top, but to be honest that doesn't surprise or bother me, as it would add a lot of fiddliness to a kit that is otherwise fairly easy to put together. Well -- I almost gave up on the little ornament at the bottom, because -- really, look at it! --
I glued it with wood glue twice, it came off twice, I glued it with super-glue, it came off, I glued it again with super-glue and it finally stuck. If it's crooked, please don't say anything!
The Welch clock is charming in its gaudy Victorianness. Cynthia Howe doesn't say so, but surely her version is based on this one --
so I think it's a pretty impressive feat to reduce this to 1:12 scale! This is the "Donita" hanging clock (it also came in a shelf version, without the lower trim) from E.N. Welch -- the Antiques Clock Guy has a little background piece on the company, whose glory days were in the 1870s and early 1880s. This miniature kit is fairly straightforward to put together, but was a bit more effort than the banjo clock simply because there are more pieces -- delicate ones, with all of that carving! -- and they are attached to the main box at different depths. I wasn't quite sure how to get the faux-glass insert to stay where I wanted it, so I ended up cutting some props from the spare bits of the matrix and gluing them inside the box, thus --
before staining them and gluing the glass on top. If I had been a little more experienced, I would have tried coloring the edges of the Plexiglas with a marker, as I found later that from some angles the silvery-white reflection from the edge is surprisingly bright.
(I have just now noticed that the coved molding on the original Donita goes this way \__/ on the upper shelf and this way /__\ on the lower, where the miniature one has them both go the same way! Well, maker's choice, then, I guess!)
I couldn't quite tell where the two little pieces went that matched the bottom piece of trim, so I glued them behind that as bracing -- and after that I decided to use the leftover centimeter or so of molding as more bracing, behind the "bonnet" trim at the top. Stability is good. I didn't have enough for the side trims, but the upper and lower ones looked more vulnerable to me.
As for knitting, it's true I have been neglecting it dreadfully in my fascination with miniatures, but I find myself thinking wistfully of it at odd moments now, or waiting at the optometrist's, say, and thinking, "Oh, I could be knitting!" I got out of having to knit that lace schmatta for my mom, as it happened -- quite innocently, I assure you! -- when I discovered that there wasn't nearly enough of the wool to finish it. And just when I was getting the hang of the first chart, too -- oh, well. I've had to rip back and re-do the Priscilla hug-me-tight a couple of times, wanting to stick with the original pattern -- which is much of the point of knitting from historical patterns, of course -- but I couldn't see how, as written, the thing would possibly fit even my embonpoint (cough), with a 45 deg. angle from shoulder to -- theoretically, anyway -- opposite hip. It might almost have gone past my hip and around the back to the other hip. I think I have found a happy medium, increasing every third row, but this is a pain in the neck, necessitating actually keeping track of which row I'm on instead of just saying, "right side, time to increase," since on the angled edge it's surprisingly difficult to tell how many rows ago was the previous increase. On the other hand, it is probably the only thing that is keeping me awake in this eternal garter stitch, so there is that.
(I'm a bit embarrassed at how wobbly this is, and am rather nervously hoping that it will come out in the blocking. I have not had this trouble with Matchmaker before. Either the lot is a bit off -- I did find four splices and a knot in the first ball alone! -- or I really am dozing off as I knit!)
Your patience is remarkable, I would probably have thrown the clocks at the wall!
And - garter stitch again! I do so hate doing it but the final fabric is quite remarkable. Well done!
Posted by: Toffeeapple | February 24, 2019 at 11:21 AM
Stunning. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Susan D | February 26, 2019 at 06:29 AM