Authentic miniature Victorian and Edwardian doll’s dolls, toys, games and playthings for the discerning doll’s house child.
Designed and handcrafted by professional artisan Sandra Morris
*drum roll please* The final perfect bound sample copy has arrived...!
Here's a quick sneak preview
I expect to take delivery of the first copies by 23rd November and my new book will be launched at the London Dollshouse Showcase which will run from 27th November - 4th December!
As a bonus, all purchasers of the book will be invited to join my new Mignonette Doll Club, which will be a fun place to share ideas.
Plus.....
*Access to a private FB group
*Discounts and exclusive special offers on micro doll supplies
*Updates on the story of La Mignonette
*Monthly newsletter
*Competitions & Giveaways
* Each month I will be making a new Mignonette doll, instructions for which will be available as a digital download….. free of charge for club members.
Members will be encouraged to show their mini doll makes and share hints, tips and suggestions. They can also send photos of their dressed dolls to be featured in the Miniature Mignonette ‘Hall of Fame’ on the new Tower House Dolls website!
So... 27th November is my deadline for having the new website fully up and running. It will be a close run thing and all my efforts for the next few weeks will be focussed on setting up our new online shop and testing it thoroughly.
During lockdown I've also been gradually building up a stock of new mignonette toy dolls, which will be making their way onto the website....
To celebrate both the launch of my book AND the new website, we're planning to have a bit of a virtual do with some special giveaways, so keep checking back, or, if you haven't already, sign up for our newsletter.
Small Dog will be making a rare guest appearance so it's not to be missed!
Recently I've been thinking a lot about my adventures in print over the years. When I was a child, I remember making little books from a sheet of paper, folded in 4, then cut to produce small 4 page booklets. I wrote little stories, some invented, some about my pets, or things I'd been doing. They were often illustrated with crude colour pencil drawings...... art was never my forte.
At some point I was given an old Remington typewriter, which had belonged to an uncle or aunt. It was ancient and clunky, but I spent hours hunched over it, laboriously clacking out pages of closely typed print.... stories, poems, lists. I loved it, although I can see now that the incessant noise of me bashing away at the keys must have made everyone in the house long to through it out the window.
In my early 20s I graduated to an electric typewriter. After school and before college I had taken a shorthand and typing class... apart from learning to drive, learning to touch type has been the life skill I use most. After the initial slog of fjfjfjfj ghghghgh etc and feeling I'd never master it, something clicked and I was able to type without looking at the keys. It's like a kind of magic and it never ceases to please me. I can't remember a solitary thing about the shorthand but the typing has stayed with me and I use it every day.
My electric typewriter was a revelation. No more bruised fingertips or having to jooosh the carriage across at the end of every line. One button press and the carriage purred smoothly across the machine.
It had a back space button! AND, joy of joys, an autocorrect function! This comprised a little strip of Tippex along the bottom of the ink ribbon, which could be used to overtype errors. I was in heaven. It was on that machine that I produced my first newsletters, which I duly sent off to the photocopy shop.
A few years later, I was a founder member of Kent Miniaturists, and responsible for all the printed material... newsletters, programmes, workshop instructions etc. Although I still used my trusty typewriter, having original documents photocopied was expensive, so I bought an ancient Gestetner duplicating machine from the Parish Council and installed it in an old outbuilding.
It was a behemoth.... about the size of a washing machine. It was also temperamental, and I often emerged from a duplicating session spattered with ink and covered in cobwebs.
The process was arcane and messy. First I had to 'cut the stencil'.... text with my electric typewriter and any drawings/diagrams using a ballpoint stylus tool. I still have that tool and use it every day in my doll making..... I'd be lost without it!
If I made a mistake I'd have to use a gloopy pink liquid to seal the holes in the stencil. Actually creating a copy involved loading the stencil onto a drum, having first ensured that the ink reservoir was full. The ink was like tar, and in the chill of the outbuilding it was always too thick and viscous. Then I'd turn the handle and the first sheet of paper would feed though the slot coming into contact with the stencil over the inked drum. The results were often patchy and I'd have to manually spread the ink over the drum and keep trying until an acceptable result was achieved. I wasted a LOT of paper.
For a multi-page newsletter I had to change the stencils for each page, inevitably a messy procedure. Also the ink had to dry on the page, otherwise it would smudge, which took time, so double sided printing was an exercise in patience.
