F is for Fort Mavrick, without the E!

Heay! For years, they thought I was 'only' dyslexic! We had a group-project at Uni', where we had to renovate/rebuild/replace (the choice was rather ours, but front and back walls had to line up) a crescent, down near Elephant & Castle, and after weeks of individual project work, Design crit's, building crit's, more crit's and so on, we were required to place them altogether for the end-of-year exhibition, to which parents and the like were invited, which left us having to fill the empty corner with something, we whacked in a roundabout I think, and some formal beds, but I thought the kids who might live in our eclectic collection of . . . . dewllings (?) might like a play area, so this was born, literally overnight, as it wasn't part of the marking process!

The base was just a sheet of sandpaper! The whole thing got a bit warped in storage over the years, and realising I'll never be an architect now, it went on the fire back in 2016! I had no use for it, everything dies in the end, and at a scale of 1:50 it could really only be used by Space Marines, and they are too busy with Morlocks and Slitheens and suchlike, to find the time to relax on my wobbly rope & log bridge!

 

The two end pieces however, taken from old Hi-Fi equipment I think, or a TV set, are that compressed, die-cut hardboard I mentioned in the previous post. The one having bundles of wire directed through the holes, the other separating wires on the prongs . . . it must have been a TV!

 

There's a PC element to the construction, with no gates, easy access and the lookout accessible from the fort, but outside of it, although the leftie elements are balance by the fact that they could hurt themselves easy-enough, but - I like to think - in a non-terminal, character-building sort of way!

L is for Last-cast Round the Attic with a Torch!

Does it need blurb?

Didn't think so!

F is for Found Objects - Six of . . . It's Stick!

You'll be glad to hear! Even I was getting sick of the title thing! There was lots of other stuff 'found' or re-found over the last three years, and we'll be dipping into all sorts for years to come, but this is the last of the bitty-bits, and it's all fabric tonight!

 

A few things from the bedroom drawers which weren't in the mending or sewing boxes, including a plastic thimble from a Christmas cracker (Christmas again!), I've always thought actually using one was a recipe for a needle in the finger, and there's no sign it has been used!

 

Used to love this when we were kids, it's just a really tangible object you want to pick up and handle, marked 'Foreign', it'll be from post-war Japan, and you see them on evilBay with up to ten people, what's nice about it is that each person is made from a fine silk-fabric off-cut, some with their own patterns.

Dad's Borneo formation sign, sleeve badge, Mum must have sewn the poppers on, so it could be removed in the jungle, as it makes a nice upper-torso target! I was a baby at the time and totally unaware of the life & death connotations of everyday life!

 

Mum had this off-cut of fabric, again, probably from Heals or Habitat in Guildford, but it might have been from one of her friends, there was far more thrift back then, than today's throwaway culture, and this heavy material may have been some child's curtains?

Anyway, she had enough to make my Brother and I a cushion each, and I've always liked the jolly guardsmen in their orange and red uniforms, it's - like the dowel animal puppets in an earlier post of this sequence - very redolent of the 1970's design ethic, and you wonder if there may have been other colourways?

F is for Found Objects - Five of . . . Merchandise

Except there's only four, but the titles are playing their own game, as some of may have noticed!

 

Another thematic one now, to which I've added some non-found objects content to stretch the post out, and again we seem to be firmly in Christmas or Christmassy territory, although some of this stuff is all-year-round gift shop fayre!

 

Tins, specifically, tins which look like houses, or buildings, although, to disprove the rule the instant I establish it, one is just a couple of Pooh Bear images! But it is house shaped and both had rather old tea-bags in, which went on the garden some time ago; it's all good compost/soil conditioner!

The Pooh one, it is what it is!

 

But this, obviously commissioned by Waitrose supermarkets (part of the John Lewis group), almost certainly at/for the Christmas season is charming, showing something akin to the original store (Waite, Rose & Taylor . . . what did Taylor do to be excised?) as a wrap-around artwork.

Scaled around the 25/28mm mark, it would be a shoo-in for old-school wargaming, just plonk it down and declare the area built-up/the high street! I don't know if this had tea, chocolate or sweets in? Something else?

