magic in miniature

Agathe takes a few running steps and skates across the shiny wooden floor in her striped wool socks. The newly laid floorboards feel warm and inviting under her feet. This is where the couch will go, she says to herself, does a pirouette and halts, facing the opposite wall. That is the spot for the divination table.

I smile as I watch her go – my red-haired, 6-inch friend made of craft clay and wool.

My journey in miniature making starts with an A4 grid paper notebook and a nine-year-old girl’s dream of a grand Victorian dollhouse. On the first page of my notebook, I wrote my dad’s words of warning to avoid any disappointments: ”Note! It takes ten years to build a dollhouse.”

He was wrong. It can take a lot longer than that.

At 9, it felt important to distinguish my hobby from childish amusement, so this was to be a dollhouse for display only, strictly no playing. Looking back, the Victorian setting, too, feels adorably serious – although, at the time, Victorian or modern-day were the most popular choices. I went for the one that felt more interesting.

The fascination with miniature continued through my teenage years and throughout university, even if the making was scarce for lack of space in my studio apartment. The light-blue dollhouse I’d got for my 13th birthday waited patiently back home for me to fill it with beautiful things. I just didn’t know where to start.

That is, until play returned to the picture.

~

Agathe arrived in my life in a way that can only be described as Finnish. I was in the sauna when my relaxed state of mind presented me with a gift, a vision of a witch’s home in London. Together with my sister, I began to weave the story:

Who is the witch? What does she do?

What rooms and which objects does she need?

In an hour (the sauna had gone cold) we had a third person sitting next to us, not yet visible but alive and very outspoken.

Adding magic to the mix was a game-changer. It gave my imagination free rein. Instead of building a nice historical diorama, I could go wild and draw from the well that inspired me the most – the wizarding world. I could play.

~

In Finnish, we differentiate between play in the context of board games, football, anything with rules, and play – something that makes its own rules and shapes its own world as it proceeds. The words are as different as the actions: peli is the noun for games, leikki for free play.

I now see my own miniature making essentially as an act of free play: I get to make the rules, build the world, and make up the stories. The association with play comes very naturally, since this is not a hobby I’ve found as an adult, but something I’ve taken with me from childhood. It separated me from the world of play at first, but ended up the opposite, and thus forms a direct link to my 9-year-old self.

Not every miniaturist thinks of their hobby as play, but many emphasize the element of imagination and storytelling. The dolls seem to grow a character and life of their own – they grab the story and run with it, and we are left with the task of making it tangible.

So, with Agathe keeping an eye on me, I started making.

And this is where we get to the mischief.

~

Miniature making feels mischievous because it works against a myriad of adult world norms. It requires you to spend hours on something that often turns out to be a half-an-inch tall object with no useful function.

It protests the view that time should be spent sensibly.

This is mischief as making something of no value to anyone else but you; making something completely for your own pleasure, not even to be worn or used, but to be admired, to be enjoyed through play (as an adult, goodness gracious!), and to be the base for hundreds of stories.

Miniature excels at following the storytelling principle of “show, don’t tell”. When you make an item and give your full attention to its every tiny angle, at some point it stirs, comes to life, and begins to breathe. The story is in the details, even if there is no visible resident in the house: it’s in the book left open on the armchair, the half-finished teacup, the cracked egg on the kitchen counter.

Author Johanna Venho captures this beautifully in Syyskirja, a biographical novel about Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä built a collection of miniature Moomin dioramas – and an actual Moomin House, too, with their friend Pentti Eistola – all of which are now exhibited in the Moomin Museum in Tampere, Finland. Venho writes:

“Every little detail was precise: the decorations on the pillars, the tiny roof shingles. Such things turned life into a miracle, they gave you the ability to see very close, and the closer you saw, the more unbelievable things you noticed, they couldn’t be spoken about, they had to be shown, shown with Moomintrolls’ tail hairs and velvety snouts and Hemulen’s aunts spectacles and Mrs Fillyjonk’s curls and a Whomper’s tiny book cover hidden in a coil of rope – so that people stopped to look and figured out for themselves that the world was rich and abundant, fierce and madly lovable.”

When we enter this layer of miniature making, a kind of alchemy takes place. The play transforms into beautiful and raw reality. An item is no longer merely an item, but something someone has found or forgotten, left lying or placed on a shelf of treasures. There’s meaning, truth, in between the details.

~

I find Agathe waiting for me on the steps to the kitchen.

“What shall we make today?” I ask her.

“I’d like a telescope for stargazing, if that’s alright with you,” she replies.

“Let’s get to it.”