My machine was very similar to this one.....
But.... I LOVED IT!
Fast forward to 1985 and the advent of the first Word Processor. I bought an Amstrad PCW 8256 and suddenly felt that I was at the cutting edge of printing technology.
It had a green screen monitor, separate keyboard, a dot matrix printer and used floppy discs. It had four different fonts.
FOUR!!!
It was basically a glorified typewriter, but I was once again smitten. OK so it only produced text, and the printed result was quite clunky, with the individual dots which made up each character often clearly visible, but it made producing repeat pages of text much simpler, cleaner and cheaper. I used my trusty word processor for years, until in the 1990s I finally made the leap to a PC with an inkjet printer.
Looking back, it's amazing how far technology has come in the past 50 years. I've gone from pencil and paper to desktop publishing.... it's difficult to imagine a similar leap in the next half century, although perhaps in the future words and images will transfer directly into the brain via an organic implant. Or maybe there will be holographic printers, which will create 3D animated images from text. Or maybe the written/spoken word will be obsolete and people will communicate via mind merge telepathy. Who knows?
There is something strangely satisfying about holding a book that you've created yourself. In my case I've done absolutely everything, from the design and layout, to the final formatting and editing.
Granted it's not perfect. Neither is it a first novel.
But it is all my own work and the result of more than three decades of experience in making tiny, wee porcelain dolls and even if I never sell a single copy I am almost inordinately pleased and proud.
Self-publishing is no longer the trial it used to be and these days anyone can do it. Of course, publishing a print book which contains only words is a whole different proposition from one which contains colour images. I've had to learn the difference between RGB and CMYK, pixels and dots, TIFF and JPEG, file size versus image quality and much more that I've already forgotten.
I've spent hours experimenting with different fonts, seeing which ones work together. That said, my choice of font for the fictional sections will likely give designers a fit of the vapours, but it works for my specific purposes and as I'm in charge, nobody can give me a telling off. On the reverse side of that coin if it looks a mess it's all down to me.
Mea culpa.
When I was choosing a printer, I got quotes from lots of different companies. The very cheapest ones, though initially tempting, rapidly revealed their limitations. I had specific questions and the lack of detailed responses or no responses at all, quickly eliminated them from my list.
A few were only really interested in how many copies and when I would be ready to go to print, dismissive of my queries about image formats or embedded fonts.
One which initially came high on my list was crossed off when I read some online reviews and found that their books were often badly produced, misaligned covers, missing pages, damaged, or sometimes didn't arrive at all!
I was beginning to despair when I came across an A5 booklet that I had printed about 30 years ago when I was first starting out. Back in the day, they were a basic copy shop and I often used them for printing copies of my catalogues, patterns, mini booklets etc. That was before the days of digital colour photocopying and everything was black and white. For colour, the only choice was offset litho printing which was prohibitively expensive.
Anyway, a quick google revealed that the company I used all those years ago were still in business and were now producing a wide range of print products, including perfect bound books!
They have been incredibly helpful, offering a range of free online tools and lots of useful information. My email enquiries were met with prompt, friendly responses, and suggestions to help me get the best results.
So, here we are..... 30 years after first using them, they are now printing my book. There is a satisfying resolution of coming full circle about this which pleases me.
Who are they....?
Catford Print Centre.
I can thoroughly recommend them for quality and value for money. I don't expect that any of the people I originally dealt with all those years ago are still working there, but it's gratifying to know that excellent customer service and high quality products are still the foundation of their business model.
Anyway, now that I've reviewed the wire bound sample copy and made the necessary tweaks, I'm ready to submit the revised files and await delivery of the sample perfect bound copy... after which *fingers crossed* it will be full steam ahead the presses can roll.
Last week I finally submitted my book to the printer and have been waiting on tenterhooks for the wire bound sample copy to arrive, which it did this afternoon.
I am beyond delighted with it, although I now have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb, searching for tiny errors which have eluded me on my laptop screen. An initial cursory flick through has already revealed an unnecessary comma and a superfluous full stop, as well as an extra space in a sentence which looked fine on the screen, so I need to take my time and work slowly and methodically, even though my tummy is turning cartwheels at actually holding in my trembling hands the result of over a decade of false starts and self-recrimination.
