watchmaker's cabinet for minis

[nid_dabeille]

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...

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!

 

  

  

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.

Comments

[grace-poppy.livejournal.com]

Well, if the surgery consists of pulling off someone's shoe, he should be fine! Though he might find use for a shoehorn...

What kind of surgical instrument though?

I have the Chrysnbon set of "ivory" vanity items, which includes a shoehorn (yay! just kidding) and a more useful button hook and nail file, both of which look like little tiny surgical instruments. For my naval surgeon I have knives (kitchen knives) and bone saws (adapted from regular saws) and two kind of trephine (for drilling the skull). Also in his collection are a nutcracker (oh dear) and some pliers and scissors. Or maybe the pliers are actually ice tongs - I can't remember. I'm planning to make some forceps out of bendy wire, which hopefully will be pretty easy.

What kind of surgery does Elrond do anyway? He's such a renaissance man! I could probably make you a bone saw and trephine, but I've never seen any stumpy elves. (Maybe some stumpy ents, ha ha...)

[elwenlj.livejournal.com]

ROTFL! Nice to see you found new uses for other items too. Although I dread to think what a surgeon would do with the nutcrackers!

I'm figuring that Elrond would have a full surgical kit . . . surely there was the odd elf who didn't duck fast enough when an orc took a swing? ;)

I hadn't considered using an ordinary saw as a bone saw but it would work. The trephine sounds interesting and if you'd be willing to make me one I'd definately be interested. Let me know how much it would be. Email me via lj.

[grace-poppy.livejournal.com]

Well I adapted a couple of ordinary saws to be bone saws. I actually became a bit addicted. Now every time I see a dollhouse saw, I want it, and start imagining ways to make it look more boney.

As for the other tools, I just started randomly buying tools that looked like they could become surgical instruments with stretches of the imagination and minor adaptations and the context of surgery.

That reminds me of a scene in 'Brazil' (one of my new favorite movies), a modern day interrogation scene where there are frightening instruments of pain on a table laid out for the prisoner to see - scalpels and drills, etc. But on close examination, there are a lot of really random things - a pair of wrenches, a pacifier, a little bouncy ball... :D

[grace-poppy.livejournal.com]

Ok, sent you a LJ message.