These are a few of my favourite (miniature-related) things over the past couple of weeks...

(You might like to get a cup of tea, or your beverage of choice before you start reading: it's going to be a long post...)

OK: first up, the candelabra painting was a success. I'm feeling most chuffed.

Now, on to what I've been up to over the past few weeks (when I've not been at work, or making scenes...)

There was Canberra Modern, a new sub-festival of the Design Canberra festival (and very similar to the now-famous Palm Springs Modern week).

I'm really excited that such an event has started in Canberra as I believe we could be 'The Napier of modernism' (but without the earthquake).

My budgetary constraints meant I had to chose carefully, especially as several of the events included book signings of books that were firmly on my collection-development wish list.

First up was Modernist Love, a talk by Tim Ross who created the most excellent series Streets of Your Town (trailer here, watch the series here).

 Next was a talk by Geoff Isaac, the author of the first book on Australian mid-century modern furniture designer Grant Featherston (via a Kickstarter campaign I didn't quite get to in time).

This is one of the dining chairs that started his obsession:

and a photo of how he stores his collection now (and I thought I had storage problems as a miniaturist!)

This is the very rare E51 chair which has eluded him so far (it sold at auction for $17,500):

And here he talks about the famous Talking Chair (during which I was plotting if a paper cup would make a good beginning of miniature version...)

Finally he shared the story of the failure of the Stem Chair, with base and chair of differing materials:

Afterwards there was a book signing. I bought a copy of course, calling it one of my not-Christmas presents for this year...

The next talk on my agenda was The Other Moderns and I was delighted to see an unexpected mention of my old friend The Dixon Street Flats* in Wellington in a slide show about Australian émigré designers.

Once again there was a book that I needed in my collection...

and a signing. (The author convinced me that I needed to make the trip to Sydney to see the exhibition that went with the book).

To round things off beautifully, Mary Featherston (wife of Grant Featherston) gave a talk about her and her husband's work, and his work with Robin Boyd,

(including the house Boyd designed for them, and in which she still lives).

I was very pleased to see that she included pictures of maquettes and trial versions of the Talking Chair, which confirmed my thoughts on how to make a miniature version...

And then I went to Sydney to see this:

(Hey, I have one of those chairs in miniature!)

and then stumbled across miniatures while I was there: a ghost-train winding box 

and Luna-Park chess set, both by Peter Kingston. (I'm now slightly obsessed with finding out what the winding box did when it was being wound...)

Back home, the next stop was the opening of an exhibition at The Embassy of Finland in Australia, where Daniel Soma's model of the Futuro House had landed after his Sydney exhibition (which I missed, so was very pleased to learn had come to Canberra in a new iteration):

(I was ever so good and wasn't even tempted to stuff the model up my top and head to the exit...)

(*In a weird twist of...something, one of the very first miniature club meetings, in the early eighties, was in the common room on the roof of the Dixon Street flats, where we made a chair out of a paper cup).