watchmaker's cabinet for minis

My watchmaker's cabinet arrived, the one I bought on ebay!  It's so perfect!  I mean, perfect for me and my miniatures.  And so pretty!  It was really dirty when it came (probably with dust and dirt all the way back to 1875, the date that's stamped in the drawers) and as I cleaned it, I kept finding all sorts of little watch gears and hands and other parts.  So cute!  It was like it was shedding.  I would set it down on the table, then pick it up again and find a couple of little gears it had left behind, and found some little watch hands in the packing material...  I waved a magnet around and picked up tiny little screws and gears that had been hiding under the dividers, etc.  Then gave it a jolly good clean so the wood became lustrous.  And then put all my tiny bottles and bone saws and trephines in the compartments!!!  Every now and then as I walk past I'll just pull open a drawer to gaze at them in fondness.

And now my roombox is sitting on top of it, and they make the perfect pair.

Bigger pictures below...

( take a look! )

In other miniature news - randomly on ebay I saw old dollhouse plans for building a house exactly like my mom's that her grandfather built her, and that my sisters and I grew up playing with!!!  The exact house!  I was so freakingly excited, and so was my sister Becca when I showed her.  (She has the house now, lucky thing.  She's older than me, and also has two daughters, so I guess that's to be expected.)  I bought the plans, of course.  When I saw the photograph, I thought it was an old photo of my mom and her sister playing with it - I mean, because I'm so used to seeing that old photo of my mom with the house.  It was totally foreign to see a DIFFERENT photograph of strangers playing with the same house!

 

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So excited!  And I'm actually considering (in my insanity) building the house for myself.  Maybe in the future.  Or maybe half scale.  It's a huge huge house.

Bag End dollhouse

Hey, obeliamedusa!  I just realized that you're you!  It's YOU, famous you!  I mean, rather, TWICE famous you!  But I already knew that you were once famous, the famous one who had the ginger hobbits and amazing hill-shaped Bag End dollhouse.

But I only just now found this old entry - or rather, re-found it, because I'd seen it before (and even posted about it in my journal), and only now realized that the house - and the maker - were the same as the house and the maker of Christmas hobbit fame (which I also posted about).  I mean, I'd looked at the pictures of the mound in progress, and the grass and daffodils etc., but I had never made the connection that the moundy roundy grassy house was the SAME as that square-roomed house I'd seen before.

I'd thought it was surprisingly amazing that TWO such wonderful and perfect Bag End houses could exist.

Yes.  The end.

Everyone, if you haven't looked at her Bag End house before, go now because it's AMAZING.  (I was going to say "if you haven't looked at her Bag End," but that just sounds wrong.)