About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

W is for Weird Welsh Lady

No - Not Morgana le Fay! This is one of the oddest figures in my collection, being a solid lump of early polystyrene or one of the later - stable - cellulose acetates and made to look like a composition piece, thereby ignoring all the benefits of the plastics technology...lightweight moulding, transfer of detail etc...

She is around 50mm, but with the heavy base looks OK next to 54mm/1:32 scale figures and her five-colour paint scheme includes the pink cheeks so redolent of old style hollow-cast toy soldiers.

Clearly a tourist piece of the sort sold in all sorts of outlets throughout Wales, from coffee shops to castle gift shops and depicting a Welsh Girl in the traditional dress that sent an invading French Army running for their ships in 1797, after Jemima Nichols managed to round-up 15 invaders with a pitchfork!

As there is no real sign of a sprue (there are one or two paint chips, but the plastic looks smoothly finished underneath) I can only conclude that someone poured hot plastic into an old composition or plaster-figure mould, then used his/her bare thumb to swipe the excess from the open-end - see the marks on the base? Has anyone got an identical figure in plaster or a composition material in their collection?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

She a cutie. I like her little bow lips.

Hugh Walter said...

And blue eyes! What self-respecting man of these isles can resist a village accent with blue eyes!...after church on a Sunday!

Cider, Rosie?

Hugh