One of the things that is making me happy right now is my little Re-Ment collection.

Re-Ment, for those unfamiliar, is a Japanese line of incredibly detailed miniature items - mostly food, but I also have a couple of the little sets with pandas.

But I've decided what I really love the most are the little collections of dishes and of food.



(This is stuff from a couple of the sets - the "Euro style" tea set, the "Lovely Danish" set, and one piece from a crystal-ware set).

They are so very cute. And so detailed.

I've loved miniatures since I was a child - periodically I forget about how happy they make me but then something comes into my life to remind me of it.

I'm addicted to these little Re-Ment things. (They can be mail-ordered, from Superbuzzy, among other places. I guess also some doll shops have them, and probably some of the Japanese stores that are found in some larger US cities).

Part of the fun is that when you get just one or two, it's what's called a "blind box" - it can be any of eight or ten different sets and you don't know. So there's the little surprise there. (Not unlike the surprise of the vending machine that has served as this week's story line in Nemu Nemu.)

But a bigger part of it, for me, is just having the little pieces - having them to look at, and to arrange, and to marvel over something so small. I think I am going to invest in some kind of little wall shelf to display these (and NOT hang it over a heating vent. I dropped one of the little cups the other day and it took forever to find it - and I was at first worried it had fallen down the heat vent).

I had a number of dollhouses when I was a child. There were a couple of commercial ones - a very simple one with boxlike rooms when I was very small, a more realistic one with 'real' windows and a set of stairs in it when I got older. I delighted in getting furniture for the houses and especially in getting or making tiny accessories. My houses had miniature books, and "paintings" made by cutting pictures out of catalogs or magazines (the "Smithsonian" catalog or other art-museum catalogs were the best for this). I made food out of oven-hardening clay, and carefully filled in the holes in the right-sized buttons with melted crayon in a matching color to make dishes. And woe unto either of my parents if they threw away things like toothpaste caps or film canisters without asking me if I wanted it first.

There were a bunch of books that the local library had on dollhouses and miniatures - some aimed at children and more "make it and play" in attitude, others aimed at adults interested in verisimilitude. I was somewhere between the two - I lacked the equipment to do things the really RIGHT way (what I wouldn't have given for a small-sized miter box and saw, and one of those little pin-vise drills, so I could have made "really real" wood furniture) but I was also bugged by things that were too obviously "fake."

(I did have different types of houses - I had one big complex one in which an Edwardian-era family dwelt, and part of the fun of that was researching what was appropriate - would they have had phones yet? What types of upholstery would have been used? What style of paintings would have hung on the walls?

I also had a house for Guinevere, one of my toy mice. Because she was a humanized mouse - and therefore, presumably living in a way similar to how Jerry Mouse lived in the walls of the house*, I figured it was OK for the labels on the tiny matchboxes to show - the tiny matchboxes that made her dresser, with "real" drawers that actually pulled out, that you could store things in. And she had pop-bottle-cap pie tins (those old, crimped-edge pop bottle caps).)

I loved being able to make stuff - although I was never one of those kids for whom the line between fantasy and reality was blurred, I still enjoyed pretending that I was "taking care of" the doll house residents - that they had what they needed, courtesy of me. All the beds had proper (stuffed) mattresses on them, and pillows, and even sheets sewn from old handkerchiefs. There were tiny books in the rooms so they wouldn't get bored, and little checkers games made from bits of cardstock with black and red beads for the checkers. I learned from a craft newsletter my mom used to get how to make houseplants using the fine florist's wire along with masking tape colored different shades of green using crayons.

(*Those cartoons, along with the ones about Sniffles the Mouse - a Warner Brothers character - were some of my favorites, I always used to watch them closely, mainly looking at the backgrounds for the fun of, "oh, that chair is made out of an empty spool and an old side-comb" or "he uses a man's pipe as a fireplace!")

Part of it was that I loved the tininess - the contrast between the things I made and the real, "big" things. (The more realistic the miniature, the greater the pleasure. I cherished the relatively few miniatures-shop accessories I had that were more realistic than what I could make).

I also think that perhaps there was another reason I loved the miniatures - the idea of a small, self-contained world, where everything the family (or mouse) living in the house needed was there - I could look over the rooms and see it all in place, see it all "right," and know that if the dolls were really-real (and the stuff in the house was really-real), they would have everything they needed - enough food, books to read, clothing, winter coats hanging up in the hall, sheets on the bed, even towels in the bathroom. And somehow, that pleased me. Perhaps part of it was being able to imagine those small, self-contained lives (if they actually existed; as I said, I was a pretty logical child and once I was past the age of reason, really couldn't fall deep into fantasy the way some of my friends apparently could) separate from my own, yet in a way, dependent upon me.

I don't know if it was an early manifestation of my control-freak tendencies (and yes, I am a control freak. I admit it and I do my best to squelch the impulse to request more control over situations than I have, or to "mother hen" people), but somehow it was deeply satisfying to me to imagine that dollhouse, sitting there in my room, with everything that was needed in it. I do remember at times sitting in front of the dollhouse and imagining what it would be like to be that size, to be able to walk in through the (really hinged) front door, close it behind me, and have an entire house to myself - a still, quiet house, where there were no other people. (No squalling little brother, in particular). That may have been part of my love of the dollhouse - the idea of it being a place that was all mine, that I had control over, and that, if I imagined hard enough, I could be in that world.

One of my favorite library books when I was a kid was a big book the local library had about Colleen Moore's dollhouse. This was an enormous, elaborate, richly-made castle-dollhouse, made for silent film star Colleen Moore. No expense had been spared, and in the book the photographs were beautiful. (I particularly adored the princess' bedroom, with her gilded bed and the pearl-like tiles on the floor that glowed in the light coming in the window).

(OH! You can see it here. And they even have photos of the greatly-beloved-by-me-as-a-child Princess' bedroom)

So the Re-Ment stuff has reopened that cabinet of my mind. It makes me happy.



One of my favorite bits is the "Euro Style Tea Set." I think it's supposed to look like Wedgwood, though I've only ever seen that cameo-style Wedgwood in the blue color. (This was one of the things I was really hoping to get, before I opened the box containing it).

I may have to start looking around, see if I can find some kind of nice wall shelf or box-like thing to go on the wall, to make a "real" house for Wilbur, the little toy tardigrade I made a few years back. Right now he and his stuff are parked on a bookshelf in my bedroom, which is not quite ideal... I'd like to have some kind of permanent place for him to live, with enough space for the chairs and the little stove and maybe one or two of the Re-Ment sets (they are about the right size) for him.



You can see how tiny they are. Love!