Mini Stephen world - bottles part 2

[nid_dabeille]

Tonight I distressed miniature bottles.  Bet your evening wasn't as awesome as that.

(The oblong bottles have a tendency to fall over.  No matter - I'll use wax to hold them in place on the shelf in my dispensary.)

And I distressed the medical instruments too.  I'm especially proud of my bone saw on the right.  It took a lot of altering.  And I sharpened all the knives with a tiny emery board too.  And I have two different styles of trephines!  And I made the glasses with jewelry wire.  The black trephine is made from a nail and a carved toothpick.



These were the same tools before I started tampering with them - note the bone saw with its bright red round handle there, and its square blade!  And the trephine was a hand drill before I cut off the end of it.



I also found a way to paint with superglue to make it look like spilled liquid on the sides of the bottle.  I was doing that anyway with paint, but then I realized that superglue would stick to some of the really shiny slick smooth bottles better than my paint would - or would give the paint something to cling to.

And those little jars with metal lids open and are hollow.  I put sawdust in one, baking soda in another, and painty water in the third.



And for scale, and to give you an idea of my painting technique (which was primarily smear some paint all over the things with my fingers):

Up next: labels on the bottles, leather covered books and a bookshelf.

ETA: And look at this miniature model of a ship's surgeon's dispensary at the NMM site!  How I squeaked with delight when I saw it!

Linked at doll_houses.

Comments

[grace-poppy.livejournal.com]

All right, I have a question now. (Do you have email notification turned on? That wasn't the question.) Does my naval surgeon need a scale for weighing out the medicines? Or will he use some other means to measure them, since the ship will be tipping and sloshing and it might (probably will) upset the balance of scales?

[derekcfpegritz.livejournal.com]

Historically, ships surgeons kept standard weights and balances aboard ship (though they were usually used on dry land at landfalls), but many medications were packaged or bottled in pre-measured dosages. For example, grains of opium were usually kept wrapt in twists of paper: if someone needed laudanum, you'd just bust out the high-proof liquor, pour a measure of it, and then untwist the wrapped of the opium to let the pre-measured grains fall into the rum or whatever and dissolve. As a matter of fact, by the mid-19th-Century, you started seeing the first graduated bottles with teaspoon, dram, and other such markings carved into the bottles themselves: if you need to pour out a dram of so-and-so, you simply poured the liquid out of the bottle until the top of the liquid settled at or slightly below the next lowest marking on the bottle.