While I shot these in TKMaxx a year ago, both were tea containers I think, German? The same roof/lid but one a two-story Southern German municipal building (Rathaus Teabagg), the other more of a Wilhelminian town-house over three floors! That's it; a bit of fun!

F is for Found Objects - Four of . . . More

Back to the general detritus of lives lived, and where those remnants combine with the interests of the Blog or my collecting habits! Remembering that we've also seen the tub of Christmassy cake-decoration pieces, and the stash of things Mum 'borrowed' for her silversmithing. There was more cake-decorating stuff in the garage, but they were subsumed into the collection a few years ago, when I sorted the garage out.

 

On the left; a Tri-Ang clockwork key-winder, I think it's the same as late Hornby and probably some tail-end Mettoy or Minic toys, earlier, pre-war toys tended to have more original designs, sometimes quite ornate, often individually toy-specific winders.

On the right; a plastic Meccano spanner, probably held-on to became it also fit some of the plastic nuts on the loo-tank/cistern, and Mum felt plastic-on-plastic would do less harm to nuts and threads!

 

We saw the stone 'Shroom, when I Blogged the Giant space and Aliens back in 2021, it will be a false-coloured one, like some of the more garish stone eggs you see, porous rock is dyed under pressure, oven-dried and worked/polished to produce stuff like this surprised being!

 

And we saw the mini-pencils/pencil-tops in the previous post, which leaves two craft style felt animals, built-up on wooden-dowel sections, they were probably Heals or Habitat items, very 1970's in styling, but so moth-eaten when I found them, they went to the fire-gods shortly after this shot! A monkey and a cat . . . I think, it might have been a demented panda!

 

At the front are a Shell-petrol keyring, a pair of magnetic pigs who still have the kissing-power and a small ceramic horse, which will be a 20th century copy of earlier pieces I think, nothing 'Ming', but nice, and often done in Ivory, there's a nice set of eight ivorene premium horses in the oriental style from the mentioned-the-other-day Jacquet.

A vintage Christmas gift box (funny how so much of this stuff harks back to Christmases past, every post so far has had Christmas references), sadly stained, with a slice of crimbo-cake I suspect; the staining has that translucence of sugar or alcohol, and the browning of molasses!

But containing old cracker gifts/prizes/novelties, being a ball-puzzle, mini Yo-yo, key/magnifying glass (never understood the combination, but there was always one in a  cheap set of crackers), pirate's eye-patch and something I've already forgotten, it was either a whistle or a periscope?

And note Santa is riding a rocket. So quite a 'Sputnik-fever', 1950's vibe on the wrapping paper!

I had, in the past, supplied my Mother with empty Kinder-eggs, which she would put a few pieces of fine gravel in, to provide endless hours of fun to kittens and younger, or young-at-heart cats, and as they got lost under furniture, more capsules would be procured from moi!

 

Clearly, at some point, a non-empty one was sent to feline playgroup. Mum used to work as a volunteer at the Barnardo's charity shop here in Fleet (before it closed, and they were all laid-off their unpaid roles!), and she may have got this one from there, I don't think it's necessarily Kinder either, one of the Turkish or Italian minor-brands?

Balls! The Wham-O again I think, an antique, glass, codswallop bottle-stop in front of it, and something I've forgotten in the interim, but which is the smallest size of gum-ball capsule container from the look of it?

 

An eclectic mix here with two tortoises, one a PVC tub/tube/blister/header-bag type with full paint, the other a polyethylene glow-in-the-dark novelty with keychain loop, probably from a Christmas cracker?

 

A piece of non-Lego, a felt-tip pen lid, a pearlescent bead, a very small battleship's turret and a Native American, who could be the remains of my 1980 collection (we moved here in October 43 years ago!), or an errant piece of show-plunder from more recent years?

 

One half of the pyramid puzzle from crackers, we looked at these a few years ago, and there was already a bag of oddments, so this will join them, and I think I've said before, I intend in a year or two, to run that whole mini-season of novelty posts again, but with everything now in the collection, storage, then and since, in each category, and any extra-subjects after Christmas; it will be fun to compare them, day by day.