I was worried about the photos, but they're mostly absolutely fine, although I will replace a few. All the images were taken in normal day-to-day working conditions in my workroom, not in a proper photographic studio setting, so I was concerned that they wouldn't pass muster but overall they are pretty good.
I might tweak the front cover slightly too.
Despite my desire to push ahead and get it signed off I'm going to take my time and actually enjoy the process, now that all the blood, sweat and tears of the actual creation have mercifully faded from memory.
In the final fraught days before submitting it, I swore blind that I would never, ever, EVER do anything like it, NEVER again. However, while looking through the proof copy, I suddenly got the glimmer of an idea for a follow-up, going down a different and rather more scenic route.
During the trials and tribulations of the lockdown period I've discovered a whole new work ethic, freed from the constraints of appointments, shopping, socialising etc. In common with most of my creative friends I've been acing work deadlines and multitasking like a demon. Who knew that lockdown would prove so productive?
My major achievement this year has been finally completing my book, which has been on my To Do list for the last decade. There have been no end of false starts and I've lost count of the number of times I've abandoned it as a lost cause.
But it's been niggling away at me, whispering 'finish me, finish me.....' and although I've mostly ignored its pleas, the opportunity presented by 2020 provided the perfect 'eye of the storm' environment to buckle down and get it done.
Now that it's finally finished I'm in an endless loop of checking and editing, double-checking and editing.
No matter how many times I go through it, I'm still finding the odd rogue full stop, or an extra space between words, or an ugly hyphenation. I'm a bit of a pedant when it comes to grammar and punctuation and I will be mortified if any schoolgirl errors slip through. However my over-familiarity with the text makes it really difficult to spot them.
So for the next few days I'm in editing/proofreading mode. However I just know that the nanosecond after I send the files off to the printers, I will notice a glaring mistake. Thankfully I will receive a printed proof copy, which I'm going to have to go through with a fine toothed comb, on the hunt for inevitable flaws, but once I've made any amendments and signed off the final proof that's it. I'm also aware that images will probably look different in print to how they do on my laptop screen.
Scary or what?
Anyway.... here's a sneak preview of the cover
I don't have any time to waste if I'm going to have the books delivered in time for the full unveiling of the website. As soon as it's gone to the printers I don't have the luxury of resting on my laurels as I have loads to do to get the website properly up and running.
Not to mention the small matter of having been accepted to exhibit at the prestigious KDF Online Showcase at the end of next month, for which I must make a selection of new little dolls.
So I'd better get on and do another edit.... just in case.
Not entirely unexpectedly, the old Tower House Dolls website has disappeared in a puff of smoke. We had hoped that it might remain online a a marker of our presence but the recent server upgrades completely annihilated it.
The end of an era.
However, there is no time to mourn and work continues on the new, improved website. It's all fresh and shiny but the back end is really unfamiliar, and I'm proceeding on the basis of trial and error... trying things to see what works and what doesn't. My learning curve is practically vertical and I'm way out of my comfort zone, also every time I learn something new it pushes old stuff out of my brain... but so far so good and progress is steady, albeit slow.
It's the first time I've been without a website in 25 years so I do feel a bit cast adrift, but hopefully it's only temporary.
The THD website is in hibernation...we have no idea whether it will remain online as it is, or whether it will suddenly disappear in a puff of ether, but aside from the home page it is essentially dormant.
I feel a bit panicky, as though a lifeline has been cut, which is ridiculous, as I still have my blog and the THD FB page which I can use as sales channels, but the standalone simplicity of the website has gone.
There will be a slight hiatus before the new site is ready to launch.... partly through necessity and partly deliberately, as we need to thoroughly test it to remove any glitches and I'm still working on uploading content. Also I will have several new lines and need to make sure that I have enough stock.
So the next few weeks will be a whirlwind of activity, although there is a limit to the amount of time I can spend on the new website before my brain attempts to clamber out through my ears and strangle me.
However, in other news, the book is coming along nicely and I'm tentatively on track to have it ready to go to print by the end of October. I have to complete photos for 30 pages, then thoroughly edit, edit, edit and check for errors.
The cover design is also progressing and overall I'm pleased with how the whole thing is turning out. Of course until I see an actual proof copy I won't know exactly how it will translate from my laptop screen onto the printed page, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
