I felt like creating something, so I’m building a miniature house with miniature furnishings made of balsa wood, fabric scraps and found objects. It began with a cardboard box turned on its side, it’s “walls” upholstered in burlap, with a wooden floor made from scrap wood from my basement. It has two windows, one with “glass” made of the plastic bubble from a package of screws. I have to find another package of the same dimensions now, to make the windows match.
The scent of hot glue permeates the atmosphere in my back room where bits and pieces from many junk drawers are messily left out on a card table; plastic craft bins and boxes are stacked on a shelf under the window. I put the internet radio station on, and go back there and waste hours at a time making my tiny upholstered armchair: gluing foam rubber to an L-shaped countertop support from Ikea, wrapping it in green silk, tufting the back with tiny little beads, finding the exactly-right-height “legs” from my collection of caps and beads.
It’s an obsessive hobby, exacting, absorbing work. I use small pliers, tweezers, toothpicks and straight pins to push and prod things into small spaces. I miter the corners of a balsa-wood picture frame around a Currier and Ives gift tag for a painting to hang on my little wall. I stick small silk flowers into clay to put into a petite terra-cotta flowerpot I found at the craft shop—a package of 6 for 79 cents—tie it around with a narrow red and green striped ribbon. My house has a Yule tree, yet undecorated. I will make tiny candy-canes out of wire and alternated red-and-white seed beads. I will hang garland made of silver and gold thread, use a plastic “jewel” in a star shape for the topper. There is a candle made of a spare bulb from a string of holiday lights—the little twinkly kind—sitting on a shelf above the small chair, and two “Indian vases” made of carved beads, and a miniscule wax pine tree “candle”. I found baskets that are no more than a quarter-inch across at the same craft shop where I found the little flowerpots. There will be a buffet table with a Yule feast, dishes and platters made of buttons and goblets made of clear push-pins with the points removed, turned upside-down. They look just like beer glasses. Food will be made as well: apples made of red beads, cheese made from a gum eraser, cut into chunks, grapes from the perfect round drops of hot glue that collect under the nozzle of my glue-gun in a small cluster, painted purple; maybe some sausage slices made from thinly sliced pencil erasers.
It is tempting to buy a whole lot of tiny little perfectly-reproduced miniatures, but there is something far more satisfying about making things yourself out of found objects. Soon, you find that you are looking at things in an entirely different way, and throwing out nothing. That scrap of sponge—it looks just like a swiss cheese, doesn’t it?—that origami paper would make great wallpaper—that pony bead only needs a tiny handle to become a coffee cup—that little cosmetic box could be a small dresser, or credenza. I paw through contents of toolboxes, and other places in the house—that basket by the telephone that collects everything I don’t know what else to do with, for instance—where I throw all those nagging miscellaneous objects. Windowsills which have been host to little found objects all year—stones, shells, tiny little bottles, interesting seed pods, jewelry bits—now get swept clean, and the objects brought to the back room and given new life as other, often surprising, things. All that unused drapery hardware makes good shelf brackets for wee shelves, or supports for furniture. Wooden pencils make columns, or door frames. Old placemats get cut up into pieces for shingles, or flooring. Knurled bolts make wonderful metal bowls, turned upside down and filled with colored beads. Bottle caps and jar lids make tabletops, tureens, soup pots. Paper clips in a row make a pretty little fence. Hairnets serve for lattice or trellis. white folder labels are fine as clapboard siding.
Once begun, a project like this overwhelms and overtakes your mind, and you find yourself expanding inward to a world smaller than yourself, but with infinite possibilities. You are god, goddess, creator, puppet master. You are builder, architect, designer, engineer. You are the center and the perimeter of your own universe. Your circumference is nowhere, your center is everywhere. The classic Giordano Bruno paradox come to life in your hands.
I will work this way until after Yule. Part of me wants to make these things as presents for others, but so much of me goes into their construction I find it hard to give them away later, and they perch around my house collecting dust. I remember sitting at the table for weeks in 1993, building a medieval Yule feast in a tiny wooden greenhouse, making a small fire-brazier, a tiny wire grill cover, flames from red fabric, an entire hutch and desk of scrap wood, complete with tiny knife and pencil; a plate of brownies was carved and cut from a boullion cube and glued to a button dish. It was an amazing piece when finished, and kept me from going insane at a time when my “real” life was too painful to actually live out. This year, there is no pain, no horror outside the miniature world I am creating; and my obligations always seem to be pressing on me, despite my obsession with my hobby. Yet, I can’t wait to get back to the spare room, to my glue gun, to my collected miscellany, my boxes of beads, sparklies, ribbons and scraps. I am soothed as the year ends, and caught in my own ever-expanding, ever-shrinking cosmos.
No comments:
Post a Comment