 

This used to be in each car's 'emergency kit' when we were kids. It's an unmarked generic, probably British rather than Hong Kong, but you never know, it's a lovely memory-thing to find, we used to love fiddling with it when we were kids.

Back then there were two standard promotional items from the tyre manufactures, small model-tyres like this with a compass, sometimes as a key ring, and larger replicas as ashtrays, with either a glass or tin-plate insert as the 'wheel', they would be marked up with Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli etc . . . sometimes, even depicting a specific tyre type, or new range.

This is obviously a mid-century, rear, tractor tyre, so may have come from an agricultural equipment firm, and with farmers on both sides of the family back then, could have come to us via either?

F is for Found Objects - Three of . . . We'll See

Stationary here at Small Scale World usually means erasers or sharpeners, and sometimes pencil tops and while there are some pencil tops here, there's also a fake, a novelty pen and a pen-converter!

 

Some stationary items I found in an old desk, there was much more obviously, conventional stuff, one of which is here purely for a scaler - the iconic BiC Crystal, but among them were a joke rubber pencil (silver jobbie) and a teeny-tiny rabbit pencil top, on his own bespoke, teeny-tiny pencil, both credited to the Japanese Kutsuwa, who are still going 50-odd years later, this is just the kind of thing they were known for in the age of miniaturisation!

Either PVC or silicon rubber, it's not that clear, a bit soft for the former and a bit hard for the latter, I suspect PVC, as it has reacted with the 'paint' coating of the pencil, usually a form of powder-coating back on the day, to produce a chip-resistant surface.

Two more rodents turned-up a few weeks later in another part of the house/piece of furniture, and they triggered a memory of my having bought them for Mum, with my meagre pocket-money years before, they came in a little PVC wallet with a matching mousey notebook, and I think there were about eight or ten different little animals?

 

My brother bought a similar set of Snoopy ones I think (just printed pencils, no toppers and a little bigger), we wrapped them, and hid them in the tree at Christmas, so when she was helping us look for our chocolate bauble treats, she found them! I think, over the years, they were used as pencils with her pocket diaries, which always lose their little pencils!

 

This was mine! I don't know how it's survived, lost under the bed and found by Mum after I left home, maybe? It's an arrow! You could probably fire it, from a small bow, but you'd need to weight the end slightly to stop it spinning end-over-end! Unmarked polystyrene, but probably Hong Kong manufacture?

It was a Christmas stocking filler, we would have got one each (she was always scrupulously fair) but my Brother's may not necessarily have been the same, just another novelty pen of similar/identical cost . . . might have been a giant nail?

This actually came in recently, but I thought it could be added to this page for reasons of interest, as while we have a couple of pencil-top posts in the long queue, this is more of a converter, turning the writing instrument into a fish . . . of sorts!

It's actually too big for pencils, but works well with these Sharpies, I want a bunch now, different tails, dinosaur tails, a kangaroo tail . . . shaggy-dog tails!

F is for Found Objects - Two of . . . a Few

Continuing with this little bit of silliness, and I seem to have shot these in different configurations - as I was sorting and putting away I guess? More bits & bobs as found over the least three years.

A bunch of keys, with a PVC peanut, possibly from the old VW Golf Mum had many years ago? Lego bits and a marble, a cat's collar bell (which will end-up on the Christmas tree, they fill all the teeny gaps at the top!) and a plastic ring - probably from a Christmas Cracker's 'ring-toss' game - which will go to 'spares'.

 

An old Remembrance Day poppy stalk (we'll revisit them one day) and half a pistol grip from a small gun, its antler-horn finish has mostly been scraped away, and I suspect Mum was mid-way through reshaping it to replace a damaged or missing one on another weapon when that too was lost or broken? Mum was very handy at that sort of home-craft stuff.

 

A relatively modern looking box of crayons (99p in Woolworth's, they're about a fiver now! And have their own collector community), a plastic bullet (anyone know the toy it came from?), a playing-card joker, bouncy ball, Airfix Paratrooper and a wooden elephant of some style!

