With the question of what to do with the space between the chimney and the entry still hovering, we continued our work on the toymaker’s workshop. While Noel was devising all kinds of fun exterior details, and figuring out the interior, the last of the chimney stones were frazzling my nerves. To give me a break, Noel did his eyeball geometry, first in poster board, then in ply, for the undulating roof form so I could move on to covering it with wave-coursed shingles.

Wave coursing is often described as mimicking thatched roofing, but to me it’s definitely watery–an ocean of ground swells, built tiny wave by tiny wave. One vertical inch of wave-coursing in miniature–which I’ll take up more in my next post–translates into six wandering and unevenly spaced rows of shingles, individually sanded thin and cut to fit, or three time the normal amount of shingles, a fact I was happy not to know at the outset. This one job would take over a year to complete. As time-consuming as it was, once I got the hang of it, it was easier on the hands and mind than stone-fitting.

As I pieced the shingles together, I had time to think about the influences and associations that made our work peculiarly ours. We miniaturists deal in a fairy tale or fantasy life, one way or another, and each of us is drawn to those details that come from our own particular make-up. For me, the influences included the creaky, weathered houses of New England—in particular the 200-yr. old farmer-tenant house where I grew up–the attics and closets we played in, basements that smelled agreeably of must and paint like my grandfather’s, fairy tales with a twist–like the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson—that my sister loved to scare me with, and my lifetime exposure to books, theater, music and art.

Because Noel and I worked as a team, we had the advantage of being able to draw upon each other’s spheres of imagination and inspiration. Noel’s influences were more inward. He was born with a piece of paper and pencil in his left hand. Well, almost, maybe he stole it from the delivery room nurse, but he was born seeing the world through the eyes of an artist, and with the ability to set it down on paper. Drawing was his escape, his obsession. He spent World War II recording it, battle by battle, in drawings that filled a roll of butcher paper. Drawing dollhouses wasn’t a real stretch for him.

And, in the case of this project, our client contributed her influences in art, architecture, travel, and the make believe of movies. She grew up in Hollywood, her imagination shaped by, in particular, early Disney animation. And we all shared a fondness for the Old World-inspired paintings of the Dutch artist Anton Pieck. Noel’s and my job was to select which features, which inventions from all three streams of influence would best enhance the project. Or how to swirl them all together.

One night, after a week of particularly slow progress for both of us, I walked the dog and went to bed early. My state of mind was like the state of the worktable—a mess of slivers and rejected shingle shapes. Noel stayed up as he often did, holed-up in the back of the darkened studio with just a small light on the project. Ruminating. In the morning I came down to find this fragile-looking settlement of tiny buildings clinging to one side of the chimney. It consisted of a few rudimentary houses connected by a catwalk, and supported by a precarious system of buttresses–an inexplicable colony of dwellings built from the splintered leftovers from the roof shingles. We were colonized!

It had been almost two years since the idea of an other-than-one-inch-scale civilization began to take shape. Noel and I had talked about introducing evidence of a smaller “people” into the toymaker’s domain. It began with that opening in the chimney that invited a tiny staircase, a passage for beings of unknown origins. And then there was that tunnel and tiny ladder in the basement (see https://smallhousepress.me/2014/04/06/the-midnight-factor-faces-of-the-moon-part-ii/ ). The idea of a needing home, or base camp for these ”Stair People” took hold, and now, there it was, right out of Noel’s nighttime conjuring.

Inspired as it was, the new encampment did not solve the problem of the increasingly noticeable blank space between the chimney and front steps. Then, on another of those late-nights, Noel, who had returned to full-scale watercolor painting a few years before, got out his miniature traveling watercolor set, and some acrylics. He began what he thought would be decorative wall painting of the kind he saw on centuries-old buildings in Germany while he was in the Army. But this space, and the whole project-to-date, invited more than plants and birds. The structure of the chimney, and the Stair People’s settlement, suggested the more architectural forms of stone buttresses arching over a small path, all in diminishing perspective. Maybe it wasn’t a road for the Stair People, but it was leading them someplace interesting, and who’s to say there might not be (or have been) another realm of inhabitants, or passers-through?