Blast from the Past.....

Often we are asked how we got started making Miniature Dolls ... and what were the first characters... ?? Well... in going through a lot of photos and files lately I am running into all sorts of little 'Blasts from the Past'... and this is one of them.... our very first Miniature Dolls.

We were commissioned back in 1995 to create various 'Railroad Characters' for a collector and friend Rod Johnston . He had this great idea of building a Beautiful Train Station and a working 1" Scale Railroad on his Property in Canada... with working platform, Trains, tracks etc... the only thing he was lacking were the People to inhabit the highly detailed setting. So Rod (who was a collector of our larger dolls) asked if we would be interested in creating the 1:12th scale miniature Train Dolls for him....

Hmmmmmm let me think.... Do I think it MIGHT be possible to convince Richard to do ANYTHING Train related...hmmmmm...might have to really twist his arm ...YEAH RIGHT!!!! Richard was Entirely Crazy about the idea and said YES YES YES...never mind the fact that we had never made anything at this point under 10 inches!!! As I have mentioned many times before here in this blog..."We love a Challenge"!!

So we taught ourselves how to scale down and think really small...that included sculpting, clothing, shoes, accessories ...the whole ball of wax...GULP!! Talk about on the job training..(no Pun Intended!!) But in truth...we knew we could do it before we even started ...we just wanted to do it well. He started with 8 Characters ...we did one a month ...in-between our regular Bigger Doll Commissions...bouncing from Big to small was interesting in itself...in the end, Richard and I agreed that creating Small was so fun. We started to create Bigger dolls with 'smaller' dolls, puppets, babies etc.... things were growing smaller in our studios.... but to this point we still were not making 1:12th scale dolls to sell in shows or even advertise that we were making. Then some time later we received more commissions...for Wizards and Witches (something close to my heart) ... it was at that point that we made the turn to miniatures. Although we still create Bigger Doll Settings through commissions...primarily our focus these days are more geared towards miniatures.

The Photos above were taken by Rod and have been featured in magazines as well as a Video. Our characters were An Engineer, Conductor, Car Tonk,Brakeman, Hobo, Elderly waiting passenger, Red Cap, Attractive Passenger, a Traveling Anvil Salesman. Richard also made the luggage cart that the Red Cap is pushing and suitcases.

This was a joy to create...and we Thank Rod each day for giving us the 'directional push' into the Wonderful World of Miniatures....

Happy Wednesday All...

Jodi and Richard