 

Two balls, and while I've only just added a collective image of balls to the Jig-Toy Page, these two have yet to be added to that page, although a reverse-colours football is there! The larger one has the same mechanism (i.e. 'simple') as the modern rubber one in that other picture!

Most seen above, but the gold-paper cracker-crown is an addition. I believe the elephant was made by my brother in woodwork classes at school, and may be a pattern some of you will recognise from your own past efforts? And I've mentioned before his private army of red/blue uniformed figures! It contained all his favourite figures from about four different sets, it was officer-heavy!

The card is somewhere between the very small ones you find in Christmas crackers, and normal or full size ones, and I have a small collection of mostly jokers and ace-of-spades somewhere, so this will join them, and I'll blog them at some point!

 

I believe the ball is a Wham-O original, it has that strange creaking noise I've observed with them before, and while I 'know' what the two neutral plastic pegs are from, I can't - right now - remember, and it may have nothing to do with toys, but I shot them together, so I think it must have? Maybe they just looked useful?

Liqueur miniature crates! Very useful for Action Man (beer) or larger doll's houses (milk, or something 'girly'!), I've put the cover in the spares zone as I though it might make a good roof for a sci-fi building or space-station at some point! one is old and has been hanging around for years (red), the other was from TKMaxx a year or two ago -blue one.

F is for Found Objects - One of . . . Some!

As I've slowly been working through Mum's estate, I've found all sorts of odds & sods which are of some use or interest to the collection, some of Mum's, some of ours (my brother or me), so more nostalgic than actually useful, and I've been chucking them in various corners of Picasa (to be honest I've lost some!), and have been trying to sort them this evening for what I thought might be two or three posts, but I've just given up trying to make sense of it with that narrow aim, and will do a few smaller posts until I've run out of stuff!

 

This bowl was actually in a drawer, and was a mine of useful stuff!

This lot is a mix of counters and tiddlywinks, buttons and tokens. The buttons; the main pile, are interesting in only having one hole, and will be from mattresses, where they are strung-through to hold and tension the two padded-covers against the springs. More interesting is that they all seem to be bone or ivory, which is obviously why my Mother kept them when the mattresses died!

 

The game counters/tokens are also bone (two larger yellow ones) or ivory, while the coins are a study in themselves!

The internet can't readily agree on what these are, when they were produced or why, and some very fanciful explanations with some very dodgy logic are to be found, particularly on the metal-detecting sites, where there seems to be the added incentive of getting thirty-quid for them rather than the 50p they're probably worth!

 

But museums (including the British Museum) also have an interest in trying to explain why they have some, using-up exhibition or storage space! Suffice to say, they are probably Victorian gambling tokens, aping George III 'spade' Guineas, so called because the shield resembles a spade.

 

I had a theory they might be connected to the TV series 'The Good Old Days', maybe as attendance tokens, and while I have to believe the Victorian moniker given them elsewhere, they mostly seem to have started turning up after 1950, and with the show starting in 1953, and with some examples clearly heavier and better made than these rather thin, tinny ones, there may be something in that?

The rest of the contents include a pair of shot markers from our old Merit pocket/travel Battleships game (white and yellow cones), two insect eyes from the Beetle Game, also Merit (blue and green dots, and 'Cootie' in the 'States), several puzzles in metal and plastic (old Christmas cracker prizes I suspect), a Christmas bauble hook (always useful) and a pair of premium animals which are the Kellogg’s rather than the Dunkin et al., ones I think?

The five dice will go with all the others (a mass close to Io's now), and the other bits are purely domestic (bread-bag tie and electrical-plug insulator/cable-clamp), I have no idea what the red widget is, but it looks useful and is plastic so will go with the modelling materials, in the drawer of round-section 'bits'!

Which leaves the rabbit? Obviously fretted, and I have a vague recollection of Mum cutting it out many years, even decades ago, but I can't remember why? It may have been a backing for something she was casting in silver, and by 'something' I mean a relief sculpt of a rabbit! Or it may have been a replacement for a shaped-puzzle piece for which I can't remember the parent puzzle, but, as a familial keepsake, it will go with all the other rabbits!

