Welcome to Mrs Harvey's

At long last, a promise I made on this blog several months ago has finally come to pass!  As explained in my previous posting, I'm busy doing a photography course at the moment (in between everything else!) in the hope that my doll photography will improve. Today I felt suitably confident to try photographing my elder daughter's dollshouse and contents, which I've been wanting to do for ages, but after taking some really awful photos of my Triang last year, I was very aware of my shortcomings with a camera and miniatures.

Welcome to every child's dream shop - Mrs Harvey's cakes and toys.  Mrs Harvey lives above the shop, and does a lot of her own baking.  She has two grandchildren who often come to visit her (hence the train set in her sitting/bedroom), and today they are downstairs watching two other children choose some cakes.

My husband built this house from a kit soon after our younger daughter was born, for our elder girl, who was 7 1/2 when her sister arrived.  He did a beautiful job of hiding the lighting wiring in grooves, so there are no ridges in the wall or ceiling papers, the switches are on the back of the house behind the staircase.  I did the painting and decorating and painstakingly sanded and laid the floor tiles in the shop (next time it will be squared paper, not real tiles!).  I also rebuilt the shelving unit in the shop which was bought ready built but needed to be adjusted to fit the space under the stairs, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

My daughter and I had great fun finding miniature toys at various fairs we attended, and we made most of the cakes from fimo including the hot cross buns which have real poppy seeds for the raisins.  Mrs Harvey and her grandchildren are all Heidi Ott dolls, which came without clothes, and I dressed them (even doing smocking on the little girl's dress, and knitting the jumper worn by the boy).  The two visiting children were gifts from my godmother and I haven't changed their clothes, even though they seem a little old fashioned in their attire compared to the others (the kitchen is fairly modern, so we think this shop is probably quite recent, despite some old fashioned toys).

 Mrs Harvey's bed sitting room in the attic

The gaily woven rug which my daughter made on a toy loom

 The kitchen area

 Baking

 Mrs's Harvey has 2 dogs

The dresser, including the mini tea set
with mouse on the teapot made by Fay of Cape Town

 The middle floor

The cake and toy shop

Mrs Harvey's Grandchildren

 Dog on the stairs

 Customers for cakes

Toys

 Cake Shop window from inside

 Toy shop window

 Shop windows from outside

Mrs Harvey's grandchildren outside the shop

They have now all been packed away carefully in a plastic box, as we are hoping that we'll be moving house soon (though you never can tell with these things).  It is quite sad seeing the dolls house empty and knowing that it is likely to stay that way for the next couple of months while we move and get settled in our new home before we can bring all the dolls houses out and set them up again.

My doll cabinet - bottom shelf part 2

This little girl is a costume doll, though I'm not entirely sure which country she represents. Her costume looks sort of Bavarian to me, but I may be wrong. I bought her probably in a table top sale or charity type shop quite some time ago. I think she has a rather fetching green hat with a feather sticking out the top.

Next to her is a much newer doll, though dressed in clothes of 100 years ago. She came from a small gift shop and there must be thousands like her: a fairly cheap, porcelain doll for a dolls house. I think I bought her because I liked the fabric of her dress and her little yellow plaits!


Beside the porcelain girl is a little Spanish girl. Well either Spanish, or a gypsy girl on account of her large earrings. She was also a table top sale acquisition. She has little wooden clogs glued to the bottom of her feet (well they aren't really clogs because they don't slip on to her feet). Her clothes are very creased and really need washing and ironing, but this would be difficult to do as the dress appears to be nylon like fabric and glued on.

A view of her glued on clogs - maybe
to make her taller, as her dress is really too long for her

The last one for today is my adorable baby in her cradle. I bought this little treasure of a doll in a large Antique shop in Bath in 1985, along with a little wardrobe and bedside table that live in the Triang House. All three items came to £6.00, which was a lot to me at the time, but they were worth every penny. The cradle was given to me soon after, and is a perfect fit for her. I've never made it a coverlet, as I rather like to see her than have her all covered up. Her little check outfit is glued on. She is made of plastic with moveable arms and legs, and is the right sort of scale for a 1/12 th scale dolls house. She doesn't have any markings on her body that I can see, I'm not sure how old she is and would love to know.

Close ups of inside the Triang House

I realised that the photos I posted of my earliest dollshouse are not very close up. They were taken over 25 years ago with a very simple camera and were the closest I could get without blurring the images. Now that I have a rather better, digital camera, I have tried experimenting with taking close up photos of some of the furniture in situ, though the photos still aren't great but do give some idea.

Bedroom with beds over quilted!

You will see from these photos that the layout of the bedroom has changed a bit. In the earlier photos, there were plenty of little inhabitants of the house, and they all needed beds. The Triang house is very cramped (it was one of my earliest desires to enlarge it, I dreamed of a staircase) and for a family this size, bunk beds were necessary. The earlier photo has reminded me that I actually made a simple bunk out of pieces of wood in my father's garage (where the house had been reassembled by my grandfather some years before), and I now realise why the two remaining beds have so many quilts - because I made quilts for all 3 bunk levels of the rather chunky bed which no longer survives.

In the bedroom, the two beds and the bureau came with the house when my grandparents brought it over, I assume they were the furniture that my mother owned. I adored the bureau as it is lined with red inside the top for the writing desk, and the drawers really come out and in. My sister once found a tiny white feather and we poked this in a bead for the inkstand, to fit the writing desk. The beds and bureau are nicely made of plywood. I bought the wardrobe in an antique shop in Bath during a visit to England in 1985, along with the little bedside table. The jug and bowl were made by fay of Cape Town, there is a similar green one in the sitting room. These items delighted me as a child. Also upstairs is the ancient lead bath, which as you will see from the photos is very scratched, revealing the lead.

The detail of the bath also made it special
to me despite the fact that lead isn't a safe material for a plaything.

In the sitting room are the original chairs that came with the house (re-covered by me), along with the fireplace and coal scuttle, which are made of metal (cast iron I think). These are truly lovely and detailed and I am so relieved we didn't lose them when we were small (though I notice the central bar of the fireplace is broken off), like we did the black plastic (but very elegant) grand piano that my grandparents brought over with a little lamp when the house was rebuilt. They also brought a family of 4 dolls, sadly long since lost. I subsequently bought lots of little plastic baby dolls with sweet faces and moving limbs from the local shop, I've still got these, but they are currently in storage, so I can't photograph them.

The fireplace and coal scuttle - if you can help identify the maker
of these, I'd be very pleased.

The red piano is the treasured replacement for the plastic grand, as my mother visited England without us in 1981 and brought back a collection of items for the dollshouse, including the new standard lamp and the wonderful piano with a lift up lid and smart little stool. The grandfather clock is actually a pencil sharpener cover, but is nicely to scale for this house and seemed to fit the other furniture in this room.

The red piano with the yellow plastic telephone,
and the green jug and bowl by fay.