 

Separately, I found my brother's Airfix T-Rex's head! Most of the rest of it is in the stash somewhere, as - being an inveterate ferret - I had some idea of giving it an alternate head one day! So it may well all come together, but I think one of the legs may still be missing, and the house is cleared now? There is a Stegosaurus, similarly afflicted, by the lack of a fourth limb!

Posed (in the left shot) with a 9mm short round (Stirling SMG probably) from the sandpit in the butts at Aldershot (where Mum won the Officer's Wives shooting competition at Airborne Forces week, one year!), my brother would have been about 13 when he painted this?

F is for Found Objects - Tub of Cake Decorations!

Well, the chicken crown didn't have orange-sauce (see end of previous post), it had pork, orange and cranberry stuffing, so the lack of stuffing was alleviated! However what I thought was goose-fat roast potatoes in the freezer turned-out to be triple-cooked, chunky chips! So I had a very posh Chicken 'n' Chips for Crimbo dinner, but with all the trimmings!

Back in the summer, while sorting out and emptying the cupboard all the bee-keeping stuff and garden chemicals were kept in, I found this little tub; the sort of thing expensive ice-cream or a individual sponge-pudding may come in.

Contents were cake decorations (presumably you entertain the bees while working on the hive?!!), which are a mystery I shall never solve, as I can't ask Mum, but with the childhood decorations in the garage and saved previously (see Blog passim I think), and latter additions in the kitchen (some also seen on the Blog, the Yule-log squirrel from Schleich for instance!), I can't imagine where these came from, let alone why they were in the garden! But we never had a skiing Santa' when we were kids?

In the previous shot you can see the skis are heat sealed onto Santa with plugs coming off the feet. I believe Gem had at least three versions of the ski-equipped figures, removable plug-on/plug-in skis with the plug on the ski (as carried-on with by the Hong Kong pirates), heat-sealed with the plug from the foot (as here) and head sealed foot-to-ski without plug (on the Blog somewhere), which may have been part of their experiments with over-moulding?

Anyway, it's a "Ho-Ho-Ho Merry Christmas!" from Santa Clause!

C is for Casually Converted Cool Container Cap Cable Coil Carrier

6th of the line in the slightly silly Hugh's Handy Helpful Home Hobby Hints thread, but from time to time something simple and easy presents itself for further dissemination, so today we're looking at model railways, or at least vehicle loads.

I think these are - possibly French - water-fountain seals/caps, but they could just as easily be - also possibly French - mineral-water bottle caps from the 1970's, gas-tank or tube seals or something else entirely, and I won't bore you with the explanation for the relative scarcity of detail in the preceding sections of the paragraph, as it's based on about 5 fragments of non-memory!

Collin's however state - for 'Negociant' "A wine merchant or wholesaler; specifically, one who buys grapes, grape juice, or partially fermented or finished wine from others and sells the wine produced under his or her own name", so it may have been grape-juice? Presumably pronounced as 'nego[tiator]' and '[pres]cient' with a French ey'ont flourish? And - thinking about it for a few minutes; Mum did do home-brew at one point, so it all sort of makes sense!

Suffice to say I have in the past here at Small Scale World mentioned the sub-collection of Triang/Hornby cable-drum carriers, for which there are a few lorries as well, and when I found these sorting out the garage, I realised instantly that all they needed was a hot-glue gun!

Suitably weathered and scratched by up-to 30 or 40-odd years in sheds and garages, no work beyond lining them up properly before the hot-glue (actually a synthetic wax) sets, and voila! - as the French say; and they all know what they're saying because they all speak French!

I have a small flat-car, which is similar to the cable-drum car, but has two beams across the bed, I think it was the 'novelty' single car-carrier from the early boxed goods-train sets, this will go in between the beams nicely.

And while I would wind some wire round it for cable, it might look good as it as, as they mist have rolled-steel drums for special or particularly heavy cable and they would cost so much to make/hold, they would be returned empty for a deposit?